This issue also contained a “Letter from Russia” by Vsevolod Brodsky; three “Cultural Memories” (aka, excerpts) from Robert Louis Stevenson, Roman Jakobson, and Marguerite Young; and two “Reading Culture” pieces: “Brain Drain” by Mark Crispin Miller and the essay that appears below, “The Middle Mind” by Curtis White.

There are also “Reading Guides” of favorite twentieth-century novels—translated into English—by writers from Latin America, Russia, Italy, and France. Some day soon I’ll run a bunch of these guides, both because it’s interesting to see how many of these same titles would appear on similar lists today, and because these are legitimately good reading guides! As always, CONTEXT created an excellent pathway to becoming a very well-read literary citizen—thanks in large part to Curtis White!

Curtis was the editor of CONTEXT for much of its printed existence, acquiring essays, writing for it, helping shape what the tabloid looked like and which sort of authors it boosted. (Something I’m hoping he’ll help do again as we expand this Substack into a “New Context” . . . ) At the same time, he wrote a number of incredible works of fiction, including America’s Magic Mountain and Requiem, both of which I would’ve included in the Dalkey Essentials Series.1

Curtis’s full list of publications—with Bookshop.org links to everything that’s available—can be found below, but the book of his that’s most relevant to this particular post is his only title to come out from HarperOne: The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves. If I can get Curtis on a future podcast to talk about his works, his friendship with John O’Brien, his time on Dalkey’s board of directors, his interest in the counterculture, FC2, and more, he can tell this story with many more details, but, basically, after writing the piece below, he was contacted to further develop it into a full manuscript. Which he did, and which resulted in a brilliant book—one that’s definitely worth reading today because, sad to say, not a lot has changed . . .

I’m going to get out of the way here, but I do want to point out that Curtis’s takedown of Terry Gross continues in Requiem, so if you like what you read below, get The Middle Mind and get Requiem. And, and, and! Preorder his new book, On Resistance: A Manifesto, forthcoming from Melville House this August.

“The Middle Mind” by Curtis White

I have suspected for some time that there is something missing in the way we usually construct the Culture Wars. Bennett, Cheney, D’Souza, Kimball, etc., on one side. Fish, Graff, Bérubé, Mapplethorpe, etc., on the other. I’ve been as involved and absorbed in this faux drama as anyone, but at the same time, dimly, I have wondered: do these characters really stand for things people care about? I mean, in places other than the Chronicle for Higher Education and the National Review?

And then at last it occurred to me that this titanic agon (as dear Harold Bloom might put it) was just a diversion from the real action. There is another cultural politics in our midst, perhaps even more organic then the academic Left or ideological Right. It is moving, making its way, accumulating its forces, winning while putative conservatives and tenured radicals beat the bloody hell out of each other to no end at all. This third force I call our Middle Mind. It is a vast mind, my friends, and I fear it is already something towering and permanent on our national horizon.

The Middle Mind attempts to find a middle way between the ideological hacks of the Right and the theorized Left. Unlike Middlebrow, the Middle Mind does not locate itself between high and low culture. Rather, it asserts its right to speak for high culture indifferent to both the traditionalist Right and the academic Left.

The Middle Mind is pragmatic, plain-spoken, populist, contemptuous of the Right’s narrowness, and incredulous before the Left’s convolutions. It is adventuresome, eclectic, spiritual, and in general agreement with liberal political assumptions about race, gender and class. The Middle Mind really rather liked Bill Clinton, thoroughly supported his policies, but wished that the children didn’t have to know so much about his personal life. The Middle Mind is liberal. It wants to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and has even bought an SUV with the intent of visiting it. It even understands in some indistinct way that that very SUV spells the Arctic’s doom. Most importantly, the Middle Mind imagines that it honors the highest culture, and that it lives through the arts. From the perspective of the theorized Left academy (of which I confess myself an ineluctable member—with reservations), the Middle Mind’s take on culture is both well intended and deeply deluded.

One way or the other, what I’m here to tell you is that the Middle Mind is winning. That is, it has the most plausible claim to being the true representative of the public’s opinion. This is good news insofar as it means William Bennett is not winning, but oh boy are there qualifications on this triumph.

I’d like to review a few of the most recent excursions of the Middle Mind that have drifted by me. It’s not always easy to know when one is in the presence of the Middle Mind. It generally flies below critique’s radar because it has the advantage of not being associated with a particular political camp. It feels “natural,” which is how we can be pretty sure it’s winning. It has its effect without being noticed. A neat trick in Kulturkampf.

The Middle Mind is very well connected. It doesn’t need bags of money from conservative foundations and think tanks to create its presence. The Middle Mind is present effortlessly. It comes to us with the convincing and implicit claim, “You’ve been curious about this, you’ve been waiting for it, and wondering about it, and here it is.” The Middle Mind is frequently on public TV (Charlie Rose), in city weeklies, and in book review sections of slick magazines (Spin and GQ). It is everywhere on National Public Radio, even shows like Whad’Ya Know?, but our collective nose is rubbed in it on Terry Gross’s Fresh Air. Fresh Air is not merely a promotional vehicle for the Middle Mind, it is itself a prime example of the Middle Mind in all its charm and banality.

Let’s think about Terry Gross and Fresh Air for just a moment. Here is an interview program that claims quite earnestly to be for intelligence, for the fresh and new, for something other than regular stale network culture, for the arts and for artists. But anyone who much listens to the show knows (I certainly hope that I’m not the only one who has noticed) that: 1) Terry rarely interviews an artist or intellectual that real-deal artists and intellectuals would recognize. 2) She has no capacity for even the grossest distinctions between artists and utter poseurs. Many of the “writers” she has interviewed recently have been writers for TV series and movies. People who can with a straight face say, “Seinfeld is a great show because of the brilliant script writing” love Fresh Air. Now, Seinfeld may be a cut above the average sit-com, but it’s a sit-com! 3) The show is a pornographic farce.

Let me develop this last idea about the pornographic a bit. Terry Gross’s interest in books and writers is too often morbid, perverse, and voyeuristic. Two quick examples: she recently interviewed the main writer of the new HBO series Six Feet Under. The critical moment in the interview came when she asked him (I’m paraphrasing from memory), “What was it like when you were in that car accident and your sister was driving and she died but you didn’t?” Was she leading up to a telling psychological reading of the work in question? No. She wanted to know and I suspect her audience wanted to know what it was like to be in an auto accident in which his sister died! That’s it. Do we learn something about writing, or the arts, or culture? Do we learn anything? No, we learn that he was traumatized by the event.

As to what the folks who go on this show are thinking, knowing they’ll face this kind of personal inquisition, I won’t speculate. They’re probably thinking either, “Fresh Air! The big time!” Or “Good grief, that woman is an idiot. But my publicist will shoot me if I don’t do it.”

A week or so later there was a program in which Terry interviewed an author who had written a novel in which a woman says, “Drop dead,” to her husband and the next day he does drop dead. Before the novel was published, the author’s own real-life husband dropped dead on a tennis court. This was the point at which the book became interesting for Terry. If her poor husband hadn’t dropped dead, Terry would never have been interested in her or her book for this Show of Shows. “What did it feel like to suspect you’d killed your own husband with your art?” Fresh Air? How about Lurid Speculations? It’s like Dr. Laura for people with bachelor degrees. Car Talk has more intellectual content.

From the perspective of a person really interested in art and culture, one can only say, “Well, I think she’s on my side, but, God, she’s so stupidly on my side that I hardly recognize my side as my side.” Thus the Middle Mind.

As l’ve considered various avatars of the Middle Mind, I’ve occasionally felt that my criticisms were a bit unseemly or even unkind. Terry Gross. Isn’t she probably a very nice person? Good companion? Probably picks up the tab for lunch more than her share of the time and doesn’t complain if you had a couple of drinks. Of my next instance, however, one need have no such reservations because Joe Queenan’s Balsamic Dreams is one of the nastiest books I’ve read in some time. The Right Wing character assassin has nothing on this guy.

Queenan’s thesis is not deceptively simple. It’s just simple. And familiar. Simple and familiar used to equal trite, but the Middle Mind has infused the trite with a new vigor. Queenan argues that Baby Boomers are a failed generation, largely because of their overwhelming obsession with “me.” Queenan has little to add to the usual conservative critique of the Me Generation except the novel observation that what’s most wrong about the obsession with “me” is that it is “annoying.” “Decent folk,” he explains, are “annoyed” by Boomer cars, jobs, money, music, self-referential conversation, hypocritical moralizing, and lack of self-awareness. Leave it to a Boomer, as Queenan confesses he is, to base a moral judgment on the never defined term “annoying.” Annoying to whom? Queenan and “decent folk”?

But exactly who, one might ask, ever manages to be “decent” in Queenan’s worldview? Queenan makes it clear that it is not Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation” of World War Two, which he finds to be a sad embarrassment, and Generation X is no better at all than its Boomer parents. So, were the decent people all born before 1920? Should we imagine a lot of annoyed octogenarians tottering around? Seriously, given Queenan’s methods, it’s a miracle that he ever found a single decent person.

Of course, this ethos constructed of that-which-annoys is itself very annoying. The greatest annoyance proper to Balsamic Dreams itself is its persistent willingness to contend that it means anything at all to generalize about generations. Perhaps one should say, “what goes around comes around” (to use one of the Boomerisms that Queenan hates so much). Balsamic Dreams is Ginsberg’s Howl in full retreat. But Ginsberg at least had the wisdom to see that the mammon he howled against was not the responsibility of any one generation. I’d happily join Queenan in a good old-fashioned rant against humanity as such, as Philip Wylie does in A Generation of Vipers, Twain did before him and Swift did before Twain. But that wouldn’t have the buzz and commercial hook that bashing Boomers has. And it won’t get him on Fresh Air.

Terry: “Do you really dislike your own generation because it likes balsamic vinegar?”

Quel scandale! How interesting, fresh and utterly Middle Mind.

Why can’t he admit that balsamic vinaigrette tastes better than that thousand-island crap made out of mayonnaise and pickle relish that we had to eat on iceberg lettuce in the fifties?

