Spotlight on … Jacques Roubaud The Loop (1992)

‘Jacques Roubaud is a playful, puzzling, erudite, at times obscure, yet at other times thoroughly moving “composer” (as he puts it) of poetry and prose. An algebraist by trade (he long professed mathematics at the University of Paris X-Nanterre and now directs research at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), Roubaud has surpassed all other French writers (with the possible exceptions of his mentor, Raymond Queneau, and his late sidekick, the ingenious Georges Perec) in entwining these two disparate manifestations of human mind: on the one hand writing, which try as it might can hardly avoid dealing with experienced feelings, memory, perceived reality; and on the other hand mathematics, which involves not only numbers and calculations (Roubaud likens himself to a “counter”), but also vertiginous logical constructs. Like the East and West of Kipling, can the twain ever really meet?

‘In Roubaud they do, impressively and instructively. From his first book, Mathematics (1967), of which the mathematical symbol for “belonging” entitles a volume of multiform “sonnets” arranged according to the moves in a masters match of the Japanese game of go, Roubaud emerged as an original voice. Not surprisingly, the author of subsequent collections such as Mono no aware (1970), Trente et un au cube (1973) and Autobiographie, chapitre dix (1977) is not only a resourceful connoisseur of the history of poetic forms, but also a member of Oulipo, the French “Workshop of Potential Literature,” a group of writers and mathematicians which was founded in 1960 by Queneau and François Le Lionnais and still remains active today. As Roubaud explains in his provocative collection of theoretical dialogues about poetry and fiction, Poesie, etcetera: menage (1995), never has a literary movement lasted so long in the history of French writing.

‘Oulipians use self-imposed formal “constraints” when writing, the most renowned example being Perec’s “e”-less novel La Disparition (1969; translated as A Void). Sometimes Oulipian constraints are geometric, algebraic or numerological; the plot of Perec’s opus magnum, La Vie mode d’emploi (1978; translated as Life A User’s Manual), is engendered by means of calculations based on a “10×10 magic square.” Other constraints may be “thematic,” such as Jacques Jouet’s recent exploit of penning a poem per day about a turnip, an experiment that lasted four years; or “chronological,” such as Roubaud’s writing of a certain recurrent type of passage in his innovatively autobiographical La Grande Incendie de Londres (1989; translated as The Great Fire of London) only in the wee hours of the morning, accompanied—in a striking image of inner desolation—by a lukewarm bowl of instant coffee. Some Oulipians give a spin to an entire literary genre. Roubaud’s witty “Hortense series” (La Belle Hortense, 1985, translated as Our Beautiful Heroine; L’Enlèvement d’Hortense, 1987, translated as Hortense Is Abducted; L’Exil d’Hortense, 1990, translated as Hortense in Exile), for example, concocts a wacky pastiche of the English detective novel—if “pastiche” is a word indeed wild enough to embrace the perpetually disarming “distancing effects” sustained by the author in this trilogy. The reader is made so aware that he is holding a “detective novel” that the “enigma” becomes less a “plot” than a series of evolving narrative structures. The genuine contents are at several removes from the “suspenseful action.” …

‘The harrowing force of Some Thing Black, of parts of The Great Fire of London and its sequel La Boucle (1993; the title refers to a “loop,” as in the language of computer sciences), indeed derives from remittent failures to get beyond the brute facts of death, to surpass the painful recurrences of memory, to attain consolation, to enter into some sort of communion with his beloved. Nor can any tangible hope long be placed in some other “possible world,” a topic explored in the poetry collection La Pluralite des mondes de Lewis (1991; translated as The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis), a philosophically far-reaching sequel to Some Thing Black. “Each time I think of you,” he laments in The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis, “you cease to be.” The paradox is typically haunting. Roubaud is left alone with “all you never anymore are,” a phrase which, in both the original and Rosmarie Waldrop’s version, gives out a melodious Beckett-like sigh.

‘It is in this confrontation between emotion and constraining form, between a pre-planned literary-mathematical structure and the painful vicissitudes of personal history, that Roubaud’s writings raise so many essential questions. Most of the books written since his wife’s death revolve around phenomena of memory, and in this respect he forges a different model of remembering than that underlying the unavoidable landmark for French (and other) writers in this domain: Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. In contrast to Proust’s notion of memory as expanding from some small, insignificant detail (like a madeleine cookie, of which the author of The Great Fire of London must surely be thinking when he in turn brilliantly describes a fresh croissant), Roubaud conceives recollecting as a sort of “forest” in which branches and twigs of clustered trees overlap and intertwine.’ — John Taylor, Context

