DC's

* (restored)

 

‘Harry Smith’s early films, known as Films #1-5 , 7 and 10 or Early Abstractions (or “the batiked films” as Smith was later to refer to them) were mainly made with Smith’s own elaborate technique of painting directly onto 35mm film, using a batik-like technique utilising stencils, tape, cutouts and layers of paint, dyes, ink and petroleum jelly. These amazing works were similar to Len Lye’s expressionist films but incorporating mystical elements of Native American art and encoded alchemical imagery. The films were re-edited, reprojected, and refilmed countless times resulting in work of great density and complexity.

‘All of Smith’s films seemed to be in a state of permanent reworking and re-editing through most of his life, and are therefore quite difficult to date. A film shown at a festival in 1947 may be very different from the version that is viewed today for example, and Smith did not seem unduly concerned with the conventions of giving his films “official” titles, dates and running times.

‘Harry Smith was, among other things, an enigmatic animator, painter, bohemian and magician, plus a curator of Native American culture and early American folk and pop music. In fact, producing major works in different disciplines (and having a common name) has meant that people reading about Harry Smith’s paintings may have no idea he is also the animator Harry Smith, or that he is the same Harry Smith who curated seminal compilations of rare folk music. Described by Kenneth Anger as “The Worlds Greatest Magician”, this was apparently another of his talents; Smith was said to have helped many people (such as Oskar Fischinger’s wife) with his spells, for instance. His frequent use of bizarre occult magic included leaving containers of his semen in the auditorium of his screenings to “absorb audience energy”. His incredible personal collections of objects included 30,000 Ukrainian Easter eggs and thousands of paper planes found randomly on the streets.

‘Harry Smith’s life story has been so mythologised, not least by Smith himself, that it’s hard to get a grip on the truth. His family were highly unconventional and encouraged his interest in philosophy, alternative religion and the occult. Smith claimed his father gave him a blacksmith shop when he was twelve and told him to try and convert lead into gold. As a teenager he would often sleep at the Indian reservation where his mother worked as a teacher and make recordings of Native American music and rituals. The story goes that Smith dropped out of college in 1944 after smoking grass and attending a Woodie Guthrie concert, moved to San Francisco for a bohemian lifestyle and never looked back.

‘Contrary to popular belief, however, “bohemian” isn’t necessarily a byword for inactivity. Not only having produced some of the twentieth century’s most remarkable abstract animation and being credited as a big influence in 1960s psychedelia, Smith is also famous for archiving and putting together one of the most important collections of folk and outsider music which, in its released form, became a huge influence on future musicians like Bob Dylan and Led Zeppelin. Similar to Len Lye in that he drew on his childhood connection with “primitive” American Indian art, Smith also associated with, and was influenced by, California-based artists including the great avant-garde pioneer Oskar Fischinger, an émigré from pre-war Germany.

‘Although said to be generous with what little money he had, Smith by his own choice lived for much of his life “as a bum” with no income, relying on benefactors and scrounging bits of money here and there which he would invariably spend on books, music, alcohol or other recreational substances rather than conventional necessities like food or rent. In short Smith was a maverick free spirit and his unique, freeform and often mesmerizing animation is as uncategorisable as the man himself.

‘While in San Francisco Smith studying painting he teamed with and fellow student Jordan Belson to organise some film screenings called Art in Cinema, which aimed to show all the greatest abstract and avant-garde films made to date. Smith traveled to Los Angeles to ask Oskar Fischinger and other avant-garde pioneers like John and James Whitney to be involved. Inspired by the brilliant Fischinger and also the films of Len Lye and Norman McLaren painted directly onto film stock, Smith and Belson began making films of their own. Having no equipment or money, Smith was helped by photographer and experimental film maker Hy Hirsh, using ink given to him by the Whitney brothers.

‘Smith’s early films were often made as a visual response to the great Jazz artists of the time such as Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Chet Baker. Later, Smith would screen this work in the nightclubs of San Francisco where these same musicians would in return create their music in response to the films. Smith’s working methods, enhanced by various intoxicants, are said to have been a form of Synesthesia, the phenomenon of overlapping senses, such as seeing sounds as colours and of images triggering internal sensations of sound.

‘Harry Smith’s most famous work came in 1960, the mysterious spiritual cut out epic Film #12 (or, as named by fellow abstract film-maker and friend Jonas Mekas, Heaven and Earth Magic). The film seems to have been made between 1950 and 1960. During this process Smith often used sleep deprivation as a gateway to spirituality and the subconscious, a process of falling asleep, awaking and resuming work continuously next to his camera. In Smith’s words this was “to make the whole thing automatic…some kind of universal process was directing these so-called arbitrary processes”. Smith gave a typically mysterious summary of the narrative as follows: “The first part depicts the heroine’s toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven. Next follows an elaborate exposition of the heavenly land, in terms of Israel and Montreal. The second part depicts the return to Earth from being eaten by Max Müller on the day Edward VII dedicated the Great Sewer of London.”

‘According to Smith, the original of Heaven and Earth Magic was made on on 35mm film with a running time of six hours, although if this version existed it now seems lost. What survives is an hour-long 16mm edit, in which for long periods small cutout figures, white against black, jerkily manipulate a variety of cutout or real symbolic objects. If the visuals in this disappoint compared to the richness of Smith’s early work, what should be remembered is that the film was designed to be enhanced with colour filters, lights, music and sound effects manipulated by Smith along with framing masks that transformed the screen itself to appropriate symbolic shapes. This would give the overall feel of an elaborate Victorian magic lantern theatre embellishing an animated shadow play. Also integrated into many of its legendary screenings was a whole other theatre of activity with Smith often letting off fireworks, giving a running “stream of consciousness” commentary, while fending off hecklers and scorning members of the audience who weren’t sufficiently appreciative.

‘After this Smith would spend years developing a variety of even more ambitious film projects. Spending much of the 1960s trying to complete his unique mystical animated version of The Wizard of Oz entitled Film #13: Oz aka The Magic Mushroom People of Oz, Smith at first raised a budget (he later claimed to be a million and a half dollars) from a group of patrons and set up a large expensive film studio with a huge elaborate animation stand. After a year Smith had produced only nine minutes of usable film and when in 1962 one of the main financiers died of a drugs overdose, the others pulled the plug. Smith was locked out of the studio and most of the work was destroyed. What remains was edited with other material to form subsequent films. The first part of Film #16: Oz – The Tin Woodsman’s Dream for instance shows glimpses of the stunning film that never was.

‘Film #18: Mahogony took Smith another ten years and was based on the start of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weil’s opera Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny. Smith took Manhattan as his version of the “Mahogony City” in the story, a parable in which “everything is permitted and poverty is the only sin”. Smith intended to create a new film language that would be equally understandable to all people on earth, by using his visual symbols to connect to a collective, spiritual subconscious. He used live-action and animation and filmed many scenes in The Chelsea Hotel where he lived, featuring friends like Allen Ginsberg, Jonas Mekas and Patti Smith as well as the random homeless people he befriended, as they came to visit.