Two last comments on Queenan: since when do we have to put up with ethical diatribes from columnists for GQ? Is that where all the decent folk have gone? They’re all at GQ? Why isn’t GQ an expression of Boomer culture? Do they all eschew the balsamic vinaigrette at GQ?

Ironically, the ultimate retort to my critique of Balsamic Dreams could very well be that my thesis about the Middle Mind simply confirms Queenan’s propositions about Boomers because the Middle Mind is what you get when Boomers take over high culture. Okay, Joe, I get it. Good job.

The Middle Mind is also interested in the spiritual, but it is not the Christian fundamentalist spirituality-with-teeth of the Right Wing. By and large, the Middle Mind is in pursuit of the Buddha. Books that seek to explain Buddhism or introduce it to North Americans are a large and growing publishing phenomenon making certain spiritual leaders, like Thich Nhat Hahn, the Vietnamese Buddhist teacher of “Mindfulness,” into something approaching international celebrities. One of the hottest such books recently was Dinty W. Moore’s The Accidental Buddhist. The book is a mostly chronological description of the author’s experiences and reflections on what he calls “my American Buddhism project.”

Then I had this bright idea—the best way to learn about Buddhism would be to see it in action, the best way to imagine how it might fit into my hectic life would be to see how other Americans are fitting it into their busy American lives. I was always a big fan of quests of adventures, and here was a chance to have my own.

What makes this book an example of the Middle Mind is:

1) The author’s conviction that his audience wouldn’t know anything about Buddhism, and couldn’t distinguish it from Hare Krishna pan-handlers at an airport (by the way, what happened to those guys? A national consequence of the Giuliani clean-up?); the Middle Mind assumes the people it takes as its audience don’t know anything; it assumes most people are benevolently stupid: “Oh Buddhism. Tell me about that.”

2) It is written in the kind of prose that works in novels written with Hollywood in mind: “About this time, an auburn-haired, distinctly beautiful young woman walks by in the sort of exceedingly tight red dress that can make a man’s heart do the hokey-pokey.”

3) No one, least of all the author, is required to think. Any genuine intellectual content attaching to Buddhism is apologized for both directly (“Understand? I’m not sure I do, frankly. . . .”) and through a down-dumbing trivialization (“Why do Tibetans have Such Trouble with Their Vacuum Cleaners”). Frederick Streng’s book on Mahayana philosophy, Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning, is a great work of intellect about a subject which has an intellectual aspect. The Accidental Buddhist is not such a book, nor could it be since its aspirations are closely limited by the managers of the Middle Mind (in this case the editorial staff at Main Street Books, a division of Doubleday). By the way, and this is a large part of my point, Streng’s book is long out of print. Of course.

But once we recognize what kind of mind it is that we are dealing with (a middling mind, as I have said), we can acknowledge that in fact this mind is making a good faith effort to report on something that is in fact very important. This is the frustrating thing about the Middle Mind. Joe Queenan is not wrong to condemn yuppies (whoever they are) who walk their dogs while talking on cell phones from their slowly rolling SUVs. (With the reservation that this sounds an awful lot like the sort of apocryphal myth Reagan used to spin about “welfare cheats”; it’s Reagan’s technique turned the other way; have you ever seen someone walk their dog, cell phone in hand from a rolling SUV?) And Dinty Moore is not wrong to pass along to us the words of Bhante Gunaratana:

You suffer from the same malady that infects every human being. It is a monster inside all of us, and it has many arms; chronic tension, lack of genuine compassion for others, including the people closest to you, feelings being blocked up, and emotional deadness. . . . We build a whole culture around hiding from it, pretending it is not there, and distracting ourselves from it with goals and projects and status. But it never goes away. It is a constant undercurrent in every thought and every perception; a little wordless voice at the back of the head that keeps saying, “Not good enough yet. Got to have more. Got to make it better. Got to be better.”

The Accidental Buddhist is not a horrible book and it is certainly not a good book. It cannot hurt Buddhism although it’s hard to see how it might help it (except insofar as it might lead someone to seek a truly good book about Buddhism). My contention is simply that a mediocre book—facilitated by a culture of mediocrity that forbids real intelligence—hurts us all.

One of the most common gambits of the Middle Mind is to claim to provide high culture while really providing something a good deal less. Thus, one of the operating assumptions of Fresh Air is “some of our best writers work for TV.” Queenan and Moore provide a sociology and theology perfectly appropriate to the expectations and conceptual capacities of the readers of Time magazine. The Middle Mind’s motto could be “Promise him culture but give him TV.” And so the Middle Mind novelist provides narrative art of the highest aspirations that, minus a few poetical profusions and recondite bits of diction, could pass for pulp fiction. Hence:

He arranged her against the wall, held her chin in one cupped hand and drew his other hand slowly up beneath her skirt until she gasped, pretended to open herself to him.

Pulp fiction or high art of the novel? Only her hairdresser knows?

Let me give you more clues. In the first thirty-five pages of this novel its heroine is in a convent, falls in love with Chopin while playing his music at the piano, moves in with a rugged but tender farmer, has torrid (and tormented) sex with same, is kidnapped by a bank robber, is shot in the hip (by the Sheriff!) and witnesses the death of her-lover-the-farmer, shot by the bank robber, but not before he gouges out the robber’s eyes with his thumbs and buries him with the sheer force of his own dying body weight in soggy prairie loam.

Well?

I regret to inform you that this concoction is the work of National Book Critics Circle Award winner Louise Erdrich in her newest novel, and National Book Award nomination, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. That I know of, there are few critics in these United States who would question her right to be taken seriously as a novelist. The Last Report is the sort of novel that will get made into a sensuous and serious independent art movie starring Harvey Keitel as the farmer and Kate Winslet as the heroine. Terry Gross will interview the director, Jane Campion, let’s say, and ask questions like, “There are feminist themes here, aren’t there? The binding of breasts is a feminist theme, isn’t it? Have you ever bound your breasts?” Our interest piqued, we will congratulate ourselves for seeing this movie at the local cinema society screening, rather than seeing the latest from Hollywood at the cineplex, and imagine in all seriousness that we are on the side of art and the angels.

To be fair, The Last Report is not a pulp romance, although it cozens its readers with the content of pulp romance. But neither is it a work of art in the tradition of the best novels. Yet no amount of whining on my part will change the fact that Erdrich, her novels and the movies to be made of them, reign triumphant and beyond question in the mundus mentis mediae. As you can perhaps tell, there is no lack of subjects for an essay on the Middle Mind. Perhaps you, readers of CONTEXT, have favorite examples of your own. Perhaps, for example, you’ve noticed that the Antique Road Show has turned arts and antiquities into crude commodity fetishism.

Expert antiquarian: “This spittoon embossed with the crest of the House of Summersoft is worth $4,000, top dollar at auction.”

Pallid owner: “Ooh! I had no idea!”

Pallid owner thinks: “I could sell this now and have that money, but then I wouldn’t have the spittoon, and I’d probably just spend the money on some sort of crap, and after a while the thing I bought will be indistinguishable from all the other things I’ve bought, things I didn’t buy with this special free money from the implausibly valuable spittoon, and then I won’t remember it was special at all, because I bought it with this money, this spittoon money, and so I’ll have nothing, really, not even the spittoon, but what’s the point of keeping the spittoon? Is it the pleasure of knowing I could turn it into cash any time I liked, if I wanted? Or maybe I should actually spit in it once in a while. This smart man says that Queen Victoria probably once spat in it. Or is it spit? Spitted? No. Ooh, I’m so confused.”

Books by Curtis White

Heretical Songs

Metaphysics in the Midwest

The Idea of Home

Anarcho-Hindu

Monstrous Possibility: An Invitation to Literary Politics

Memories of My Father Watching TV

Requiem

The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves

America’s Magic Mountain

The Spirit of Disobedience: Resisting the Charms of Fake Politics, Mindless Consumption, and the Culture of Total Work

The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature

The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers

We Robots: Staying Human in the Age of Big Data

Lacking Character: A Novel

Living in a World that Can’t Be Fixed: Reimagining Counterculture Today

Transcendent: Art and Dharma in a Time of Collapse

On Resistance: A Manifesto

From Zenosbooks, which has the most comprehensive information online about this series:

When [Peter] Mayer acquired the paperback rights to One Hundred Years Of Solitude (published in hardcover by Harper & Row in a translation by Gregory Rabassa in 1970), the Avon Bard Latin American list was essentially born and Bard was on its way to becoming a major American publisher of Latin American fiction, even though the García Márquez book was first published in paperback as an Avon book and only later as an Avon Bard title. According to Robert Wyatt, the plan to publish Latin American fiction did not follow any particular plan, but evolved over time: “We sort of tacked the Latin American titles on as they came along.”

The 1970s were a good time for Latin American authors in the United States, in that “magical realism,” that blending of the elements of magic with the real world, was in the air. Writers of the “Boom” generation—that shorthand designation for a disparate group of authors that allowed publishers to effectively package a collection of talented writers into an aesthetic “school” or unified movement where there may not have been one—like Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez. José Lezama Lima, and Julio Cortázar were building reputations in the English-speaking world helped by a flood of translations from the Spanish and Portuguese by notable translators like Gregory Rabassa, Suzanne Jill Levine, Harriet de Onis, and others. Driven by the Venezuelan sculptor José Guillermo Castillo, the New York-based Center for Inter-American Relations proved instrumental in the development of this interest in Latin American poetry and prose, not only by publishing a journal three times a year focused on the art and literature of Latin America, but by arranging financing for the translations of nearly 70 books by Latin writers.

You can find the complete list of Avon Bard Latin American titles here, including The Celebration by Ivan Ângelo, translated from Brazilian Portuguese by Thomas Colchie, which is the focus of today’s CONTEXT post.

Thanks in large part to Julio Cortázar, I’ve always been in love with Latin American writers. I used to collect as many Latin American Literary Review Press titles as I could find—by authors like Luisa Valenzuela, Ricardo Piglia, Ana María Matute, Giannina Braschi, Rosario Castellanos, all the anthologies, etc.—and when I encountered John O’Brien’s library (R.I.P., I believe this library was sold off, and has since been destroyed by a burst pipe), I not only got a real education in literature, but discovered the Avon Bard series and read as many as I could find on the shelves.