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Gallery

Georges Perec & Jacques Roubaud

Alix Cléo & Jacques Roubaud

Jacques Roubaud & Jacques Derrida

Pierre Dumayet & Jacques Roubaud

Members of Oulipo, 1975: Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews, Francois de Lionnais, Raymond Queneau, Jean Queval, Claude Berge, Jacques Roubaud, Paul Fournel, Michele Metail, Luc Etienne, Georges Perec, Marcel Benabou, Jacques Duchateau, Jean Lescure

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Further

Jacques Roubaud’s Wikipedia page
Some Jacques Roubaud resources
Jacques Roubaud page @ the Oulipo Resource
Jacques Roubaud @ goodreads
‘E’ by Jacques Roubaud
Excerpt from JR’s ‘Exchanges on Light’
M. Kitchell on JR’s ‘Mathematics’ @ HTMLGIANT
Ryan Ruby on JR’s ‘Mathematics’ @ Bookforum
Molly Gaudry on JR’s ‘Some Thing Black’ @ Big Other
Video: Lecture de Poète, filmed by François Sarhan, Paris, 2012
Audio: ‘Dialogue inédit entre Jacques Roubaud et Raymond Queneau’
‘Jacques Roubaud, un poète parisien amoureux de la ligne de bus 29’
‘Qui a peur de Jacques Roubaud?’
JR’s ‘The Great Fire of London’ @ The Complete Review
Book: ‘Jacques Roubaud and the Invention of Memory’
Buy ‘The Loop’ @ Dalkey Archive Press

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Extras

INTERVIEW PAR STEPHANE DUGOWSON le 20 mars 2014

Jacques Roubaud reads his poetry (in French)

Les dinosaures de Jacques Roubaud

2019.9.13 Jacques Roubaud, atelier Michael Woolworth, Paris

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Interview
from Bomb Magazine

What does the title of The Loop mean in terms of the structure of the book, its bifurcations and branches?

Jacques Roubaud: I write every night. I never correct, I never go back—I just go on and on. Everything I speak about is, in a way, linked to the old abandoned project. I want to say something about it, but I digress as soon as I start saying something, because I remember something else that I then begin to explain, and so on. So the structure is a bit meandering. I begin The Loop with a very old childhood image of snow in Carcassonne, where snow is very rare. I’m in my room and it’s very cold outside. At night there’s frost on the windowpane—I write and make pictures on it. So that’s the image: there’s an outer and an inner space, memory and the present. That’s the first image of the book, which at the end, returns to it.

I also thought of this book as extending the invitation in The Great Fire of London that the reader trust that events are true as they unfold in your writing.

JR: And if they’re not true (I make mistakes), at least the events are told truthfully, as I remember them.

There you talk about renku, an endless sequence of haikus—a perpetual form.

JR: The difference between The Loop and the haiku and the renku forms in the The Great Fire of London is that there the writing goes on and on, but it never goes back. In The Loop, my memory changes all the time, but from time to time it also goes back. But when I return to a memory, I do not come back to the same point—the memory has changed.

But the act of writing makes it true, no? You almost establish the past as a continuous present.

JR: Yes, it’s a kind of continuous present, but what’s important is that I speak about things I remember, essentially. However, as I go along, my memory gets worse. Now it’s getting worse very quickly—I don’t know how I’m going to go on. When I started, in 1985, I had forgotten many things, but I had a really good memory of the chronological framework. And for the last three or four years, I’ve been losing that. I phone old friends of mine and ask, for instance, “When were we working in Dijon?” And my friend will answer, “I have completely forgotten and I don’t care to remember at all!” But to know the dates is important because I’m moving chronologically and I have to be sure I’m not remembering things ten years off.

And what have you discovered about memory as you’ve written through it?

JR: When I was trying to write my big project, I read a lot about memory. I studied the school of scientists doing “ecological memory” and also . . . of course, I’ve forgotten the name . . . Ulric Neisser. These people were not interested in neuroscience or in introspection. Instead, they asked a lot of practical questions like, “What is your first memory?” They reflect on the answer and sometimes discover that it’s impossible to have such an early first memory. One scientist, Marjorie Linton, made an experiment that inspired me. She tried to transcribe all the different memories she had, which came to about 8,000. After that, she said, “When I tried to add another one, I found that it would be one I had already written down and remembered a bit differently. That’s when I stopped.”

What did you discover about your own memory?