‘In 1992 Harry Smith died of cardiac arrest in this legendary hotel, singing in his friend Paola Igliori’s arms. Poet and writer Igliori later made American Magus (2001), a documentary about Smith’s life. Smith was certainly one of the most legendary counter-cultural figures of the twentieth century and, if fellow abstract animator, artist and adventurer Len Lye was once said to be “the worlds least boring man”, then Smith must have run him a very close second.’ — Stephen Cavalier

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Harry Smith Archives
The Collage of Perception: William S. Burroughs & Harry Everett Smith
Between Fact and Friction: Hanging Out in the Ozone with HARRY SMITH
Harry Smith Fan Page @ Facebook
Book: Think of the Self Speaking: Selected Interviews by Harry Everett Smith
A Thick Description of Harry Smith
A Harry Smith Seance
Summer Flowers
Strange dreams
Harry Smith @ Instagram
The Offbeat Paper Airplane Collection of the Brilliant Beat Era Artist Harry Everett Smith
HARRY EVERETT SMITH: JACK OF ODD TRADES
harry smith: the avant-garde in the american vernacular
Memorial Day – Harry Smith’s Birthday

 

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Extras

Interview with Harry Smith and P. Adams Sitney (1965)

Harry Smith – BOY AM I IN TROUBLE

Thee Oh Sees with film by Harry Smith

Folk Mystic: The Eccentric Life of Harry Everett Smith

Harry Smith, American Magus, Directed by Paola Igliori

 

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Interview: Jonas Mekas on Harry Smith
by Kevin Arrow

 

While in New York, I met with Jonas Mekas, the ninety-three-year-old filmmaker and founder of the Anthology Film Archives at his studio in Brooklyn to discuss Smith, Mahagonny, and the scene surrounding Smith at the time. Mekas has been watching films, writing about films, making films, and living films for longer that you can imagine. He was living and breathing and filming in the midst of the Velvet Underground’s first appearance, Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s Living Theater,the birth of Fluxus, Andy Warhol’s Factory, John and Yoko’s bed-in for peace, Cunningham, Cage, and Kerouac. It was as the founder of the Filmmaker’s Co-Op and Anthology Film Archives that Mekas first encountered Smith. He was once asked about their first meeting and, as I recall from the account in the book American Magus Harry Smith: A Modern Alchemist, Mekas described it as something like this:

Harry Smith walked in—I had never met him before, this was in 1962—I thought that he was sixty or seventy years old. ’I am Harry Smith and I hate you!’ he said. I said,’Harry, you don’t know me—do you know what it means? You are saying that you hate somebody?’ And I looked straight at him and said again, ’You know what you are saying?’ He looked at me, turned around, and walked out.

Smith proved himself to be irresistible to Mekas for the remainder of his life. Harry Smith practiced magic. I sat down with Mekas to discuss all this further.

KEVIN ARROW (MIAMI RAIL): The whole idea of Marcel Duchamp, mathematics, and The Large Glass sideswipes everything—I was trying to wrap my head around Brecht and Weill and was then trying to decipher the Duchamp reference and I don’t even know where to begin.

JONAS MEKAS: That’s Harry! That film is pure Harry. Don’t ask me about meanings!

RAIL: Did Harry ever say much about his films after they were made?

MEKAS: Whatever he had to say is in the Filmmaker’s Cooperative Handbook, he wrote the film capsules and didn’t talk much about his films.

RAIL: Is it true that people may have been intimidated to organize events with him to show his films?

MEKAS: He refused to go. I don’t know a single case when he would have accepted to appear after a film, but his room was always full of friends at the Chelsea Hotel.

RAIL: So he was good in informal sessions—would impart his knowledge to people?

MEKAS: No, he wouldn’t talk much, he would usually just insult them — he was not lecturing. He was a man of few words and would easily snap. They are a few recorded interviews with P. Adams Sitney. He also wrote a lot and he left behind a lot of scribbles.

RAIL: Regarding the film restoration project, who instigated the process?

MEKAS: The Anthology Film Archive has all his films, we are the only ones doing it, and not everything is preserved, because of money limitations.

RAIL: Apparently the right date and time and combination of factors arose and investors appeared?

MEKAS: Yes, but unfortunately they did not want to spend money preserving the individual films [of Mahagonny]. They wanted to put it onto one film, which was the wrong idea, but it’s OK.

RAIL: Are there additional films out there awaiting this same kind of a treatment?

MEKAS: They are all preserved except for the original materials for Mahagonny, we would need close to one hundred thousand dollars to do that.

RAIL: It does seem as if someone ought to do a frame-by-frame analysis of Mahagonny, if that is even possible.

MEKAS: Yes, that is the future.

RAIL: There is a 16 mm print of Early Abstractions in the Miami Dade Public Library, which I have watched countless times, and I have the Mystic Fire VHS tape as well. I am fascinated by themethods Smith employed to screen these films publically, in which he used slide projectors and was manipulating the images with crystals…

MEKAS: And colored gels.

RAIL: I understand that he used large lantern slides, some of which are reproduced in the book Experimental Animation Origins of New Art, by Robert Russett and Cecile Starr.

MEKAS: Yes, that projection instrument machine Harry destroyed. He made it himself. It was a contraption that you could take apart and put together and place a projector inside of and there was another place for different sized and shaped gels, and as you project you could do all those tricks. This was made especially for the film Heaven and Earth Magic (1962). Not for Early Abstractions, which was always shown straight, with no manipulation.

RAIL: I have Heaven and Earth Magic as released by Mystic Fire on VHS and it’s only in black and white. So when Smith presented this live, there were colored passages?

MEKAS: Yes. And you know, his paintings have yet to been seen and exhibited. We are currently trying to build a library, performance space, and a Heaven and Earth Cafe on the roof of the Anthology Film Archives. It will be for books, periodicals, and documentation and a lot of Harry’s art and paintings.

RAIL: So this is material that didn’t go to the Getty?

MEKAS: Most of his materials that have to do with music are at the Getty, and someof the paintings that came from individuals, but most of his paintings he left with me, which I deposited at the Anthology, but since we are not a museum and cannot care for them, we are selling them to build the library. We have forty Smith paintings, which we are selling for ten million dollars, which I consider to be the cost of one second-rate Warhol! With forty paintings from Harry Smith, we will build the library and the café, because we are really suffering right now and half of our paper materials are in boxes and we have more coming in, and since we are operating on a deficit, the café will help us break even, at least. So, I am forced to sell the paintings to build the library. The paintings have to be purchased and kept together–some foundation should buy them and deposit them in a well-established museum.

RAIL: I often tell people that Harry is the most important twentieth-century artist that you have never heard of.

MEKAS: Some people who know Harry’s work, like Henry Geldzahler, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he thought he was a much more important artist than Warhol, as a painter.

RAIL: I am sure Harry would have something to say about time cycles and that there needed to be this much time to pass before people would wake up and pay attention.

MEKAS: That is exactly what Henry told me, that he has to die and then people will eventually understand his work and he will be evaluated in the right way.

 

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13 of Harry Smith’s 20 films

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Early Abstractions (1946 – 1957)
‘The seven films that make up Early Abstractions are spliced together to be projected as a unit. “My movies are made by God; I am just the medium for them.” Harry Smith “Smith’s films can be watched for pure color enjoyment, or for motion – Harry Smith’s films never stop moving – or you can watch them for hidden and symbolic meanings, alchemical signs.’ — Jonas Mekas

the entirety

 

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A Strange Dream (1946 – 1948)
‘Hand-painted 35 mm stock photographed in 16 mm, color, silent, 2:20 or 5 min. Initially intended to be screened with and synchronized to Dizzy Gillespie’s Manteca or Guarachi Guaro. “…the history of the geologic period reduced to orgasm length.”’ — letterboxd

the entirety

 

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No. 2: Message From the Sun (1941)
‘Hand-painted 35 mm stock photographed in 16 mm, color, 2:15 or 10 min. Initially intended to be screened with and synchronized to Dizzy Gillespie’s Algo Bueno. This film “takes place either inside the sun or in… Switzerland” according to Smith. To produce this film he used a technique that involved cutting stickers of the type used to reinforce the holes in 3-ring binder paper. These were applied to 16 mm movie film and used like a stencil. Layers of vaseline and paint were used to color each frame in this manner. The effect is hypnotic, psychedelic and is something like a visual music.’

the entirety

 

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No. 3: Interwoven (1947-49)
‘ Set to the music of Dizzy Gillespie, the film dances and bounces with jazzy rhythms, vaguely jiving to the same beat as the Gillespie tune but more just pulsating in sympathy with the music. The animation is geometric and colorful, with multicolored geometric shapes — mostly squares and rectangles, though a few circles and triangles show up towards the end of the brief short — shifting around the screen. Often, the quadrilaterals are arranged in tight grids, the internal boundaries of which are constantly shifting so that any given quadrant could pulse in size from a tiny box to spanning across nearly a quarter of the frame. These grids seem to be bouncing to their own internal groove, like there’s a rowdy party going on and the whole place is jumping to the beat.