There were maybe one or two of these titles I wasn’t keen on, but left to my own devices (and unlimited funds), we probably would’ve reprinted every one of the out-of-print titles from this series.

And Dalkey did do a few! Macho Camacho’s Beat by Luis Rafael Sanchéz came out before my time there (Martin Riker was a big fan, and now I want to reread this book, but it’s probably out-of-print again), and Lygia Fagundes Telles’s The Girl in the Photograph (translated by Margaret A. Neves) came out after I was gone, but while I was there, we did Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Manuel Puig, Camilo José Cela, Ignácio de Loyola Brandão, and the aforementioned Ivan Ângelo.

When I first read it, Ângelo’s The Celebration completely blew me away. It reminded by of Cortázar’s Hopscotch, superficially at least, in the way it had sections “Before the Celebration” and “After the Celebration,” which could be read in a couple different ways, but it was also a great representation of the non-Magical Realist Latin American literature of the time, with a heavy focus on dictatorships. (Ironically, Augusto Roa Bastos’s I The Supreme—the subject of the new Two Month Review season starting March 6, 2026—is also dictator-related, and came out from Vintage’s Aventura line, another noteworthy series of excellent works of world literature.) This was also true of the Brandão books, especially Zero and And Still the Earth, which are absolutely wild, and also deserve another life, now, in 2026.

We reprinted both of Ângelo’s two Avon Bard titles: The Celebration and The Tower of Glass, but then everything stopped. He has other untranslated works, and we had, at the time, a very bright intern from Brazil who may have looked into these, but ended up focused instead on António Lobo Antunes, who I was even more obsessed with at the time. (See all the Antunes titles Dalkey brought out over the years after Grove abandoned him.) Nevertheless, at least English readers have these two books available to them . . .

I’ll let Theodore L. McDermott explain more about the book itself below, but to introduce him, Ted was my marketing assistant for a number of years, including during the Lost extravaganza. He’s a brilliant reader, a great writer, and a big fan of Flann O’Brien—exactly the sort of person you’d want working at Dalkey Archive. (Those were the days!) Anyway, he wrote a number of pieces for CONTEXT during his time there, is the author of The Minor Outsider, and is now a freelance journalist focusing on the Montana-Idaho-Washington region.

And here’s the piece he wrote about Ivan Ângelo’s masterpiece!

Reading Ivan Ângelo’s The Celebration by Theodore L. McDermott

You can see something of Borges in The Celebration: in the way that the central event of the book—the event that gives it its title—is absent from its pages. You can see something of Cortázar in the way the chronology coils around and crosses over itself. You can see something of Nabokov in the fictional annotations that retell the story from an entirely new vantage, implying an endless number of other versions as yet untold. You can see something of Barth in the stylistic variations. You can see something of Machado de Assis, Osman Lins, and Ignacio Loyola Brandão in the peculiarly Brazilian integration of remarkable formal innovation and social and political engagement.

You can see all of this, but what’s most apparent, and most important, is that Ângelo has written a book unlike any other.

*

When he sat down to do it, Ângelo took the entire world and dissembled it so that he could cram everything in the space of 203 pages. The entire world in one book, except he has forgotten to include one thing: the celebration.

Reading Ivan Ângelo’s The Celebration is to reassemble. This is not passive fiction that tries to tell, start to finish, the chronology of a life, of an event, of a particular epiphany. Instead, in chapters that skip through a bewildering array of styles, techniques, times, and places, Ângelo, who has written a number of other books both for children and adults, including the story collection Tower of Glass, creates a kind of fiction that is as precise as it is broad.

He writes with a ferocious energy and purpose about both the inscrutable forces of history and the maddening insignificance of all our individual lives.

Ângelo began The Celebration in 1964, twelve years before it was published, and the same year a revolution put a military government in control of Brazil.

Near the end of the novel, he writes:

(Author’s note: What am I supposed to write about in this shithole of a country? Anything I write seems like a joke, as if I were totally avoiding the subject. What subject? Shit, that’s all. And anyway, whoever said it was my responsibility? Why not write detective stories, or one-act plays for children?)

The answer to all of these questions is the book itself. He doesn’t choose a subject: he includes everything. He doesn’t avoid politics, but neither does he announce any specific political commitment.

Flannery O’Connor wrote, “I suppose half of writing is overcoming the revulsion you feel when you sit down to it.”

Ângelo’s revulsion is palpable; he overcomes nothing, but writes anyway. And the world that Ângelo creates is as vivid, as grim, and as crowded as a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape.

The novel begins with “A Short Documentary (the city and the interior, 1970).” The city is Belo Horizonte. The interior is the Brazilian Northeast. The documentary is comprised of excerpts from newspapers, leaflets, police testimony, a letter to the editor, books, a birth certificate, “a popular Northeastern ballad of 1952,” speeches, and a report from the “Sugar Refineries Association.”

Some of these are actual historical documents, while others are invented; it’s impossible to distinguish between the two. Together, they describe the riot that exploded on the night of March 30, 1970, and continued into the next morning. There is a “flashback” to documents from earlier moments in Brazilian history, showing us the events that made the riot unavoidable.

Severe drought, government corruption, prolonged disenfranchisement, and poverty have combined with a host of unstated, alluded to, and unparaphrasable events and prejudices to bring Macrionílio de Mattos, a fifty-year-old former outlaw from the Northeast, and Samuel Aparecido Fereszin, a reporter in Belo Horizonte, to the fore of a “highly organized group” of peasants marching toward riot police.

That’s the first chapter. In fourteen pages, we’ve covered 120 years. We’ve been dropped into the midst not only of Brazilian history, but also into a miniature war.

Then we turn the page and read the title of the next chapter: “Thirtieth Anniversary . . . Pearls.” The next page is only occupied by a single word, “Husband,” down in the lower right corner. We turn again and read:

—I have so much to do tomorrow.

It was some time ago that she began this business of making plans for tomorrow. But tomorrow she’s going to die.

We go, in a matter of three sentences, from an unremarkable bit of dialogue to an insinuation of murder. We find ourselves trying to figure out who’s speaking, who “she” is and why “she” will die. But this is answered quickly: a wealthy husband is trying to kill his beautiful wife, and she is his willing victim: “So Juliana nodded yes, finished the rest of her slice, and braced herself for the onslaught of its poison.”

In the transition from the first to the second chapter, the book moves from the public to the private without blinking. It moves from the historical to the domestic without comment.

The book is filled with these kinds of shifts, sudden turns, and unresolved mysteries. It moves from the ’30s to the ’50s, back to the ’40s, on to the ’70s, and even into the future. We move through a cast of characters as large and disparate, and yet surprisingly interconnected, as those in Robert Altman’s Nashville.

Chapter-by-chapter, we unpack the contents of this book: a brief biography of a beautiful girl who seeks a career in journalism and ends up left only with “days of drunkenness and solitude”; the story of a woman who is driven to abandon her family by the exclusionary intimacy that her husband enjoys with her son; a chapter about a once-promising writer who gave up his career to become a successful lawyer and a “strong contender for a top slot among the ten best-dressed bachelors of the city of Belo Horizonte in 1970”; a brusque story that tells, in alternating sentences, of two characters who meet and confront each other in the last line; a story—told from the points of view of his mother and a police commissioner—of the consequences of a college student’s political activism. And this only brings us halfway through.

*

Should you get a copy of The Celebration, you will notice that the pages that comprise the last third of the book have black edges, so that, when seen from the side, it’s explicitly divided, like a phone book.

These black-edged pages demarcate the final chapter of the novel, which is entitled:

“AFTER THE CELEBRATION: A cross-index of the characters, in order of appearance or reference, with additional* information regarding the fate of those who were alive during the events of the night of March 30.”

*necessary?

surprising?

useful?

corroborative?

unnecessary?

useless?

Between the bookends of a “Short Documentary” and an “index,” then, we have been given seemingly disconnected stories of a range of characters who (before the index) may or may not be going to—or else (in the index itself) have already gone—to the celebration of the title.

This is where, if it hasn’t already, summary begins to break down. Any statement about plot, character, action, setting, theme, or anything else would require a paragraph of qualifiers, caveats, and extrapolations. For example, I could reiterate, we never actually see the celebration itself.

But I would have to explain that the index contains annotations that, like those in Pale Fire, are never indicated in the main body of the text, and that refer to events that may or may not ever have happened—even in fictional terms. Unlike Kinbote’s interpretations, however, this indeterminacy is not an outcome of the alleged narrator’s probable insanity, but because the events described in the index happen in the future.

Sometimes “future” means “after the celebration.” Other times it means “after the date of the book’s publication.” The Celebration was first published in 1976, but we are still informed that Commisioner Humberto Levita “died of laughter, literally, in 1982.” Now, this index also includes an annotation to the word “Author”: an Author who is similar to, but isn’t, Ângelo. Here, in the index, the Author is having a conversation with a friend about the book you’ve been reading. Parenthetical asides written by a third-person narrator describe the action in what otherwise would be a passage comprised exclusively of dialogue. Referring to the matter of the celebration not being included in a book that’s named for it, the Author says, “I have some sketches, I’ll show you (opening the drawer, taking out a folder, selecting three pages, sitting back down again). Take a look (handing the pages to his friend).” Only then is part of the missing scene included. In the end, the celebration is neither present nor absent. Despite the novel’s infinite fracturing, everything is carefully connected.

The term “experimental writing” implies that formal innovation is an “experiment.” An experiment implies a question, implies that the book is an argument whose success or failure proves or disproves something. As a result, one often feels that they’re reading a lab report. I think it would be better to disassociate “experimental” and “innovative” in order to make room for books like The Celebration.

Ângelo’s novel is not an experiment, but a fully realized, nearly perfect work of art. The use of so many styles, the colored pages, the fragmentation, the “cross-index of the characters,” the primary documents, the false ones—all of these are simply the elements that best describe, well, reality. And because reality is subjective, mutable, indeterminate, and indescribable, formal innovation is the one great way to get at it.

In the suffering of the drought-starved and government-exploited poor, in the petty conflicts of upper-class intellectuals, in the wide-angled scope of Brazilian history, in the microcosm of a celebration, in everything the novel includes, and in everything it pointedly leaves out, the entire, tired world is captured.