JR: I tried to recover some very important memories of my childhood. When I found an isolated and condensed memory in my mind, I wrote it down—I discovered very quickly that as soon as I did that, I lost it. I didn’t lose it exactly, but when I tried to find it again, what I found was what I had written. You see, it’s exactly like when you are on the beach and you take a very pretty pebble that’s been in the water and it’s brilliant and then it dries up and there’s a film of salt over it and it’s not beautiful anymore—it’s finished. The gleam of it, the light of it, is gone! As for memories, it’s exactly the same. By working like this I destroy my memory.

So were there any memories you didn’t write down because you were afraid that—

JR: I wanted to destroy my memory, because of some sadness in it. I’m very different from Mr. Marcel Proust, because he wants to recover the past, but the past cannot be recovered.

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Book

Jacques Roubaud The Loop
Dalkey Archive Press

‘Seventeen years after the publication of the first volume of Jacques Roubaud’s epic and moving The Great Fire of London, Dalkey Archive Press is proud to publish the first English translation of The Loop, the second novel in Roubaud’s Proustian series, which has in its capacity to astonish been compared to the compositions of Messiaen and the buildings of Antonio Gaudi. Devastated after the death of his young wife, Alix, the author conceives of a project that will allow him not only to continue writing, but continue living—writing a book that leads him to confront his terrible loss as well as examine the lonely world in which he now seems, more and more, to exist: that of Memory. The Loop finds Roubaud returning to his earliest recollections, as well as considering the nature of memory itself, and the process—both merciful and terrible—of forgetting. Neither memoir nor novel, by turns playful and despairing, The Loop is a masterpiece of contemporary prose.’ — Dalkey Archive

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Excerpt

During the night, the mist on the window had turned to ice. I see that it was still night, six-thirty, seven o’clock; wintertime, then, and dark outside; no details, only darkness; the windowpane covered with the patterns of the frozen mist; on the lowest pane, on the lefthand side of the window, at eye level, in the light; this light from an electric bulb, yellow against the intense darkness outside, opaque and wintry, clouded by the mist; not a uniform mist, as when it rains, rather an almost transparent frost, forming patterns; a web of translucent patterns, with a certain thickness, the slight thickness of frost, but with variations, and because of these miniscule variations in thickness, the frost formed patterns on the glass, like a vegetal network, an entire system of nerves, a surface vegetation, a cluster of flat ferns; or a flower.

I scratched a fingernail against this snow, this fake snow: neither white nor powdery; nor melting snow, but a kind of fading snow, the dirty snow of springtime lingering on the sidewalks under the boxwood trees; or rather crushed snow, worn down, dusty and colorless, ephemeral; with my fingernail I traced a path on the glass, and the crystallized mist accumulated against my finger, turning to water from the warmth of my finger, quickly disappearing in tiny rivulets and evaporating into a damp coldness on my numb finger; or else I held my palm flat on the glass, and under its pressure the clump of frost became a sheet of glassy ice, so that suddenly the night showed through, almost watchful in its proximity; the whole vegetation of frozen traces, with its imaginary petals, stamens, and corollas, was erased; now it was smooth, like glass on glass: the map of the hand, the sensitive network of its lines, left no imprint. [–> I § 51]

Still using my fingernail, very carefully, I was able to slide these blades of ice over the surface of the glass, toward the bottom, placing them next to one another in polygonal figures, fractured rectangles; the upper half of the windowpane then seemed to be bare for a moment, immediately adjacent to the night, contiguous with this still impenetrable mass, blue and somber; but only for a moment, for it was soon covered in mist: a fine mist, impartial and isolating, this same mist that floated through the air in a cloud, born from respiration; at every moment this breath-turned-mist held the nocturnal exterior at bay; if I rubbed it with my elbow, with my pyjama sleeve, it reappeared immediately. From this thicket of images one could deduce that it was also cold inside the room, perhaps a little less cold than outside, so that the mist would stick to the window, but cold enough for the air to condense these frozen vocables (I see them), as though they had fallen from a silent voice.

But this would mean indulging in a superfluous exercise of deduction, since at the very moment of saying it, before saying it, I know it; my memory knows it, and it does not lie. I do not mean that a memory is, or is not, sincere, but only that, like a dog, it cannot lie (no doubt a lie is only an act of saying, an act of speech, turned outward). It really does appear this way, in this image; and every image is undeniable. Memory, my memory, knows that it was so: It was nighttime, and it was winter; it was cold; cold outside, cold inside the room; I scratched with my fingernail, I let accumulate against my nail the granite of foggy crystals from the mist, I lay my hand against the pane, I pressed it with my face, with my breath. And yet, every line in the story of this memory contains a great many implicit conclusions. And it is here that error, if there is any error, lies in wait for me at every turn. For in memory, in my memory (I am speaking only for myself), there is only seeing. Even touch is “colorless,” anesthetized. I have no other adjectives to identify this apprehension of material things by thought alone, without form or sensuous qualities, as they arise in their grey and pasty conceptual clay (as certain early theories from Antiquity pictured it). In the process of remembering, I do not feel that my finger is cold, nor do I feel the mild and already fading sharpness of the scraped and frozen dust. I know–because it is commonly and universally known that frost exists and that this mode of the physical existence of water is cold–I know, therefore, that the night was cold, and everything that follows from this. And I recall this knowledge based on experience, as one says. But the image that I reconstitute at this moment is numb to this knowledge, it is indifferent.