‘It gives the impression of architecture in motion, the boundaries all temporary, the straight lines deceptive because nothing ever stays in place for long — whereas most grids give the impression of rigidity and formality, this grid is fluid and free. Like jazz itself, it’s structure in motion, structure with room for improvisation and movement, for unpredictability, for fun. It’s hard to imagine a better visual metaphor for the spirit of jazz, this tension between structure/rigidity and freedom/motion. When Smith’s shapes break out of the grid, dancing across the black space, momentarily suggesting bar graphs or rows of piano keys before returning to their abstract dance, it’s even more suggestive of total freedom, though that sense of structure is lost.’ — Only the Cinema

the entirety

 

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No. 4: Manteca (1947)
‘Silent though possibly intended to be screened with Dizzy Gillespie’s Manteca. The film starts with a color sequence showing Smith’s painting Manteca (ca. 1950) with which he tried to subjectively depict Gillespie’s song, every brushstroke representing a music note. The film concludes with black & white superimpositions.’

 

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No. 5: Circular Tensions (Homage to Oskar Fischinger) (1949 – 1950)
‘An experimental film from artist Harry Smith and part of his Number series of various animated scenes.’

 

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No. 7: Color Study (1950 – 1952)
‘Optically printed Pythagoreanism in four movements supported on squares, circles, grillwork, and triangles with an interlude concerning an experiment.’

the entirety

 

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No. 10: Mirror Animations (1957)
‘Film #10: Mirror Animations was included in his short film anthology *Early Abstractions*, which was selected in 2006 by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry. While originally silent, Smith later used music by the Fugs (who were Smith’s friends) and the Beatles as the collection’s soundtrack; its video release in 1987 synced music from Teiji Ito (husband of another experimental filmmaker, Maya Deren), and more recent scores have been created by pianist/composer Philip Glass and the band Sonic Youth. Smith himself described *Film #10* as An exposition of Buddhism and the Kaballa in the form of a collage. The final scene shows Agaric mushrooms growing on the moon while the Hero and Heroine row by on a cerebrum. This soundtrack was created in July 2009 by the Shaking Ray Levis and Love, Execution Style. It was improvised and recorded in real-time, as the musicians viewed the film.’ — Shaking Ray Levi Society

the entirety

 

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No. 11: Mirror Animations (1956 – 1957)
‘If, (as many suppose), the unseen world is the real world and the world of our senses but the transient symbols of the eternal unseen, ad limiting ourselves to the aesthetic experience’s well-known predilection for the eyes and ears, we could logically propose that any one projection of a film is variant from any other. This is particularly true of MIRROR ANIMATIONS. Although studies for this film were made in the early 1960s, the non-existence of suitable printing equipment until recently, my inability to locate the original camera footage until 1979, and particularity, the lack of an audience ready to evaluate L. Wittgenstein’s “Ethics and Aesthetics Are One and the Same”, in the light of H.C. Agrippa’s earlier, “there is no form of madness more dangerous than that arrived at by rational means’ have all contributed to delaying until now the availability of a print in the full mirror-reverse from originally envisioned. I hope you like it.’ — Harry Smith

the entirety

 

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No. 12: Heaven and Earth Magic (1962)
‘Harry Smith describes Film #12 as follows, “The first part depicts the heroine’s toothache consequent to the loss of a very valuable watermelon, her dentistry and transportation to heaven. Next follows an elaborate exposition of the heavenly land, in terms of Israel, Montreal and the second part depicts the return to Earth from being eaten by Max Muller on the day Edward the Seventh dedicated the Great Sewer of London.” One of Smith’s most well-known works; this black and white collage film culled from cut-outs from nineteenth-century catalogues, the film traverses the landscape of an hermetic dream.’ — Harry Smith Archives

the entirety

 

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No. 14: Late Superimpositions (1963 – 1965)
‘Superimposed photographs of Mr. Fleischman’s butcher shop in New York, and the Kiowa around Anadarko, Oklahoma–with Cognate Material. The strip is dark at the beginning and end, light in the middle, and is structured 122333221. I honor it the most of my films, otherwise a not very popular one before 1972. If the exciter lamp blows, play Bert Brecht’s Mahogany.’ — Harry Smith

 

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No. 16: Oz – The Tin Woodman’s Dream (1967)
‘Unfinished commercial adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz which was shelved after Smith’s close friend, the executive producer and primary financial backer Arthur Young died of cancer. From the reported three to six hours of camera test footage (rushes) only ca. 15 minutes, in the form of non-color-corrected rushes, is known to be extant. The only completed bit is The Approach to Emerald City, released under the current title.’ — HSA

the entirety

 

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No. 18: Mahagonny (1980)
‘Harry Smith’s final film; an epic four-screen projection. Smith worked on this cinematic transformation of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s opera Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1929) for over ten years and considered it his magnum opus. The film was shot from 1970 to 1972 and edited for the next eight years. The “program” of the film is meticulous, with a complex structure and order. The Weill opera is transformed into a numerological and symbolic system. Images in the film are divided into categories— portraits, animation, symbols and nature— to form the palindrome P.A.S.A.N.A.S.A.P. The film contains invaluable cameos of important avant-garde figures such as Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, and Jonas Mekas, intercut with installation pieces from Robert Mapplethorpe’s studio, New York City landmarks of the era, and Smith’s visionary animation.’ — trakt.tv