And since the world hums along, thus far, without end, so does The Celebration. You can start reading it, but you can never finish. I open this book and close it. I swear it off, telling myself I’m through, that I get it. I started reading The Celebration about eight months ago, and though I have read it start to finish several times, I’m not finished with it. I carry it around my apartment. I prop it open with the weight of the salt and pepper shakers when I’m eating dinner, or hold it open with the soles of my shoes on the front steps when it is warm enough, or bend it back when I am lying in bed.

Oftentimes, I’m not even reading the words, only looking at the type on the page and wondering, How the fuck does he do it? But then, I come back to it again.

(Author’s note: What a waste to let this moment go by without trying to capture the sense of it, if only in outline, to be able to show someone: this is how it was, back then.)

This is how it was, this is how it is, and this his how it will be.

It’s hard to know what to say about The Celebration, a book that is so clearly a masterpiece, a book that you read with wide, uncritical eyes, a book that strikes you initially as perfect, and only improves after that. An essay in praise of The Celebration is like the hook that hangs a painting: it might help to get it noticed, but won’t add anything to the beauty of the work itself. If you will only notice it, the book will do the rest.

“Reading Ivan Ângelo’s The Celebration” by Theodore McDermott first appeared in CONTEXT No. 19.

Selected Works by Ivan Ângelo in Translation:

The Celebration Trans. Thomas Colchie.

The Tower of Glass Trans. Ellen Watson.

Selected Untranslated Works:

Duas Faces [Two Faces], 1961.

O ladrão de sonhos [The Thief of Dreams], 1995.

A face horrível [The Horrible Face], 1996.

Amor? [Love?], 1996.

Pode me beijar se quiser [You May Kiss Me if You Please], 1997.

O Vestido Luminoso da princesa [The Luminous Dress of the Princess], 1997.

História em ão e inha [History in Big and Small], 1998.

Later this week, a post will go up on the Three Percent Substack about French literature in the Translation Database, so I thought it would be nice to bring a bit of attention to one of the authors who, when I first got into serious publishing, was a writer it seemed like everyone was familiar with: Raymond Roussel.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think Roussel has the reputation he did back in the early 2000s—perhaps for the reasons that Trevor Winkfield alludes to in his opening paragraphs—which is a shame. For readers interested in Harry Mathews (especially The Conversions), Eric Chevillard, Raymond Queneau, and the Nouveau Roman writ large, Roussel is definitely worth checking out.

Trevor Winkfield is a Leeds-born writer and artist who edited Roussel’s How I Wrote Certain of My Books and Other Writings, as well as creating the artwork for the cover—which he also did for the original Dalkey Archive Press covers for The Case of the Persevering Maltese and The Human Country. If you’d like to know more about him, I highly recommend this interview that appeared in The Brooklyn Rail back in 2014.

“Reading Raymond Roussel” by Trevor Winkfield

For some readers, Raymond Roussel resembles nobody so much as the admired party guest towards whom one is propelled by overly enthusiastic hosts who breathlessly assure one, “You’ll have so much in common.” But confronted with the said guest, one finds that though one might have everything in common with him, one has nothing to say.

This confrontation can be all the more unsettling if one’s smitten hosts include Marcel Proust, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Alberto Giacometti, Michel Leiris, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Harry Mathews, Georges Perec, and John Ashbery, to a man great admirers of the influential French scribe. Though citing a writer’s prestigious fans is a cheap way of drawing attention to him (“He’s nothing but a writer’s writer’s writer’s acquired taste,” as one partygoer sneered at me), it’s due to these important admirers that Roussel’s status has changed subtly but dramatically over the past decades from marginal curiosity to central figure, one of those writers we have to go through rather than walk around. We’re now on the crest of another Roussel revival, an event occurring every generation or so. The apparent failure of these revivals to establish Roussel as an academic Major Writer is not the point of the venture. For as Roussel himself noted in another context, each revival finds “more and more people gathering to my cause.” Think Mallarmé as opposed to Balzac.

Roussel was born into an immensely wealthy Parisian family in 1877 (he died by suicide in 1933), the money surrounding him acting as a cocoon between himself and reality. The quotidian is notable by its absence from his work: this is not a literature with much appeal for anyone in search of a social conscience. But if one is magnetized by works of the imagination derived almost solely from linguistics, Roussel represents some kind of summation. How I Wrote Certain of My Books, the posthumously published testament in which Roussel delineates many—but by no means all—of his writing techniques is, as they say, essential reading. As a vade mecum it doesn’t necessarily make the books easier to penetrate, but it does provide some clue as to what lies beneath them (though no matter how knowledgeable these clues make us, as readers, feel, no amount of shouting “Open Sesame!” at the threshold of the books entices them to reveal all their secrets). The most obvious examples of his expository secrets can be found early in his career, before he learnt to cover his tracks. The story “Among the Blacks,” written during Roussel’s years of “prospecting” (as he termed his youth) begins and ends with two almost identical phrases: Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard (The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table) and Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard (The white man’s letters on the hordes of the old plunderer). Acting as a delicious sandwich between these apparently irreconcilable rhyming bookends comes a parlor game set in a country home. A question in writing is posed to someone who is then shut up in the adjoining room; after ten minutes one is released to give a response to the question in the form of a riddle whose flavor is perfectly captured by Ron Padgett’s hilariously deadpan translation:

First, there was a man’s face, split in half, the right side of which was utterly fiendish and ugly. This was followed by an eyeball, from which hung an L. Then came a skeleton key that was inserting itself into a 2. After this there was a stack of currency bills; the Greek letter for alpha; the words “The Chrononhotonthologos Man”; a cat, the incomplete group of words “—— — your rocker!”; a table setting that included a prominent frankfurter and a jar; and last, four zebras singing in unison, “We don’t want to zzzz!” After a moment of reflection, I had the complete sentence and I related it in detail while having the others follow on the drawing: HYDE L EYE KE TWO DOugh A CAREY CAT YOU’RE OFF MUSTARD ZEBRAS. And I repeated fluently, I’d like to do a caricature of Mister Debarras.

One finds this mixture of the “simple as ABC with the quintessential” (to quote Michel Leiris’s memorable definition) as either childish or brilliantly inventive. A Rousselian finds both attitudes acceptable.

Such raiding of the nursery to conjure up adult myths produced Roussel’s first indisputable masterpiece, the novel Impressions of Africa, published in 1910 at the author’s expense (as were all his books) under the prestigious Lemerre imprint. It begins like a boy’s adventure story: a group of shipwrecked passengers are captured and held for ransom by an African king, Talou VII. To while away their time and keep their captors entertained, each captive is allotted a theatrical task or test of mechanical ingenuity based on his inherent skills, to be performed at a gala before their release. But in a reversal of the plot of Among the Blacks and in defiance of all the rules of detective fiction, Roussel first explains and then describes his mysteries, somewhat like the playwright who, in the opening scene, tells us who the murderer is and then spends the rest of the play explaining why he did it. Suspense is thus dispensed with at the opening of the adventure. But it remains one of his greatest triumphs as a storyteller that after all the mysteries have been unravelled and explained away, they become even more mysterious—hence his appeal to modernists and ourselves. A further aspect of his appeal resides in his manipulation of people. Not exactly as a puppet master, but one who shuffles his characters around to serve the same purpose as words, strictly to unfold the story. No one could be less interested in psychology than Roussel. The surface of things is paramount, characters being defined by their rituals and attributes, not their sonalities. Their belongings as a result can be more animistic than their owners.

And yet his characters—some of the most inventive in all twentieth-century literature—are elevated above the robot level with a few deft strokes of characterization. Take the unforgettable episode concerning the painting adventures of sexy Louise Montalescot (one of whose many singularities derives from a phonetic distortion of (slices) á canard (duck) into aiguillettes (shoulder braid of a uniform) á canard (false notes in music), thus supplying Roussel with her musical shoulder braid). Over the span of several pages we discover that she is a botanical explorer traveling with a younger brother, “the object of her warmest affection”; she has charm and allure, is both beautiful and captivating; she possesses “splendid fair hair, which she allowed to fall in natural curls below the small forage cap worn jauntily over one ear.” She’s adopted male attire for the tropics, specifically an officer’s uniform. Blessed with a serious demeanor, yet she preaches free love. None of these details is dwelt upon (in many ways they’re as cursory as stage directions), but bit by bit throughout the narrative they’re offered as clues to our protagonist’s persona: they leave us with an impression rather than a portrait, but it’s enough to make us care about the characters and about what they’re going to do next. And what Louise Montalescot does next is create a painting machine, a photo-mechanical contraption whose functioning is facilitated by the use of a rare tropical oil. Set in motion, it produces an unbelievably accurate and artistically satisfying facsimile of the garden arranged before it. No wonder Duchamp and Picabia, among numerous visual artists, extol this particular episode as one of the seminal turning points in their own lives. The whole book has a similar visual impact, like an illuminated manuscript patiently unscrolled by a professorial hand.

This notion of lives episodically unfolding “before our very eyes” is carried even further in Roussel’s second and final novel, Locus Solus, first published on the eve of World War I (his sole comment on that conflagration—“I’ve never seen so many men!”—being a mordant example of his blinkered humor) and for many of us his greatest, most perfect narrative construction. Set in the spacious grounds of Locus Solus, the “solitary place” inhabited by Martial Canterel, a wealthy scientific genius living on the outskirts of Paris, the novel’s form, even more so than that of Impressions, relies for its model on the travelogue. Here our guide actually is a professor, one who escorts his guests through his landscape of marvels. A partial tabulation of what his guests are asked to admire would include a curious, antique sculpture molded from dry earth of a naked child holding forth a wizened flower; an aerial paving beetle-cum-weather forecaster which builds a mosaic made from rotten teeth, guided thither and yon by the wind (whose movements Canterel has predicted days in advance). Further on, we come across a gigantic faceted aquarium containing a curious medley of objects and creatures, including a depilated cat who, aided by a pointed metal horn, galvanizes the floating remains of Danton’s head into speech; a dancer with musical tresses; and a troupe of bottle-imps performing scenes from folklore and history as they rise and fall through the oxygenated water. The central marvel, however, involves what amounts to a glass-enclosed graveyard where eight corpses are reanimated (thanks to Canterel’s preparations of vitalium and resurrectine) in order to relive the capital moments of their lives, attended by their ecstatically grieving (but still living) relatives.