Writing on glass is like writing on water: regardless of what one tries to inscribe on these surfaces, such writing is also a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of everything. A mythifying fiction has sometimes tried to convert this into its opposite, by inventing a message engraved on eternal glaciers and in the deep polar snow, uniformly protected by its whiteness, a kind of immense graffiti–indeed, preferrably of colossal proportions–and preferrably in an incomprehensible and therefore immortal language, presenting a truth at once indispensible and indecipherable. From the moment one masters the gestures of writing, and probably for some people up until the hand ceases its movement, there is a desire, mixed with anguish, to write words and signs that can be immediately erased: in sand by a wave, in dust by footsteps, under the eraser with a pencil, or from water, rain, time, or tears smudging the ink.

It was winter, most likely a wartime winter: 1938-1939, at the earliest, 1944-1945 at the latest. I could not have been in this room before that, or after. It was toward the end of night, since the mist had frozen. A very cold night, which was a rare phenomenon. It doesn’t freeze much in the Aude region. I try to think of a very cold winter: 1940? 1942? There was at least one very cold winter during that war. It long remained in everyone’s memory, including my own, and was all the more memorable because people did not heat their houses, at least we didn’t. Our bedroom was not heated. If this image is correct, and pure, if it is not distorted or mixed with others, through resemblance, confusion, or mere repetition, if it is indeed the lower pane of the window that I see, then it must be the earliest, the first possible winter. But as soon as one breathes on any image, any memory, it is covered with mist, and reveals itself to be thoroughly imbued with imprecision. Around it is the past which, like the dark night of that winter, is impenetrable.

To the left of the window, I see my bed: this is another image, another moment, or the same? I don’t know. I feel the cube of the room around me, the bed square in the corner against two walls, lengthwise in relation to me, behind my head; a little farther, the door opens, is open (this “around” belongs to vision which, like light, is sometimes able to “turn corners”). Of certain bedrooms, certain beds, I can evoke only a single image that always remains the same, and everything that is not in this image remains hermetically sealed to me. But of this old room I have a multiple but unified vision, assembled like a collage, through the superimposition and then the fusion of numerous separate visions that have since become indiscernible, beginning from a particular point, the one from which “this” is seen, a central point, at the top of the bed, almost in the corner. There is a “top” and a “bottom” of the bed, as if while lying in it one imagined oneself as vertical, the “point” of vision being at the top of the “page.” It is there that, in a letter, one puts the address of the sender. No colors, no, there are no colors. To see gathered together in this way all the other images from this same place, the fingernail on the frost-covered window, the nighttime windowpanes, what the daylight will make visible through the window, all this assumes multiple eyes, innumerable hands. Whoever remembers is at once an Argos, a creature with a hundred eyes, and an octopus, a creature with a hundred arms.

In the cold, my bed was divided into different regions, warm and cold; the intense cold bordered sharply on the warmth; it pinched my ears, my nose. Here, then, is something truly “inevitable,” the very banality of temperature. In the evening one conquers as many territories of the cold as possible, waging battles analogous to a Russian campaign, which provided a strategic model for this game of conquest, renewed night after night (I’m not speaking of the historic one, the disastrous Napoleonic campaign, but of the one that unfolded at the time, and contemporaneously, in the immense bed of the Ukraine, which was unveiled for us every evening on the radio from London, with the “allied” victories confirmed, after a delay, when the radio from occupied Paris announced the new “elastic retreats” of the Germans). The Siberian regions of the three edges, bounded by the vertical sides of the mattress and the covers that were tucked in well underneath it, always remained impervious to comfort; in the morning, the diffuse warmth of the sleeping body had reduced the pockets of resistance, that Stalingrad with its armies of ice.