Watch the film VOD here

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! I would worry about saying ‘awww’ to macho guys, given their thin skin and everything, but luckily they don’t tend to want to talk to me/love. High five to love because I’ve never watched ‘Friends’ either and never will, although I do quite like Lisa Kudrow. Love almost wishing he had a pet parrot, G. ** Adem Berbic, Paris has the best tabacs. And I should know. My local go-to is called Le Cigarium, and I only have to open the door and whoever’s working there immediately grabs two packs of Camel Blue off the shelf. Thinking we probably won’t get to do Thorpe Park sadly, as our hosts are just bringing us in for two days/nights, and, if the Halloween screening sells out, we’ll add another on the 1st, and that would eat our time. Oh well. There might be some Ollier at Les Cahiers de Colette, arguably Paris’s greatest French language book shop, which isn’t far at all from where we’re coffeeing in a few hours. ** Tosh Berman, Cool, I love Mathieu Lindon’s writing. I can’t wait to get that. He and I share a French publisher, and he is super sweet and strange. Thanks. T. ** Bill, You never saw them or SY live? That’s sad, but that’s life. I missed a bunch of biggies too for distance and/or stupid laziness reasons: Pistols, Beatles, Sly Stone, Nirvana, … I might well follow you to that YouTube location. Have the swellest weekend. ** _Black_Acrylic, A bunch of the Nouveau Roman writers loved detective fiction. I guess maybe because it’s so plotty but also so dry in that way they liked? ** Carsten, Luckily or unluckily the woman who gave birth to my friend’s accidental triplets won’t have anything to do with him. So the triplets themselves remain his daydream fodder. Yeah, but making stuff for this blog i.e for anyone is pretty different than making something that’s designed to seduce people with money into forking it over. That’s not my forte, but we’re counting on corrections from our producer. I hate being reductive, but there’s other choice. Good weekend ahead or I guess already underway for you. ** Sarah Palmer, Hi, Sarah! Glad you had a good holiday. Southeast … okay, I think what that means. My friend Zac is originally from a small town by Nice. Does that qualify? Anyway, it sounds to have been quite art rich. I’ll see if Phoebe Hadjimarkos Clarke has been translated into English. And I’ll look into (La) Horde too. I haven’t gone to see dance in ages. I used to go all the time when I was working with Gisele Vienne. Cool, thanks. Any weekend highlights? ** Hugo, That does sound hectic. Ugh, sorry about the Alice job loss. I hope she’s okay. She seemed excited about that gig. Do let her know that our film only provides semi-levity. I hope things look totally up for you extremely quickly. ** HaRpEr //, ‘Un Femme Douce’ is about, mm, a little less than halfway down my fave Bressons list, I think. It’s great though. Like I said, I now doubt we’ll get to Halloween at Thorpe Park. I think we’re going to be a little too in-and-out to have the time. But who knows. As I think I’ve said, the only movie that has scared me as an adult was seeing ‘Blair Witch Project’ upon its release. Hard to believe now. I don’t remember that Vollman story, but I don’t think I want to back and read it. Yikes. ** laura w, The French really do like American detective fiction, and it’s been very influential on both fiction and readership here. Like they love Paul Auster’s hoity-toity ‘detective’ fiction offshoots. You mean ‘Purple Noon’? It’s very good in my memory. Disney is very wussy on the scare front, at least in their parks. They even went back and softened up their old Snow White ride so as not to offend anyone even though it wasn’t remotely scary to begin with. Doing a Tim Burton makeover of the Haunted Mansion for Halloween is their idea of being daring. I’m curious about ‘Coyote vs Acme’. This weekend: keep working on the deck, which is not finished. I have to finish reading a book I agreed to blurb. See a pal or two. Nothing too spectacular. You? ** Thom, Hi. Mm, Dalkey is gradually bringing their old stuff back into print, but I fear Ollier may be a top priority. But you can probably get ‘used’ copies. You ordered some great stuff there, obviously. Grove’s design department is not what it once was, that’s for absolutely sure. Very nice Nick Lowe cover. That ‘Jesus of Cool’ album is so good. By far his best, I think? I think my favorite Zelda game is ‘Windwaker’. I haven’t properly played the last two Zeldas, but everyone says they’re god. I do have a longtime fondness for ‘Majorca’s Mask’. Weekend galore to you! ** Okay. I’ve restored the blog’s oldish post about the mystical, odd, charismatic films of Harry Smith for you this weekend, and do have a look and poke and play around. See you on Monday.

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The Basics:

With the publication in 1958 of his first novel, Claude Ollier was immediately associated with the group of writers who came to be known in the 1950s and 1960s as the Nouveau Roman or New Novelists. Although these writers (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, and others) differed significantly from each other, they shared some important common denominators: a questioning of narrative form, of point of view, of temporality, of representation in fiction. Like his contemporaries, Ollier was interested in fiction’s capacity for problematizing its own conventions, while at the same time proposing formal innovations that would challenge the ways in which fiction is usually read, evaluated, and categorized. However, Ollier’s work soon took on a configuration that made it both unique and exemplary with respect to the New Novel movement: after completing his second novel in 1961, Ollier decided to link all his novels in an ongoing fictional “cycle” which would form, with subsequent books, a serial investigation into the nature and functioning of fiction itself.

Eventually comprising eight works, with the last published in 1975, the cycle was entitled Le Jeu d’enfant (translatable as Child’s Play or Child’s Game). The eight books are divided into two cycles of four novels each and are linked to each other in a complex pattern of recurring characters, structures, situations, and passages. The principal thread binding all the works is eventually revealed to be a single protagonist who undertakes, in various guises, a voyage of investigation in a foreign setting. Analogously, the author and reader can be seen as exploring the nature of texts which become more and more alien with respect to traditional narrative forms and conventions.

The cycle’s impetus is thus a dual one: it seeks both to reflect upon its own nature as fiction and to challenge the foundations of narrative convention by proposing alternatives to traditional forms and procedures. Thus Ollier’s cycle addresses many of the important theoretical questions raised by the New Novel movement and, indeed, by much of the intellectual inquiry of recent years: what happens to the traditional protagonist in experimental fictions? to what extent is the author in control of the writing process? what is the role of the reader with respect to these demanding, ambiguous works? what, finally, is the nature and origin of a fictional text? These interrogations take place in works of high artistic quality where meticulous construction combines with lyric skill to create memorable fables of reading and writing.

Since the appearance in 1975 of the last volume of Le Jeu d’enfant, Ollier has published eight books, and a ninth is in progress at the time of this writing. These works vary in format and subject. While echoing some of the subjects and concerns of Le Jeu d’enfant, these more recent texts deal in new ways with the questions of perception and memory in relation to writing. Although its quality and interest are undisputed, Ollier’s work has to date received considerably less critical attention than that of his contemporaries among the New Novelists. The reason for this comparative lack of analysis lies, perhaps, in the difficult and rigorous unity of Ollier’s major cycle, whose scope, size, and intricacy make special demands upon the critic. — Dictionary of Literary Biography

Note: Claude Ollier also appeared in Robert Bresson’s film Un Femme Douce (1969), playing the doctor of Dominique Sanda’s character Elle.

 

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Claude Ollier, Réminiscence

 

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Claude Ollier’s books in English:

The Mise-en-Scène (Dalkey Archive Press)

First published in France in 1958 and winner of the prestigious Prix Medecis, The Mise-en-Scène takes place in the mountains of Morocco when the French still controlled North Africa. An engineer named Lassalle has been sent from France to plan a road through the mountains. Although Lassalle seems to be successful, he finds out that another engineer, Lessing, has preceded him, and that Lessing, as well as others, may have been murdered.

The novel is a detailed inquiry into the meaning of actions and the impossibility of determining what happens. Lassalle prepares to return home uncertain of whether what he has witnessed is a series of coincidences or part of a sinister plan to keep him ignorant. His uncertainty is shared by the reader, who is kept guessing and wondering at what he thinks he knows but cannot be sure of.

In part a detective novel and in part an investigation into the nature of knowledge, The Mise-en-Scène is controlled by a tone and style that are truly remarkable.  — DA

“It is remarkable that it has taken thirty years for a translation of La Mise-en-Scène to appear . . . This novel comes as close to perfection as a novel ever can; not a word or sentence is wasted, and the reader could continue unearthing symmetries and resonances for a very long time.” —Ivan Hill, Times Literary Supplement

“One of the best as well as the most influential of the French New Novelists . . . Skillfully translated by Dominic Di Bernardi . . . The novel is a demonstration of the complexity of reality, and the impossibility of knowing for certain the true meaning of a chain of events . . . A rich voyage of discovery of the human psyche . . . by one of the most original authors in modern France.” —Washington Post

Excerpt:

When he got up to close the window—because of the lizards scurrying over the lattice work of the mosquito net, making the mesh rustle under their claws—the whole room was plunged into darkness. Meanwhile, the moon rose behind the mountain, lighting up the hill. It is most probably this brightness which made him reopen his eyes. The light and noise, no matter how faint, disturb his sleep. With the window closed, the howls of the dogs and jackals still penetrate the room, coming from the hollow of the olive grove or the foothills of the mountain, answering each other endlessly; at times the answer is long in coming, but comes it does without fail—haunting, uniform.