This précis barely skims the surface of the novel’s layout, which, like that of Impressions, is delineated by descriptions, which in turn expand and engender other descriptions, followed by explanations of those descriptions. And such is the concision of Roussel’s language that itemizing all the episodes and their ramifications would entail a tabulation almost as detailed as the books themselves, ending up with something very much like Lewis Carroll’s lugubrious map, the one that’s so detailed it’s on a scale of one mile to one mile, thus completely covering the landscape it is intended to elucidate.

Roussel’s world, as portrayed in the two novels, is almost soundproof and virtually devoid of dialogue, with only the whirr of an aerostat or the presumed clatter from the blades of a hydraulic wheel to interrupt the mime. One suspects that almost as an act of revenge Roussel felt compelled to follow his two novels with two plays, The Star on the Forehead in 1925, followed two years later by Dust of Suns. These are plays in which people can’t stop talking . . . or is that babbling? Whatever it is, it’s more than mere verbiage they spout. Their speeches act as the plot’s propellant. Anecdotes are batted back and forth between characters like shuttlecocks, cleverly disguising the fact that a single narrator could conceivably deliver them as a monologue. Hilarious and deeply involving though both may be, these remain plays better read on the page than endured on the stage.

Roussel’s penultimate opus, New Impressions of Africa, is not, as its name seems to imply, a continuation of the earlier novel. Rather it is one of the most complex poems in the French language, four cantos based loosely on four Egyptian tourist sites. Not only is the text complex, it looks impenetrable. The layout proclaims “No Trespassing” to the casual reader, with its thicket of brackets within brackets within brackets and attendant footnotes as austere and foreboding as any Rosetta Stone. But once inside it reveals itself as even more impenetrable! For instance, the opening of the third canto (ostensibly extolling the virtues of a column on the outskirts of Damietta which, when licked, cures jaundice) is brought to a halt after only five lines by the mention of hope, leading to a parenthesis dealing with an American uncle whose nephews have hopes of inheritance. But that touching scene is not completed for five or six pages, the word “American” having provoked a double-parenthesis dealing with “that land still young, still unexhausted” whose dog’s cold nose triggers a trio of brackets and a brief revery on an ailing pup. Which in turn triggers a bracketed aside within four parentheses, then another within five. After barely one hundred lines, even the most astute and intrepid explorer is all at sea and gasping for air. This avalanche of interruptions is akin to that produced by a group of partygoers, with one conversationalist being interrupted barely after he’s begun talking; meantime his interrupter is in turn cut short by the person across the table whose memory has just been jolted, so she in turn relates an anecdote, which reminds her neighbor of a funny story . . . and so on and so forth. This simplistic exegesis of the technique is, I hope, sufficient to show that it’s not for readers cursed with a one-track mind. But to those who persevere, this Everest of High Modernism donates rich comfort: like all truly great works of art, it is inexhaustible in its rewards. The density of the language—its pared-down compression—is such that each line could be ascribed a physical weight as well as length. As Roussel himself said of an earlier version of this poem, abandoned after countless revisions, an entire lifetime would have been insufficient to complete the polishing. Likewise (and I know whereof I speak) an entire lifetime is insufficient to fully disentangle (and understand—my italics) its myriad branches. The same, of course, may be said of Roussel’s entire oeuvre.

This piece first appeared in issue No. 10 of CONTEXT. Copyright © Trevor Winkfield.

Selected Works by Raymond Roussel in Translation

Among the Blacks: Two Works

How I Wrote Certain of My Books and Other Writings (ed. Trevor Winkfield)

Impressions of Africa (tr. Mark Polizzotti)

Locus Solus (tr. Rupert Copeland Cunningham)

New Impressions of Africa (tr. Mark Ford)

But it’s Coleman Dowell’s novels that I really want to focus on today.

I do have interesting Dalkey lore related to Coleman Dowell, mostly related to his long-term partner, Bert Slaff, but I’m going to save this for a future post on Eugene Hayworth’s Fever Vision: The Life and Works of Coleman Dowell (which contains an introduction from Edmund White). For now, I’ll just mention that Bert was on Dalkey’s board until the end of his life, is responsible for the “Coleman Dowell Series,” which was one of Dalkey’s only named & funded series, and hosted many a Dalkey employee who visited NYC. (Bert’s apartment on 5th Ave. with a balcony overlooking the Guggenheim was both spectacular and awash in stories in a way that felt almost haunted, positively, by Coleman’s spirit.)

Rather than distract from Dowell’s work with gossip and namedropping, I would rather you read Sorrentino’s piece, and then check out Island People and/or Too Much Flesh and Jabez. (Spoiler: By contrast with the more “plotless” Island People, Too Much Flesh and Jabez is much easier to summarize.)

According to the “About the Author” page in Island People:

Coleman Dowell was born in 1925 in Adairville, Kentucky. After serving in the army, he left Kentucky for New York and a career on Broadway and in television. He began writing fiction in the early sixties; Random House published his first novel, One of the Children Is Crying, in 1968. As he continued writing, Dowell’s books became more daring and experimental, and appropriately were published by New Directions: Mrs. October Was Here appeared in 1974, Island People in 1976, and Too Much Flesh and Jabez in 1977. Dowell’s final novel, White on Black on White, was published by Countryman Press in 1983. Despondent over his career, he committed suicide in 1985. A Star-Bright Lie, a memoir recounting Dowell’s Broadway years, won the Editor’s Choice Lambda Literary Award when it was posthumously published by Dalkey Archive in 1993.

Sorrentino’s essay was my introduction to Dowell’s work, and I suspect it will be for a number of you as well. At the time when CONTEXT No. 3 came out, I was applying for a Dalkey apprenticeship around this time, so I was on a complete Dalkey bender, and was enthralled to find out about an ND+DAP author I’d never heard of, someone whose work called to mind If on a winter’s night a traveler, and which sounded almost fractal in construction (“you are reading a book that’s largely been generated from smaller pieces of itself”).

[It’s funny. A lot of these same techniques and references have come up recently with regard to books being published today, in 2025, with editors and publicists and book critics acting as if these ideas about the craft of literature are totally new and “crazy.” Just goes to show that not as many people in books have an awareness of the past as you’d expect—especially when it comes to Dalkey’s complete catalog—and that everything has already been done.]

All of Dowell’s work is fascinating and complex, pushing back against the existing stereotypes of what constituted “gay literature.” Personally, I think he’s ripe for rediscovery, especially among fans of more “challenging” contemporary world literature.

So read this, then read Dowell. I think you’ll find a lot to admire and puzzle over and learn from.

“Reading Coleman Dowell’s Island People” by Christopher Sorrentino

Interviewed in 1978 by John O’Brien, Coleman Dowell 1925–1985) said, “In Island People I had to invent everything—my techniques and everything because I wanted to do things I wasn’t sure words could do.” What “words could do,” of course, turned out to be the focus of Island People, with its hair-raising presentation of what Dowell refers to in the book as “the underlying.” The connotations of this term are rehearsed endlessly in the text, but what we read is the “underlying” itself: within the preternatural boundaries of this astounding book, its repeated instances act individually and together to point away from the possibility of “solving” the work. Though Dowell, in his interview, offers many authorized (so to speak) interpretations, Island People manages to slip out from under anything as slight as its own author’s claims about its nature.

A plot summary doesn’t help much here as a starting point for analysis: as the saying goes, you’d have about as much luck bisecting a sneeze. An unnamed man leaves the city to live in a house he has bought on a small island, a lone outsider among the “island people” who inhabit the place year-round. Though he lives alone with his dachshund, it appears that he has an engaged (if isolated) existence, enjoying frequent contact with and occasional visitors from the city. Abruptly, it’s revealed that the acridly disturbing comedy of manners we have read, involving the man and his guests Beatrix and Jeremiah, is a story, “The Keepsake,” written by another unnamed man living under circumstances identical to those of the first man, though somewhat more removed from the outside world.

Island People seems to have unveiled its framework here, and even the reader habituated (whether by contemporary fiction or by facile Scream-style reflexivity) to metafictional techniques expectantly awaits the commencement of the “real” Island People. As with Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler, the wait is unending. But while Calvino’s comedy draws inevitably toward the shaggy-dog joke that crowns its penultimate chapter, Island People is all “underlying.” It’s a book that doesn’t seem to have been written as much as it seems to crawl out of itself, and is made up of a handful of chronic images, a few stark and metaphoric figures, and an endless succession of contrasts, correlations, and mutations that are effected through a continuous stream of distorted information, to which the periodic addition of what seems to be fresh intelligence only adds to the overall indeterminacy.

Island People can perhaps most usefully be read as a collection of documents—journal entries, fragments, poems, short stories, and mysterious shifts in time and voice denoted by switches to what I take to be a more “archaic” typeface (it’s the fact that the typeface is changed that textualizes these phantom utterances for me and allows me to feel comfortable categorizing them as documents)—whose authorship is unclear and whose veridicality, within the confines of the book’s peculiar space, is likewise undetermined. Island People is set in motion by the Narrator’s decision to embrace his invention Beatrix as an alter-ego (”helpmeet” is the curious word Dowell chooses in the interview) and to allow her, as a sort of repentance for his maligning of her in “The Keepsake,” to write his life. In the process, the wholly invented Beatrix herself invents, in a series of episodes, several versions of the Narrator, most of them named variations on “Chris,” all of whom move ever to the danger and the “assault of desire” that the Narrator has decamped to the island to avoid. These episodes are surrounded by journal entries, presumably the Narrator’s (though their provenience is open to question), and by the strange articulations from the past, announced by the change of typeface, which obliquely tell the story of the family, touched by sickness, murder, and accusations of witchcraft, which had lived in the house in the nineteenth century.