In that room there were two other beds that I see; on the other side of the window, my sister Denise’s; at the far end (still looking from the same point) my brother Pierre’s, to the left of the door; seen from the door, on the contrary, this layout, which was of parental origin (I mean it was decided by our parents), organized the space of the bedroom according to the age of its occupants (that is, if one grasps this space in the movement of sight, as I am in the habit of doing, and as if the flat surface of the world, and not only that of the bed, had become vertical, it too like a page: from left to right, and from top to bottom). It seems to me that the spartan light did indeed come from a naked bulb on the ceiling; just about all the rest has disappeared.

*

p.s. Hey. ** Sarah Palmer, Hi. You’re most welcome. I’m on the search for La Horde possibilities. Thank you. ‘Extra Life’ is post-my involvement. I haven’t even seen it yet. My favorite of Gisele’s and my works is ‘Kindertotenlieder’. ‘Jerk’, of which there is a quite good film, is also a fave. ‘This Is How You Will Disappear’ too. I saw the Palais de Tokyo show. I especially liked the Cathy de Monchaux work. It’s not the kind of work I’m generally into, but I was pretty impressed. The new season of gallery shows is finally opening, and I’m excited to go wander around the Marais and see what’s what. Very fine day to you! ** Dominik, Hi!!! I think my mother named Mr. Bun, but I don’t remember. It doesn’t seem like a very ‘me’ name, but then I was 8 years old, and who knows who I was then. The pile is a combination of to be read and read. It’s a mess. I’m dreading having to buy yet another bookshelf, but my desk is starting to look like a ‘crazy’ person’s, so no choice. Love’s taste in coffins is understandable. Love inviting thousands of people to his impending funeral, but only 3 stray cats show up, G. ** cmr, Hi. I might well read it, yes, maybe. I certainly could use a lot more input into what the occult manifests as. My fingers are crossed for your friend’s guitar restoration too. I hope it sounds haunting. Well, I hope everything sounds haunting, I guess. I haven’t read that Nietzsche, but I did step inside the little house in Switzerland where he wrote ‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’. Not quite the same thing obviously. Wishes heavily in return. ** _Black_Acrylic, Nice about the lecture. I really like absorbing lectures, for much the same reasons as you, but I really hate giving them, again for much the same reasons. Odd. ** Adem Berbic, Okey doke. I wonder what Mexican place you hit up. The only Mexican place here that has been almost satisfactory to me (other than Chipotle) is Barrio Meschica in the 11th, but Zac says it’s gone downhill. When I see people dressed in latex, all I can think about is how they must be sweating profusely underneath. Which I suppose has its charm. ** Carsten, I always wanted to be buried in the ground, but I’m feeling less nazi about that as time goes on. I can relate in that when I was first staring out, that was consistently the case. Now, other than internet trolls and squeamish goodreads reviewers, I feel like I mostly encounter people who seem to understand me and what I’m doing. Haven’t seen ‘The Intruder’, no. I’ll look for opportunities. ** Bill, I do know a little about the Arse Elektronica, but I hadn’t connected it with Monochrom for some reason. Odd. ‘Masking Threshold’, I’ll see if I can find it. Thanks! I agree, dark synthetic orchestra arrangements are really Thirwell’s forte. ** laura w, That park sounds very exciting. But it is almost Halloween. I’m old enough to remember when the wannabe cool people in high school carried Vonnegut novels around with them. Doubt they ever cracked the covers. Thanks, yeah, we were thrilled when Destroyer let us use that song. If he hadn’t, it would have been a big crisis even. That Destroyer album, ‘Your Blues’, is my all-time favorite album, apropos of nothing. Happily I really liked the book that I agreed to blurb, so I could give them a glowing one. ** HaRpEr //, I went to Highgate once. It was nicely shabby and kind of spooky, and very, very British for some reason, at least to me. But, yeah, not as pretty/impressive as Pere Lachaise. ‘Castle Faggot’ is a great example. ‘Numero Deux’ is hard to see? Shame, it’s a good one. I wish you were here because they’re doing another super rare screening of the 3D ‘Adieu au language’ (with English subtitles!) this week. ** Uday, Right place, right time stuff. You reading ‘SPiaCM’, wonderful. Ashbery must be hard to read aloud. Although I guess just kind of mimicking his flat-ish way of reading his poems is the way to go because that works like a charm. Quite a story there: the bf -> gf @ gravestones. A bit hard to believe though. If it was a scene in a movie, I think I’d roll my eyes. But I haven’t rolled mine no doubt due to your fine presentation. Dan Quayle?! ** Thomas Moronic, Hey, buddy! Yes, indeed! How are you? How’s the novel unfolding? ** Okay. There was some conversation here recently about the brilliant Oulipian writer Jacques Roubaud, which led me to aim a spotlight at one of his best novels, and there you go. See you tomorrow.