Right cheek pressed against the pillow, and the iron bed so low, he has the impression of lying at floor-level. Every time he opens his eyes, he spots the wall map which is reduced, at this hour, to the schematic outline of a plant, of an animal or a dwarf tree: a lush ball on the left, another sparer one on the right, linked to the former by an almost horizontal network of fibers.

But this makes short shrift of a night’s rest. How to fall back to sleep under such conditions? It is better to turn over on your left side, nose against the wall. It is the only way he has of escaping the light, since he cannot prevent it from coming in: the blinds do not close. They informed him of this as soon as he arrived: the first one has broken blades, and the second is clinging to the wall by only a single hinge—he verified this himself during his tour of the house.

With his shift in position he experiences the same short-lived relief, a soothing sensation which fades very quickly. The window is shut, the air inert, the heat damp and unremitting. He would gladly throw the sheets off, but for the few mosquitoes which a while ago successfully edged their way in and are now hovering about in the vicinity of the bed. All the same, by enclosing himself, he made up for the defects in the mosquito net: the movable frame, badly fit together, is off kilter by nearly an inch; several links of the mesh have been snipped or torn open. But this satisfaction is fleeting. Caution would dictate methodically checking every path of entry: the chinks between the badly fitted tiles, the gaps under the doors, the condition of the roughcast, the inner covering of the closet, not to mention the great weak point of the system—the fireplace. The first precaution to take would be to have blocked off for the duration of the torrid season. For all that, this room is exposed to every kind of surprise and, when all is said, in its present state does not offer the slightest protection.

He has nevertheless been notified, on several occasions. of the minor hazards, spiders being among them. They described various species to him: those with black bodies and long hairy legs, others with a yellowish hue, very dangerous. The majority were supposedly harmless. But the very idea of touching their legs with this lips or his eyelids was enough to terrify him—as was the thought that they could remain motionless for hours at a time, clinging to the ceiling, before dropping themselves down onto the sheets. With the reptiles, the problem was more complex, more controversial. How many stories had he been told, and some of them were beyond question, others suspect . . .

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Disconnection (Dalkey Archive Press)

In two interconnected, alternating stories, Claude Ollier has written a disturbing, haunting, apocalyptic novel that brings together the end of the Third Reich with the closing of the twentieth century. The first is the autobiographical story of Martin, a French student conscripted into a munitions factory in Nuremberg in the middle of World War II. The other is the story of a nameless writer, a Robinson Crusoe-like figure who inhabits a twilight world where civilization has collapsed. — DA

“The moral and psychic disjunctions occasioned by World War II have long been the source of much of Europe’s best fiction. In Germany, it is the novelistic terrain of Gunter Grass and Heinrich Boll, in France of Claude Simon, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Claude Ollier. In his latest novel, Mr. Ollier, a major force behind the nouveau roman, a literary movement born out of the Resistance, meditates on Germany’s totalitarian past . . . To suggest history’s deeper discontinuities, Mr. Ollier shatters the traditional narrative form, preferring fragments to sustained storytelling . . . [F]ull of fine, splintered poetry, Mr. Ollier’s aphoristic style has been carefully rendered in Dominic Di Bernardi’s skillful translation.” —New York Times Book Review

‘At one point today, Christmas Day 2013, I thought perhaps I had had a stroke some time within the last week or two. I would be reading along another four or five pages of Claude Ollier’s book here and there and not know what I read or why I even did it. The words were simply hollow for me and I was thinking that they shouldn’t be. Nothing could dissuade me from my thinking the text a bore and inconsequential. There was nothing to engage me and still I felt maybe I had lost something of myself due to my new and potentially quite serious condition. But then I realized this could of course not be true because these same days I have been reading the humungous memoir of Elias Canetti and enjoying every word of it. He is such a good and interesting writer. And then there is Josef Winkler who is daily tearing me up with his The Serf and its awful contents regarding a life so foreign to me but so graphically real and disturbing it makes one cringe too much. My senses must still be intact, and I can still discern relevance, it seems, in a given text presented to me. So what is my problem with this master work?

‘I loved the feel of the book itself, its subject matter, the author’s name, the cloth-covered boards, even the title which made it even harder for me to not like the text. I tried my best to like it, I did. But it was dead, the words, and perfectly good words at that but for some reason there wasn’t a sentence that rang true and good for me. On page seventy-nine we are reading the words of the nameless writer in the first person:

‘Returned, stopping frequently, pushing my bicycle, dead tired, very gloomy. Haven’t moved since.

‘It was as if he had a journal and was recording his daily activities so that one day in the future he might extend the shorthand into something palatable and interesting. For over eighty pages I attempted to find my way into the sentences of Claude Ollier and could not. And the blurbs on the dust jacket suggested I would and the critics claimed I had to. But success was not in the cards for me. Finally on page eighty-one I had to give in, give up, and move on. And the page before that was the straw that broke my back. And it wasn’t anything I hadn’t read before. Here we have in the third person words telling the story of Martin. The sentence was the same as all the others. The problem for me was in the telling. There was no showing, and that is the critical element I need that was missing. Oh writer, do not tell me about your problem but show it to me. And I will give an example of that page now and you can tell me why I am wrong. Better yet, please don’t. It doesn’t matter. I have no more time allotted or available for this project after my review.

‘Disconcerted, Martin walks the whole way, crosses the city for the first time on a weekday morning, goes along Lorenzkirche, Karolinenstrasse, is impressed while entering the immense building where uniformed orderlies, deciphering his paper, on each floor dictate to him the correct procedure.

‘So why even write this? Instead of showing me something, making me feel, we have empty adjectives such as immense and uniformed and also a stupid verb the likes of impressed. Honestly, there wasn’t a page I liked or even a sentence that was memorable. And that is rare even in a shitty novel. And I know, I know, this one was supposed to be good. To me, it was if this novel was of an elitist quality and for a crowd I do not belong to. Something written in a way a common man such as myself could not possibly get or understand. Perhaps a book for the most attuned and smartest among us, though I have to doubt it. Seriously. I have the same problem reading poems written by William Butler Yeats. There are references in his poems that I just do not get and his work leaves me feeling flat. I never studied the classics. I do not know the secret code that might let me in. But, in stark contrast, a writer such as W.G. Sebald writes of places and historical occurrences I know nothing about either but I feel my way through and his words are interesting. His words also mean something to me. And by my lights that is good work, that is art, high art, important art, and full, sound, and relevant to my day. Sebald refuses to waste my time. He makes me pay a price for reading him. Ollier ultimately gives me nothing so he gets no praise from me. And in return a bit of indifference to the rest of his work, and little else to make me think or feel otherwise.’ — M Sarki

Excerpt:

He knows that memory will betray him. Later on. Will deceive, will delude him.

Will distort the scenes, shuffle their order.

Knows it already. Has learned this, already.

Knows that what in this place he sees, hears, will be poorly safeguarded, poorly protected, poorly restored. Will be mixed up, later on.

Dashed, riddled. Or erased.

But Martin isn’t any less observant. All eyes: facades, banderoles, poster; towers, walls, old roofs.

But listens that much more keenly, all ears, to fix the locations, as far as possible, save these sounds, fanfares, trolley bells, clicking footsteps.

Hears the voice in the distance, from the loudspeaker, already hears the noise. Seemingly hears it, hasn’t reached the Ring yet, from this point hears only voices calling, the din of motors, shouts.

Passes the Ring a little farther on and the deep ditch, Marientor, the door in the ramparts, ears pricked up, picks up the pace, stepping quickly.