Even as Beatrix’s Chris-avatars echo one another across the chasm of the novel, on still another level each “Chris” has his own doppelganger/opponent to grapple with inside the limits of each episode, while the other characters engage and complement one another in their respective episodes and with their counterparts throughout the novel, so that—just for the sake of example—the infinitely supercilious “Christopher” who stages patronizing “interviews” with his perceived social inferior Victor (both to discern the similarities between them and to indulge in the homoerotic undertone of the meetings) echoes not only the “Chris” of the next segment, a youthful playwright who is overwhelmed by the otherworldly depravity of the salon maintained by Claudo Darius, and not only Claudo, who takes “others into his body” to arrest decay, a sort of vampire who prolongs his own life “by ceasing during those periods to be . . . ,” but Victor as well, with whose condition Christopher is forcibly made to identify. Island People gradually fills with these doubled and reflected inhabitants—with writers and interlocutors whose pitilessly cold probing reveals their own barrenness more than that of their subjects, with precise observers who are so concerned with concretizing the abstruse social code their antennae pick up they remain unaware that they have entered the very slipstream of unuttered information that they monitor, with gigolos and hustlers and con men, with runaway boys, with the scarred and the birthmarked, with people who snap, or sag, when confronted with desire or revelation of truth—all in various at different stages of life, crossing of gender and sexuality and race and time and space to form a webbed whole.

The web is spun entirely from language. I find that each new reading reveals deeper levels of—perhaps not meaning, but significance. Opening the novel for the purpose of confirming a quote for this essay newly exposes another of the interlacings that connect episode to episode and character to character. The effect of recognizing that you are reading a book that’s largely been generated from smaller pieces of itself is claustral (to use a component of the carefully chosen, nearly ritualistic vocabulary employed by Dowell) but it’s also liberating in a profound way. This kind of work, where words and phrases become suffused through systematic repetition with a private, diacritical import, opens itself to the infinite even as it closes itself and becomes defined by its textual limitations, because the “action” of the text does not center on the novelist’s technique of executing imagined alternatives to what “is,” a technique that usually manages to escape scrutiny because as a convention it’s inseparable from our concept of the novel form (in fact, it—the “idea” of the book, the unique set of alternatives each offers—is probably the very essence of the novel to most readers), but on the combinatorial possibilities inherent in the very words of the text in their juxtaposition to one another.

Consequently, countless parts of Island People set off sympathetic vibrations with countless other parts. Again, to provide just a few examples: in addition to numerous occurrences of the text’s central figure of an isolated man attempting to connect “like an island managing to throw out from itself . . . to touch, however tenuously, a main body and thus become a peninsula,” there are evocations in at least ten other places in the book of people with “island-like” traits or of conditions akin to living on a metaphorical “island,” plus numerous instances in which the “island people” reference is intended literally. The image of someone staring through, or at, the panes of a mullioned window or door is likewise revisited. Memory or what “could be another world” is evoked repeatedly through the related metaphors of a “vertical door,” a “line of yellow light,” a “dilated chink,” and “a thread of gold from a barely cracked door.” The similitudes are opposed in equal number by contrasts. Broad antitheses like writer and written, victim and victimizer, attraction and repulsion, male and female, homosexuality and heterosexuality, and youth and age, to name just a handful, appear throughout, and more specific motifs are held up for detailed comparison—e.g., on page 31, Grace is portrayed as a condition to attain, the essence of benevolence; while on page 66 Grace is described as a kind of a priori bestowal and a “malignancy.” Juxtaposed to the similarities, which have a tendency to ground the text, and contrasts, which help to deny the text “realism,” are correlative echoes and occasionally drastic transmutations of previously “received” information, which repeat the characters’ own mutability and underscores Island People’s refusal to reappear from out of the language into which it vanishes. For example, “Chris’s” frenzied moonlit fight with a rosebush on page 38 is echoed by the tree surgeon, Sajic’s, healing ministrations 250 pages later. When “Christine” makes her willfully mute son witness her stoning of a rabbit that has become trapped in the garden, it is recalled later when Sajic and his teenage lover, Moselle, are (nonfatally) stoned when discovered in flagrante delicto. The Narrator’s idle comment early in the book regarding the hunters who have overrun the nearby woods, “I could pick them off from my window,” is chillingly evoked in the novel’s final pages, as the danger dwelling at the edge of the fiction threatens to inundate it.

Though we are continually being confided in and directly addressed by the book’s various narrators, shown privileged information, and generally having the book’s textiness held under out noses, Dowell is silent as a sphinx: there is no point in the book at which there is any intrusion that might attest to the presence of the author: he remains hidden: in other words, while the stylistic differences proffered by the authors of the miscellaneous documents in Island People are perhaps subtly real,1 each is unimpeachably “literary,” so to speak—that is, not only is there an absence of the parody that would lend a Just Kidding aspect to the proceedings (as is the case with another book made up entirely of documents, Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew), there is also, to borrow from structuralist thinking, no “metalanguage” to allow a dominant and “authentic” voice to emerge, comment on, and claim authority over the book.

Dowell said that the book’s concept began with the theme he read in the Dickinson lines that serve as one of Island People’s epigraphs, “One need not be a Chamber / to be Haunted / One need not be a House / The Brain has Corridors surpassing / Material Place,” and the book pays overt homage to the lines several times. Dickinson’s verse is a particularly good choice to express the sense of ardent yearning Island People’s miscellaneous techniques, its haunting recurrences and hand-picked lexicon, collaborate to sustain, a longing that drives each of the characters who inhabit its “corridors” to their increasingly desperate and reckless acts—either material or imagined. When the extravagantly birthmarked Low criticizes the affectless and clinical “Chris” for writing a story of their relationship, “The Birthmark,” in the episode of the same name, he complains, “You didn’t want the real thing to get in the way of your story.” The increasingly foregrounded impetus of Island People is its unsuccessful effort to write that “real thing” and set it to rest. Island People’s conundrum and implicit tragedy is that it is composed of a series of truths and accurate intuitions that are nonetheless defective, that in the end avoid or elide the “real thing” that has sent its characters into their solitary orbits. The mysteriousness at Island People’s core is the reason for its uncanny and disturbing ambience: there is no more succor for the reader than for the characters. Speaking of the book’s lesson, Dowell said, “that kind of loneliness will not lead to a knowledge of reality or how to separate art from life.” What Dowell did not mention—perhaps he felt it unnecessary or self-evident—is that the lesson comes from outside the text. The book itself is singularly unedifying in this respect, and ends on a note of unendurable desolation: emptied of its inhabitants, the book leaves the reader to turn out the lights when (s)he leaves, as it were. The “real thing” is connection, a confrontation with desire. Aloneness yields an impoverished existence; it yields, to paraphrase a passage from early in the book, the reality we create in those secret places of ours that others do not know about—“But what about the eyes that took some of him in passing on a windy corner one dark night and enshrined that fragment of him like a holy relic and yearned over it and prayed to it for days and years . . .”—insulated from the risky evanescence that always holds the possibility of love as well as danger.

Books by Coleman Dowell

Black on White on Black

Houses of Children: Collected Stories

Island People

Mrs. October Was Here

One of the Children Is Crying

A Star-Bright Lie

Too Much Flesh and Jabez

“Reading Coleman Dowell’s Island People” by Christopher Sorrentino first appeared in Context No. 3, which was published in spring 2000.

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Although we had been in touch about her book—I recommended reordering one of the stories in Coming. Apart., so that “The Last Short Story” actually opens the collection—and then on a podcast we did with May-Brit Akerholt (I also wrote about Anatomy. Monotony. in a piece about marriage alongside Nina Lykke’s Natural Causes), but we had never met in real life.

Edy’s an incredibly funny person—her account of a Kafka-esque experience with Border Control had everyone cracking up—with an eye for detail and ability to write about emotions and situations others might shy away from. Her work is sharp, uncomfortable (in the best way), provocative, and quite layered. Definitely worth checking out.

Anyway, hanging out with her—and seeing the first snowflakes of the season—has put me in the mood to read some cold-climate books, especially books from Estonia.

I’ll write more about John’s history with Estonian literature, our first trip there (which may have saved my life), some of the highlights from the backlist, etc., in a separate post about Rein Raud, but for now, I wanted to bring some attention to, arguably, Estonia’s greatest contemporary writer: Mati Unt.

Unt was a giant in Estonian letters, which might sound like the start of a bad joke, but only until you open up Things in the Night, his absolute masterpiece—and the first Estonian book Dalkey ever published.

This was one of my finds, which arrived from Eric Dickens, a translator from several languages (I forget them all, but I know Dutch was one), who had great literary taste and a lot of wit. He was also an independent scholar, and his piece on “Literary Translation in Britain and Selective Xenophobia” is an excellent look at the situation of literary translation in the early-2000s:

British publishers, usually themselves incapable of reading books in foreign languages, get around this serious cultural handicap by employing what are termed “publisher’s readers.” In theory, this means that the publisher consults a well-informed adviser to tell him or her what is being published in the world at large. But there are drawbacks. Firstly, there seems to be no clear process whereby a publisher’s reader is chosen. This could be anyone from a family friend who did his year abroad in France to someone the publisher met at a cocktail party and swore blind she was an “expert” on, say, Ruritanian literature. The publisher has no way of checking their credentials and language knowledge and their choice of authors could be one-sided or even quirky. The publisher, having few insights into how Ruritania works, and into who is respected there as an author, relies totally on the publisher’s reader. The publisher’s only check is the occasional chat with one or two European publishers over drinks in the evenings at the Frankfurt Book Fair. Since these foreign publishers do speak English and are on occasions Anglophiles, the conversation, and ultimate trading, tends to swing in the other direction, with the foreigner buying British or United States literature—but almost never vice-versa.

Eric turned me on to Unt, and ended up translating two of his books: Things in the Night and Brecht at Night. (The third Unt book published by Dalkey, Diary of a Blood Donor, was translated by Ants Eert.) He also wrote about Unt on a couple of occasions, including the obituary of sorts that follows.

Sadly, Dickens himself passed away in 2017, but his impact on the promotion of Estonian literature—through his work for Dalkey Archive, and as the translator of Jaan Kross for Harvill—lives on.

I’d like to reread these three Unt titles along with Autumn Ball (which I really, really would love to bring out in a new translation) and connect them to larger trends in the Dalkey backlist, but for now, this piece will have to serve as a general introduction to his complex, fascinating, polyvocal work.

Enjoy!