The real voice now, funneled inside the old street, a summer mist on the cobblestones of Lorenzstrasse, slick and glistening, a dampness, a decent shower.

At the bend in the street catches sight of the church, massive, with golden spires, Lorenzkirche, its nave damaged.

Goes around the edifice and returns to the main street, Königsstrasse, the people on the sidewalk, in small groups, seem less hurried than he, on their way down to the river.

Others pass on bicycles, in boots, feathered hats, rare cars, five o’clock, today the factories closed earlier, the stores, the offices.

Doesn’t believe his eyes, Martin simply finds himself here, in this city, not quite one whole week, walking on these cobblestones, he’s too going down toward the river, can spot the bridge, soon crosses the flower-decked bridge.

The voice is everywhere now, fills the square, the old city center, indeed, that’s the voice, that’s the one. Emphatically bursts forth, rings out, echoes.

When he comes into the square, Goebbels has already begun to speak. He’s there on the platform, with the dignitaries, green overcoat, has kept on his cap, too big for him, face furrowed, obstructed by the microphones, shouts very loudly.

Doesn’t believe his ears, what’s happening to him, this tribute seen so often before the war on screens, newsreels of childhood, adolescence, here in motion, very close, brandishing a fish, renowned actor, self-assured, haranguing at the top of his lungs.

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Wert and the Life Without End (Dalkey Archive Press)

‘In some kind of institution, maybe a hospital or rehabilitation center, we are introduced to Wert, a disturbed, traumatized man still suffering the horrors of his experience as a soldier fighting in an unidentified conflict. A patient or prisoner, Wert writes down his memories of the war; his impressions of his current, ill-defined treatment; and his reflections on his own psychological well-being. When at last released, Wert undertakes a long journey to the east, and slowly recognizes the events of his life as being reminiscent of episodes from ancient epic narratives—as though his entire story has simply been the reenactment of a tale first told thousands of years before. Chipping away at its narrative through short, rhythmic, poetic sentences; combining the worlds of the avant-garde and the ancient epic; and revealing the interconnectedness of psychology, lived experience, and the written word, Wert and the Life Without End is a masterpiece of self-reflective storytelling.’ — DA

‘Ollier explores the dividing line between past and present, the fault line of postwar European consciousness, still in a state of shock in the midst of evidence of its recent history, still recovering, semi-expectant and above all watchful. In bidding memory, as after Nabokov, to speak, one will also, in Ollier’s world, have to answer to it, this requirement being as explicit a statement of the inherent hopefulness of narrative as one might look for in a fallen and betrayed civilization.’ — Choice

‘Using the structural device of contrast—particularly light and darkness—he works with words as a composer works with tonal patterns, producing a verbal symphony of distinctive beauty.’ — Anna Otten

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Law and Order (Red Dust)

‘A man waits to be killed in a town by the sea, probably in North Africa. His room is described, the sound of the elevator, its vibrations, the light at different hours, the shifting positions of the men waiting below for him who follow him in their Buick, slowly at a distance, then so close that only their faces are visible in his rearview mirror. Chronology is jumbled. It is never certain when and whether he is apprehended. The climax is all through the story. The reader constructs his own story, his own terror.’ — RD

‘Most interesting, however, are the textual developments and transformations that take place. …the initial paragraph furnishes key motifs for two focal segments of the text– “The sudden vast glistening brightness…” and “Raw, intense, blinding light” the first a textual correlative of fear– the second, of scandal.’ — Leon Roudiez

‘Using the structural device of contrast – particularly light and darkness- he works with words as a composer works with tonal patterns, producing in Law and Order a verbal symphony of distinctive beauty’ — Anna Otten

 

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(l. to r.) Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Claude Mauriac, Jérôme Lindon, Robert Pinget, Samuel Beckett, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Ollier

 

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Interview
from The Review of Contemporary Fiction

 

Cecile Lindsay: I have always been struck by the absence of the Second World War and the Algerian War in your fictions.

Claude Ollier: If we exempt the fleeting and marginal “return” to European soil in L’Echec de Nolan, as phantomlike, muffled, nocturnal, and haunted by bad memories and nightmares, then all the other books are situated outside of Europe and far from Europe, farther and farther. On the one hand, it became almost impossible to “think” lucidly about what had been that sort of self-destruction of Europe between 1930 and 1945; on the other hand, it is clear that what is important in the evolution of the world since then is no longer taking place there. The obstinate and persevering hero of Le Jeu d’enfant senses and knows it from the beginning; it is the terrible knowledge acquired in adolescence, an admitted, outmoded fact of which he will never speak; the Second World War destroyed all he had been taught, humanism included, along with his whole inherited childhood universe. He is trying bravely, ingenuously perhaps, to take everything back to zero, in the beginning of La Mise en scene just as the book’s author tries, by a sort of narrative tabula rasa, to take back to square one all the elements of narration: observation of a country, a civilization, a foreign language, an unknown story. And all the primordial questions are asked there in a single movement: what is seeing, hearing, interpreting, exploring, reflecting, remembering, dreaming, writing, speaking? His instruction begins again, his life is reeducated elsewhere, on an “exotic” soil, extra-muros, far from the ruins of his childhood and his native land, far from the other side of the walls of a Europe whose Second World War culminated in a sort of cultural suicide. This war was for him the equivalent of that inaugural catastrophe that the hero of so many science fiction tales has trouble remembering or measuring but that conditions the entirety of his new universe. For him, it is as though this catastrophe “upstream” could not be recounted. And he tries anew to see, to tell, to write, having come into contact with foreign languages unknown to him—languages which, by their difference from his own, will allow him to look upon his mother tongue differently and to use it anew.

CL: A strong current in American literary criticism and critical theory of recent years has been a call for a more “political” approach to both writing literature and writing about literature. Experimental fiction has often been critiqued for what is seen as its “hyperformalism.” Were this charge to be made about your writing, how would you respond?

CO: I would answer that this accusation, which is superficial and banal, rests upon a regrettable lack of reflection on the question of language and of its relation to the body; upon the question of form and of the evolution of forms; and, more generally, upon any question that is epistemological, philosophical, or aesthetic in nature. Or I would answer, more simply, that those who make this charge have probably not read the books of which they claim to speak. For to use the term experimental is to misconstrue completely the very nature and practice of the act of writing such as they are manifested in books like mine. My work has absolutely nothing to do with “experimentation.” In the exact, scientific sense of the term, experimentation consists of isolating certain elements and conducting upon them duly controlled experiments, systematic manipulations, skillful alterations. I have nothing against this kind of work, and some of its results can be interesting and instructive. But my kind of intervention in respect to language and narrative forms has nothing to do with that. You could even say that it is the opposite: indeed, genuine experimentation necessarily tries as much as possible to eliminate chance, while my whole practice consists in provoking, in narrative invention, the greatest possible degree of chance, soliciting at every moment the irruption of elements which are more or less diffuse, forgotten, or firmly buried within the unconscious. I can only write, can only feel the pleasure of writing, if I reconnect with past emotions. I have an absolute need in the beginning for a precise setting, a setting in which I have lived; I need it so that the sensations, perceptions, and emotions can flow. Even on an “imaginary” planet, my writing can function only if it is plugged into memories, dreams, and intuitions. The phantasmic scenes of Epsilon and Enigma are closely derived from lived scenes from the recent or distant past. This is what I call the anchorage of a fiction. Everything in my texts arrives there by way of this anchorage in a place, by way of the paths, the journeys, the adventures, the dramas linked to this place. This is the source of the elan which allows for the development of a story: this story is launched on emotional traces, that is, on the reviviscence of the body’s displacements in a space known and forgotten, and on linkings of synesthetic, kinesthetic sensations whose recall and inscription in adequate terms regroup all the other sensations—visual, auditory, tactile. And for me the auditory sensations are much more important than the visual ones; the sounds connected with a place evoke that place for me, years later, much better than images: the tape recording is by far superior to photography. The tracing of lines is linked up to this play of recall and resurgences; the words, sentences, paragraphs, and blanks between lines must be fused by the permanence of this elan.