Mati Unt (1944–2005)

Mati Unt was born in Estonia and lived there all his life. He spent his early years in the village of Linnamäe near the university town of Tartu. His life, like that of so many Estonians, was rooted in the countryside and nature, something evident in all of his works. Unt doubled as one of the most influential modernist, and latterly post-modernist, authors in Estonia, as well as being a playwright, director, and producer, staging plays at several theaters in the Estonian capital, Tallinn.

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Unt made his breakthrough as an author early in life, publishing his first prose in the early 1960s while still at school, and later while studying literature and journalism at Tartu University, near the village where he was born. He belonged to the Sixties Generation, which denotes a number of Estonian writers born in the 1940s and who emerged as writers and intellectuals some twenty years later. During the years leading up to the Prague Spring of 1968, Estonian intellectuals had high hopes of a Duběck-style “socialism with a human face.” Their hopes were soon dashed. Nevertheless, Estonia had always managed to evade the full brunt of Soviet repression and censorship.

In the 1960s and ’70s, when Stalinism had waned, key works of international literature were made available in translation to the citizens of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic by such authors as Whitman, Faulkner, Salinger, Scott Fitzgerald, Wilder, Malamud, Baldwin, Capote, Updike, Oates, Bellow, Golding, Bergman (film scripts), Kafka, Borges, Butor, and Camus. This was thanks to an unusual initiative, a weekly addition to one of the cultural monthlies where many shorter works of international literature managed to appear. In 1964, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simon de Beauvoir made a brief visit to Estonia, and even works that were frowned upon by the central Soviet authorities—such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita—were published in the Estonian language. Presumably the Soviet authorities thought that the translation of controversial works into a language used by no more than one million people could do little or no harm to the predominantly Russian-speaking USSR.

For much of his working life, Mati Unt was involved with the theater, staging plays regularly from 1981, when he became the director and scriptwriter for the Youth Theater in Tallinn. It is often thought that the Soviet Union was entirely cut off from Western theatrical trends, but this is not entirely true. During the 1960s thaw, new ideas in the theater seeped in through the Iron Curtain and from the more liberal satellite states to the Soviet Union itself. In time, names such as Artaud, Grotowski, and Peter Brook became familiar to Estonians.

Over the past decades, Unt staged many plays of international renown by dramatists such as Sophocles, Corneille, Shakespeare, Goethe, Schiller, Strindberg, Ibsen, Chekhov, Gombrowicz, Genet, Weiss, Havel, and Beckett, plus adaptations of Euripides and Bulgakov, many of these at the Vanemuine Theater in Tartu. One of the last plays he staged was Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker, in the provincial town of Rakvere, and before his death Unt was working on a stage adaptation of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights.

Mati Unt also wrote several plays of his own. As early as 1967, Unt was experimenting with the introduction of Brechtian techniques to Ancient Greek material in his play Phaethon, Son of the Sun. Perhaps Unt’s most complex stage play was Dress Rehearsal (1977) where in Pirandellian fashion he examined the life of a Soviet revolutionary through actors on a film set performing in and discussing what is in fact a rather hackneyed adaptation. The real revolutionary, now an old man, stands around the set giving monosyllabic advice, and seems rather indifferent to the myth his life is being turned into.

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Still, it is as a renewer of Estonian prose that Unt will be best remembered, at home and especially abroad. The leitmotifs and style of Mati Unt’s fiction changed little from when he first began publishing in the 1960s and was regarded as something of a Wunderkind. Unt’s prose is rooted in the mythology of everyday life, personal relationships, sexuality, and especially that of modern urban living—although the national trauma of the Soviet occupation always lurks under the surface. To this he added the deadpan humor of the eternal observer, someone who never quite succeeds in getting fully involved with other people, and yet is always present amongst them.

Unt was always interested in popular science; the most unexpected associations and references appear in his works. He was also keen on examining paranormal, esoteric, and pathological phenomena, like vampires, werewolves, cannibals, sex criminals, and those driven by obsessions and idées fixes. One critic says: “Unt’s interest in everything . . . was phenomenal. He read rapidly and much, his memory was first class and concrete, and he synthesized what he read. You could always ask him about things in many fields.”

Unt’s early novels clearly show the direction he was moving in. His first novel, Farewell, Yellow Cat!, appeared in his school annual in 1963. Here the protagonist is in an ideological battle with his aunt, a homeowner—something that was rather politically incorrect in the Soviet days. Anything harking back to bourgeois times (i.e., the 1930s of independence and the authoritarian rule of President Päts) had to be painted in a negative light. But by mentioning them at all, Unt was taking a stand.

Then came the novella The Debt (1964), which caused a literary storm. Under the edicts of Socialist Realism, Soviet literature was in those days supposed to provide models for how people should conduct their lives. Instead, Unt chose a protagonist who was having sex while still at school, and who gets a girl pregnant, something which was shocking to the hypocritically puritan Soviet society. Critic Tiit Hennoste regards this novella as Unt’s key work: “It was the first work of Estonian literature in Soviet times that caused a real scandal, and endless disputes about the behavior of the young.”

In 1970, Unt produced a Kafkaesque murder-mystery parody called Murder at the Hotel, and two years later wrote a love-triangle novella called An Empty Beach, where a young married writer has to contend with the advances made to his wife by a violinist—and which, he claimed, contains elements of self-mockery. A film version of this novella was scheduled to start shooting in late August 2005, and will continue despite the author’s death.

Under the same cover was Mattias and Kristina, which is again about a young couple struggling against society, and who end up in a kind of Tristan-and-Isolde tragedy.

This was followed in 1975 by the novella And If We Are Not Dead, Then We Are Alive Right Now. This deals with werewolves and contains numerous references to literature on the same subject, a stylistic trait that remained constant in the rest of Unt’s œuvre.

Unt’s most famous novel, Autumn Ball (1979), was translated into English—as well as Russian, Finnish, Swedish, and other languages—back in the Soviet era, and tells the story of six people living in apartments in the Tallinn high-rise suburb of Mustamäe, and who are destined to meet at the end of the novel: a poet, an architect who is a technocrat and futurist, a misanthropic barber, and a TV-addicted woman and her young son. Here, Unt’s coolly objective yet tongue-in-cheek style and interest in popular science came into their own. Apart from Things in the Night, this is the only novel by Unt made available in English. [Ed. Note: This is no longer true. See below.]

Unt’s novels and stories, as well as a few plays, were collected in two volumes in 1985, totaling some 650 pages. But Unt was not finished as an author. Some of his most significant work was still to come.

The following year, Unt published a volume of novellas and other short texts entitled They Speak and Keep Silent. Critics talk here of polyphony in the Bakhtinian sense, claiming that while there was the germ of this already in Autumn Ball, by now Unt had abandoned the traditional role of a narrator. These texts include the semi-theatrical dialogue of a woman and a taxi-driver; a short play about the nineteenth-century poet Lydia Koidula (see below) and the twentieth-century author of folk tales Aino Kallas; diary entries by a woman whose husband disappears without trace; and a postmodern text that comments on the translation of a poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Things in the Night, Unt’s second-longest novel, and second to be translated into English, appeared as Oös on asju in 1990, and deals with electricity in all its forms: a source of urban heating and lighting, but also a dangerous and untamed force. Unt also incorporates other devices from his stock of trivia: pigs, cacti, holography, urban cannibalism, and the ever-present blocks of high-rise apartments found throughout the former Soviet Union. Things in the Night continues in the postmodern vein of They Speak and Keep Silent, being full of game-playing, anarchic behavior, absence, schizophrenia, and irony. Nevertheless, there is, as in similar works from the former Soviet Bloc, a touch of light moralism in the novel.

The Estonian critic Kalev Kesküla sums the work up as follows:

The novel consists of the author’s confessions, novel fragments, snatches of plays, comments on how to write a novel, poems, minutes of interrogations, letters, and quite a few quotes from popular classics. There are amusing adventures and pointless ratiocinations. From time to time, the writer-protagonist personifies the compulsive scribbler who is unable to curb his urge to write when attempting to describe electricity, who tells yarns about accidents and shops. The characters in the novel have strayed into a world where other people’s words, clichéd behavior, and serious scientific literature are jumbled up together. In its artistic radicalism, the novel is very modernist, while very postmodern in its zest for irony. The ideas that bear the novel along appear to be a fear of people and an underlying misanthropy, themes familiar from Unt’s earlier works. Here again we have the criminals, farmers who set their dogs on those wandering through the night, arctic hysteria, and cannibalism.

In 1990, the same year as Things in the Night, Unt published a second novel, Diary of a Blood Donor. This is the usual Untian mixture of fact and fiction, and takes one of the most sacred names in Estonian literature in vain. Lydia Koidula (1843–1886) is regarded as the first Estonian woman poet of significance, and also the first poet to express an Estonian longing for independence and freedom. But Unt rather blasphe-mously weaves this national icon and her Latvian doctor and husband into a postmodern tale of vampires and a mysterious trip to Leningrad. While the leitmotif of Things in the Night is electricity, that of Diary of a Blood Donor is, predictably, blood.

After 1990, Unt published only one major work of fiction, but one with special international resonance. This was a documentary novel about Bertolt Brecht’s meeting with the Estonian-born Hella Wuolijoki, who later became a Communist and broadcaster in neighboring Finland, and is entitled Brecht at Night. (The night was clearly something with which Unt had affinities.) In true Untian style, the author mixes episodes from the history of Estonia and Finland in a tale centered around World War II, including historical documents and a rather playful description of the very bourgeois and somewhat fastidious Brecht, who would like to feel at home with the workers, but is too busy with his “alienation effect” and mistresses.

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In one of a series of articles written to mark Unt’s sixtieth birthday—January 1, 2004 —Ms. Marju Lauristin, who remembered him from his early days as a writer, wrote an appreciation entitled “Mati Unt’s Blogosphere.” In it she examines Unt’s last literary guise—that of a columnist in the cultural press, where he wrote short pieces that almost resembled “blog” entries, recording his comments on life on a weekly basis. Lauristin, now a professor of media studies, remembers Unt as someone for whom the world was “very text-centered, sound-centered, centered on the life of the mind.”

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Mati Unt lies buried in the writer’s corner of the Metsakalmistu cemetery in Tallinn, where he rubs shoulders in death with many of the key figures of nineteenth- and especially twentieth-century Estonian literature, their graves all grouped together rather like those in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey —but in a more modest, truly Estonian manner. The vaults of the abbey are here replaced by the branches of trees.