Each day, I start out on an impulse of this sort, which may only last a few minutes or can sometimes stretch out into several hours, but when I no longer feel its action within me, I know there is no point in insisting because there is no longer any vital necessity to continue, and it is only for that that I write. This necessity must be inscribed in each word, between the words, palpably. Only then can the reader feel an emotion of the same nature and force. If a sentence fails to transmit the emotion, it’s no good, it must be rejected or transformed. This work of palpable re-creation thus takes place through work upon forms: of vocabulary, of syntax, of typical and coded narrative formulas. This implies a putting into form of assonances, of relations of sonority, of rhythms, of silences, of the tempo intended for each piece. Here it is principally a question of music, a music of the text which is composed a bit like a musical score; I listen to it, I play it to myself, play it again, modify it, listen again, until the “musical phrase” is perfect, untouchable. If this work upon forms is called “hyperformalism,” then Bach, Schubert, Cervantes, Debussy, Rabelais, Flaubert, Bartok, Henry James, Proust and many others are remarkable hyperformalists.

It could be added that the necessity of an evolution of forms is inscribed within the exhaustion resulting from the prolonged use of these forms. By dint of being endlessly repeated, such forms become cliches, forms emptied of emotion. It is in order to reactivate emotive reactions (which form the basis of all the others— argumentative, critical, ethical) and to produce new ones that writers, musicians, and painters periodically “disconnect” from an ambient academicism diffused and lauded by the media, and compose works which appear to be completely apart, completely marginal and unassimilable. But these works create, there, a new poetics, and I would willingly speak of poetics in relation to my books, which are not novels. Finally, this necessity of disconnection and upheaval always rejoins at a certain point a sort of irrepressible curiosity, submitted to a mysterious logic of plastic transformations, and linked to meaning, to the relation of the body to meaning and form. All this, which should be developed point by point, clearly has nothing to do with the activity of some experimental laboratory.

CL: What are the “politics of fiction” in France in recent years? Why do we see a resurgence of more conventional novelistic forms and a rejection, from some quarters, of experimentation in fiction?

CO: I’m not sure I understand what you mean by “politics of fiction.” Who enunciates, advocates, or applies this “politics”? What I know of are fashions, which are launched or sustained by the modem media and which are in a state of constant disjunction in respect to stages of creation such as they are lived by writers. By disjunction I mean a delay. I think that there was a remarkable series of narrative innovations in France after the end of the Second World War. One can study this series historically and formally, analyzing its currents, works, filiations, and influences. One can also, if one has the taste for it, study its echo (if there is one) in the media of the same period. One will note that the delay in providing information, to say nothing of analysis and criticism, is between two and ten years. And the principal objective of the accumulated power of the media is, today, to blur and confuse the paths, to tend to efface them, retaining only one slim trace for show, while awaiting the next show. This volatilization of reality takes place on a large scale and is motivated by the quest for quick sales and high ratings. All of this could give the impression of a “resurgence” of the traditional novel. But it has no more “resurged” now than it had foundered in the era of the New Novel, from 1955 to 1960. It has been in good health for the last forty years, and that’s perfectly normal. Every era is marked by a very major conservative current and a very minor innovative current. What characterizes a given era is the particular difference, the singular gap that it reveals between these two currents. The gap can be rather minimal in certain eras and considerable in others. It has tended to grow, in my opinion, over the last half-century, to a great extent because of the Second World War, all of whose consequences in the cultural domain have not yet been weighed by most of our contemporaries. And also because of the fact that in all the compartments of social life, evolution since the beginning of the century has been extremely sudden and rapid and unexpected, surprising everyone, creating in every domain—technological, military, political, ethical- enormous simultaneous upheavals which could not have been avoided, abated, attenuated. One submitted to them and continues to submit to their full force; one is obliged to adapt, and one adapts badly. So our Western society today strives to preserve intact the cultural sector and, above all, that of the narrative: it is absolutely imperative that this vital activity—the auto narrativity of a society, the “representation,” if you will, or the “recitation” of this society to itself—remain sheltered from this wave of questioning. And this sector can be stabilized; mastery over it can be maintained (it may well be the only one today). All that need be done is to uniformly marginalize any innovation, especially threatening manifestations of rupture. Thus it can be confirmed, curiously, in this fin de siecle, that any social change is finally admitted quite soon, even if it constitutes a break with secular customs, except in the narrative domain. Everything else can “blow”—the atom, the family, ideology—but literary genres must hold! Thus the novelistic still shines today as the enduring quietude of consciences, the glowing repose of the citizen who is buffeted on all other sides and who is frightened. The major media, plus computerization, in the service of generalized literary academicism: this is the burlesque cultural project in which we have been engaged for quite a while. This will function for a certain time. For a long time perhaps, longer than we think. And then, one fine day, the gap will resurface, in broad daylight, in all its violence.

CL: At the end of your essay “French Version,” you signal the need for a new reading, a different way of approaching the kind of texts you and others have written. Can you elaborate further on what specific directions or forms this new reading might take? How could this new kind of reading translate into literary criticism? How does this proposed accent on “le biographique,” on the person of the writer, differ from standard biographical criticism?

CO: When I suggested “new gestures of reading, ones which are attentive to metamorphoses,” at the end of “French Version,” I meant something like this: to place oneself in the movement of the text, that is, in its creative movement, in the same path that the text’s inventor was in the process of opening up, of clearing away, of exploring when he chose his words, cadences, punctuation marks, silences. In other words, to listen to the music of the text attentively enough to perceive its assonances, its resonances, its close or distant rhymes, its allusions, and at the same time the tensions, the differences between the passages that came easily (one can sense it) and those where the phrase nearly broke or hesitated or went off in an unexpected direction (one can sense this, too, in any finished text). Or again: to “get inside the skin” of the author, to adopt his apprehensions, successes, pleasures, doubts. This is the only way to feel the words vibrate fully and to deliver them of all their meaning—their manifest meaning as well as their hidden, yet perceptible meaning. This is not a new attitude, you will say, and that’s true: it holds for any truly organized text. I therefore linked “gestures of reading” to “metamorphoses.” And there I wanted to make reference to two contemporary events of extreme importance: the insistence of psychoanalysis on the play of the signifier, on the one hand, and on the other, the breakdown of European cultural ethnocentrism. There is no time to develop these two points in detail here. I will simply say that all my books, on the whole, call for an opening onto the Other, and this Other is as much the unconscious, the “double,” as it is the Other repressed by European writing for centuries—the Islamic civilization, for example. My books in which this aspect is most manifest are Marrakch Medine and Mon Double a Malacca, both subsequent to Le Jeu d’enfant. But in all of Le Jeu d’enfant the purpose is the same, the aim is identical. These books thus call for readers who will also be open and capable of abandoning, if only for a time, their prejudices and presuppositions-not only those about reading (the “character,” the “story,” pre-Freudian psychology, the taste for tragedy, etc.) but also the ideological ones, that is, all the customary cliches prevalent in the culture. This is not so easy. For example, it is significant that most of the French readers of Marrakch Medine, who claimed to be sensitive to a certain poetic quality of the text, did not, however, feel themselves mobilized by the text’s effort toward Islam; they thus recuperated for themselves, under the iridescent colors of exoticism, all that this book tried to do in order to break down the wall of exoticism and specifically of “orientalism. ” The Moroccan readers, on the other hand, judged the book to be important in this connection.

As for the critic, he is a reader like any other, even if he is overwhelmed by his readings. What I just said is valid for him as well, neither more nor less. A literary criticism applied to these books must exhibit the same openness, the same availability, which clearly requires a rupture with certain modes of behavior, too, imprinted with Eurocentric ideology.

Finally, I think I stressed that “le biographique” in “French Version” is intended as “symbolized,” rather than directly enunciated. This is to say that it is a “biographique” which is filtered and transposed by the author, the “instance” which organizes, chooses, and writes, and which is representative of a place, a period, and of the currents, intersections, practices, feelings, ideas, and voices which make themselves heard there. It is not a “biographique” which simply incorporates events in the life of the citizen who bears the same name as the writer. And these are, really, two distinct characters-another reality that the “media” fiercely deny and repress. This duality is difficult to explain and analyze, and is the source of many misunderstandings. I really should have thought, back then, of taking a pseudonym.

CL: How are other media—radio and film—related to writing fiction for you?

CO: First, allow me an objection: for me, radio and cinema are no more “media” than are language or the book. They are materials, ones that are different from those on which is exercised the writing of a book: sounds, noises, music, spoken or sung dialogues, fixed or mobile images, etc. For several years radio and cinema accompanied the writing of my books: in radio, in the form of “radiophonic pieces” composed at the request of French or German stations and broadcast all over Europe; in cinema, in the form of film critiques published in La Nouvelle Revue francaise, Le Mercure de France, and Les Cahiers du cinema (a selection of these articles was published in 1981 by Gallimard-Cahiers du Cinema as Souvenirs ecran); and also in the form of film scenarios, two of which have been produced. Writing for radio or cinema is something entirely different from writing a text of literary fiction. The former are more social, more sociable activities. I practiced them with pleasure, as a welcome diversion from the absorbing work of writing—even a pleasant recreation. Most of my radio pieces are developments or “enlargements” of the short texts collected in Nebules and Navettes. Having said this, I don’t think that these exercises effected upon composite materials have ever had any influence on my writing. They are different domains.

 

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Further:

Claude Ollier’s books @ Dalkey Archive Press
A Claude Ollier Bibliography
Claude Ollier interview
Claude Ollier @ P.O.L. Editeur
Video: Claude Ollier reads from his novel Reminiscence
Video: Claude Ollier w/ Bernard Pivot on French TV, 1982

 

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Claude OLLIER Le Nouveau Roman

Le Dissident secret. Un portrait de Claude Ollier. Par Christian Rosset.
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p.s. Hey. ** Adem Berbic, Yes, Zac and I will be at the London screening. We have a meeting in a few hours to finalise everything. If we have time and $$$ we might go to the Halloween makeover at Thorpe Park while we’re there, we’ll see. C.L. said thanks to you and, well, to everyone for your kind words. Yes, email, we’ll sort it. ** Steeqhen, Hi. The 60s era monster movies are a whole lot wittier and weirder, if possibly by default. ‘Solaris’ is certainly well worth watching. I don’t think I know ‘La Femme d’Aviateur’. The good thing about American tourists is that they can be very enthusiastic when they’re not being loud and privileged. Most are nice enough, I think. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Good, love has at least set you on the road to painlessness, although, being love, you’d think he’d just have had to snap his fingers to cure you. Interesting. I watched ‘The Crawling Eye’ when I was a little kid, and it scared the shit out of me even though it’s kind of ludicrous, so maybe it. Although The Beast of Yucca Flats looks like he’d be the easiest to survive. Haha, hopefully not ‘Will and Grace’ though. Love embarking on an experiment to smile and say ‘awww’ to everything that everyone says to him, G. ** Carsten, I feel very confident that I never made a kid. I have a friend who discovered a few years ago that he’d unknowingly made triplets. ‘Deck’: It’s a promo package you have to make to approach potential investors in a film. Usually it’s in the form of a pdf. You have to write a series of texts that introduce the film, lay out its narrative, describe the intended filmmaking (style, tone, performances, sound, etc.), which is what I’m working on now. Our producer will tell us if we’re doing that attractively enough or not. Suggestive images that give a sense of the film’s look. Comparisons with other known films that the film might have a relationship to. Etc, etc. It’s interesting to be forced to consolidate one’s thoughts/plans, but it’s hell to put together and try to get right. ‘The Serpent and the Rainbow’ sounds like a fun thing to watch if you’re stoned, which I never am. Pullman, yeah. That scene in ‘Lost Highway’ where he looks down that dark, empty hall in his house and then slowly walks into it is so great, a thing only Lynch could conjure. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yes, indeed, and maybe also speaking to the laziness of current day film producers’ imaginations too. Crazy golf! I miss crazy golf. There is one place in Paris where there’s an indoor crazy golf course, but I’ve been too suspicious to give it a try. ** Bill, ‘The Crawling Eye’ is wack, a laugh riot, etc. I real want to see the Butthole Surfers doc. I’ve been hunting the illegal sites for it, but nothing yet. Lucky you. Really jonesing to see that. Nothing like them in their early heyday. Did you ever see them live in, say, the ‘Locust Abortion’ and related era. They were stage-bound LSD. ** Sam F, Hi, Sam. C.L. thanks you from afar. ‘A Bucket of Blood’, yes, saw it, but not for many yonks. So happy of course that you’re digging the poetry that I also dig. Excellent about Ithaca, and surely Baltimore will go gangbusters. I not even secretly love and covet guest-posts, yes, for the reason you mention and every other reason. May your Friday catapult you into a weekend that you can’t even begin to imagine. ** laura w., Disney is gigantically expensive. That’s why we’re hoping our Disney-hooked-up friend gets discounts as part of her employment. Disney parks’ Halloween makeover is just stupid and lame. But Universal’s is okay if ridiculously expensive. The ‘RT’ screening in London might be our last in-person screening, but there are others coming up where we won’t be in attendance. I can be a procrastinator for sure, but when I finally force myself to start, I get really dedicated and obsessive. That AMC thing is interesting but I would be very, very surprised if they support actual daring, original filmmakers and films. I suspect they’re just looking for the next ‘Obsession’ or ‘Backrooms’, but we’ll see. The new Dinosaur Jr. is good? Cool. The last couple didn’t excite me so much, but they’ve got it going on. ** HaRpEr //, They’re certainly more creative. Are they still scary? I never get scared anymore, so I couldn’t tell. It would be nice to be scared and aesthetically delighted/amused at the same time. My guess is we’ll only be in London for a couple of days, but we’re about to figure that out. It’ll be fun, irregardless. Haven’t spun the new/old Cramps yet. Of course I’m a fan. I’ll get it, thanks, pal. ** Nicholas., Really? If so, you clearly need more astute and verbally generous friends. Cold sesame noodle is my favorite food of all foods. Zac and I made a film about a young guy who wants his death to be hugely impactful. ‘Permanent Green Light’. So I get it. Friends ∞. ** Thom, Hey, thanks. Share it when you’re happy with it. I never share anything I make until I’m completely sure of it. Although I’m sometimes wrong about that of course. My back problems haven’t gotten all that worse as I’ve gotten older so far. I guess they’re more frequent, and it seems to take a lot less to trigger them. They’ll probably get worse though, I suppose. Aging: grr. ** Right. I’m a big fan of the Nouveau Roman writers, as I’m sure you know. Claude Ollier and Claude Mauriac are probably the least known, celebrated, and read of those writers for reasons I don’t understand. Maybe they were just low key guys. Anyway, I thought I would make a post concentrating on the works of Ollier that have been translated into English and see what happens. See you tomorrow.