This piece originally appeared in Context Magazine No. 18. (And on the Three Percent blog back in the day . . .)

Books by Mati Unt in English Translation

Autumn Ball

Brecht at Night

Diary of a Blood Donor

Things in the Night

That said, I was reading a lot of authors at the time that Giles Gordon was connected to, especially B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, and, the subject of our next Mining the Dalkey Archive podcast, Brigid Brophy.2 Gordon, an innovative novelist in his own right, also ran the Scottish branch of the Curtis Brown Agency, and represented a number of the members of this branch of boundary-pushing British writers from the latter half of the twentieth century.3 And since this was around the time that we were doing Quin and Brophy, Gordon’s presence—as an agent and a writer—was in the air.

The piece below is, for a lot of Dalkey aficionados, pretty basic, yet a nice starting point to discuss ways to approach and converse about literature, and what sets certain books apart. This is a thread that runs throughout the “Commentaries” in Context, so expect more of them in the coming months. For now, enjoy!

“Fiction As Itself” by Giles Gordon

The difficulty with writing, as with reading, is words. Only the painter uses paint—not the spectator, not even the art critic; he uses words. Only the composer uses notes—not the listener, nor the music critic; he too uses words. The writer uses words, but so does everybody else. Therefore everyone believes he or she is a potential writer.

Most people, in daily currency, use words in what they think of as a fairly literal way. Consequently they are made uneasy if a writer does not use them similarly. They expect a novelist to know more words than they do, and to employ them with greater expertise than they can. Basically though, they expect a “story” to begin at the beginning (wherever that may be). If the first four words aren’t literally “Once upon a time,” the reader should be able to assume they’re taken for granted. The story should continue through exposition, climax, denouement, until on the last page the author can write “The End,” and the reader may be confident there’s no more to come, that nothing that should have been said remains unsaid.

The reader, then, expects to understand a work of fiction in the way he understands a conversation with his butcher, his bank manager, his wife, his colleagues at work, or even—in times of energy crisis—his candlestick maker or vendor. Or, pitching it a degree higher, he expects the fiction he reads to illuminate his own conversations with his hairdresser, his solicitor, his wife, his friends, even his Member of Parliament, because he knows that the author possesses “imagination” while he probably does not.

We are conditioned to read thousands of words every day. There are probably more of them in a single issue of the Times or the Guardian or the Daily Telegraph than there are in the average new novel; and we’re conditioned, because we lead such “busy” lives, to read these words—whether in newspaper or book—as fast as we’re able to assimilate them. In practice, this means a general understanding of the surface meaning, the “factual” content, rather than being persuaded, beguiled, influenced, stimulated, and altered by the words. But the craft of even our best journalist is one thing, the art of our better novelists quite another. Or should be.

In his introduction to The Secret Life of Our Times, a collection of fiction first published in the magazine Esquire (edited by Gordon Lish; Doubleday, 1973), Tom Wolfe points out that in the 1960s in America:

Journalists began mastering the same techniques of social realism that American short-story writers had depended on for so long. They began using them in quite sophisticated ways, in fact—and without ducking behind the screen of fiction. This was the movement or, better said, the development known as the New Journalism. These two forces—film and the New Journalism—would have probably been enough by themselves to deflect serious fiction writers onto a new course, much the same way that the rise of photography held painters and sculptors against representationalism after the turn of the century.

Mr. Wolfe goes on to suggest that the contemporary American short story is now evolving a system of poetics, or formal conventions, after the manner of the classical conventions that English poets—and English readers—observed in the eighteenth century: “. . . the characters are not tied to history, geography, nationality, or political subdivisions. . . . They speak, if they speak at all, in a language that tells you nothing about class, regional, or ethnic status.” The journalist, the “factual” writer, reports a world which his reader not only recognizes but identifies with, even if it is Chile, China, or Afghanistan. This he can do uniquely well. The talented writer of fiction is much more subversive. As David Gallagher wrote recently in the Observer, reviewing a novel by the Chilean José Donoso: “The only reality it posits is that of its own pages. There is no ‘real world,’ no specific context to which it refers, and it is subversive precisely because it denies the validity, or stability, of any context.” In other words, it is itself. A novel is a novel is a novel.

Traditionally, the British have been suspicious of theories of fiction, but at a time when many of the most intelligent and imaginative novels are coming from Latin America, North America, and France, and when translation is making available to us more new books than ever before, we could do a lot worse than to pay closer attention to what critics are writing about non-British fiction. Though Tom Wolfe and David Gallagher in their remarks quoted here are writing about American fiction, we surely cannot afford to be so insular as to disregard what they are saying. Sooner or later, we must—as a fiction writing and reading nation—accept that unambitious but competent slice-of-life mediocrity (Joe Lampton, Jim Dixon, Lewis Eliot) isn’t all our novelists need be capable of.

In what seems to me a passage of the utmost importance to contemporary fiction criticism, Tom Wolfe in the introduction already quoted from suggests that the perpetrators of what he calls the new poetic in fiction are producing—legends, fables, parables, myths—neo-fables:

. . . realism has been done; it’s finished. But how can I abandon realism and all of its extraordinary power and yet transcend it? Why, by returning to a form that goes back to the very roots of literature itself, a pure and crystalline form, a form that does not depend on the soon outdated details of everyday life for its effects, a form that communicates directly with the consciousness of man, a form that is as timeless as language itself.

In spite of the universality of myth, for the writer of fiction—by authors, reviewers and readers, I’d like the reviewer or reader to say to himself: “Mr. X appears to be doing such and such. He knows his European literature, he’s read his Cervantes and Sterne and Peacock as well as his Joyce and Proust and Beckett, and his Americans, not forgetting Borges. He uses words in his latest artifact in a way that, if not peculiar to him, is not how they are used in this sentence. He’s intrigued and fascinated by them, by sentences, paragraphs, pages as sounds, shapes, rhythms as well as senses. His meanings aren’t necessarily mine, but that’s no reason to dismiss them.”

Let us be grateful to our all too few writers prepared to reveal in fictional terms their visions of the air-conditioned nightmare, and their parallel dreams, even day-dreams.

I am not asking for fiction that isn’t immediately accessible in all its glories either to be praised lavishly or to be patronized with contempt of parody. If in terms of its own originality—whatever uniqueness it possesses—the reader of a book has difficulty immediately in interpreting its territory, why shouldn’t this be regarded as a challenge? Henry Moore said recently: “Cézanne, at one time, was completely unacceptable, and now he’s part of the tradition. It’s time that makes the difference.” But I would not want to suggest that there is, in itself, any virtue in the writing of fiction in being “experimental,” assuming that were possible, which I don’t believe to be the case if the author is serious about his art. If a novel is labelled experimental or avant-garde by a reader, then it seems to me that the book has failed in its primary function, at least in terms of that one reader: to be a novel.

If content and form in fiction are inseparable, both essential aspects of a single artifact, a novel that with skill portrays its author’s individual contemporary vision cannot be experimental or avant-garde. It can only be itself, a work of fiction.

This passage first appeared as part of the introduction to Beyond the Words, edited by Giles Gordon and published by Hutchinson in 1975. It was then reprinted in CONTEXT no. 11.

One personal note: I did have the opportunity to meet Helen in person on one occasion. It was at an event also attended by Svetlana Alexievich connected to a publishing summit orchestrated by the Lannan Foundation in Santa Fe. (Glenn Schaeffer, CEO of Mandalay Bay at the time, who helped fund UNLV’s translation program also helicoptered in. What a time to be in nonprofit publishing!) I remember this gathering really well for a plethora of reasons: seeing a couple make love alongside the Santa Fe River (they waved to me and laughed), hanging out all night with Michael Silverblatt and John O’Brien, meeting Alexievich as Voices from Chernobyl was in the works (the original, Keith Gessen-translated, superior version), getting the idea that became Reading the World and jumpstarted the interest in translation among indie booksellers, and asking Helen Lane to consider translating Eloy Urroz’s The Obstacles. (Ezra Fitz ended up doing a brilliant job on this and Eloy’s other books, so NBD in terms of that request.)

Getting far afield here, but I do honestly believe these sorts of gatherings—all Lannan funded presses were there, including BOA Editions, Copper Canyon, Graywolf, I believe Archipelago, others—are vital to the future of nonprofit publishing and I wish some funder would step in and convene a series of meetings with the ten or so top thinkers about the funding and promotion of literature. We need new strategies, and personally, I would love to theorize with other like-minded folk about the future.

But this is a post about Helen R. Lane. So, take it away Ronald!

Helen R. Lane, 1921–2004

Helen R. Lane, who died August 29, 2004, at the age of 83, was the preeminent translator of French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian fiction. Among the long list of authors she translated are Augusto Roa Bastos, Juan Goytisolo, Juan Carlos Onetti, Jorge Amado, Luisa Valenzuela, Mario Vargas Llosa, Marguerite Duras, Nélida Piñon, and Curzio Malaparte. A long-time supporter of Dalkey Archive, as well as a contributor to the Review of Contemporary Fiction, Helen R. Lane will be remembered as both a friend and co-conspirator in bringing the best of contemporary fiction to the English-speaking world. We asked her good friend and fellow-translator Ronald Christ to write about Helen’s life and accomplishments.

Though petite, Helen Lane was mighty and sometimes called the queen of translators, leading Margaret Sayers Peden, known to all as Petch, into fondly dubbing her “Queenie.” Helen was also an intensely attracting person, like some babies and certain animals, and with age her small stature grew enhanced by the disproportionate size of her head, leading me to dub her “Panda.” She acknowledged her titles with that inimitable smile and tilt of her head revealing half-closed crescents of large eyes, and we now fondly and proudly recall all that those titles hailed, Helen having left us—been translated, she liked to quip—on August 29, 2004, after a stroke at her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Helen’s mastery of translation flowed from several converging sources that made her unique. She had been a cryptographer during WWII; she had served as foreign editor in the 1960s at Grove Press, and she continued writing reader’s reports on proposed books for various publishers and agencies into the 1980s; she had studied both Romance languages and literatures at UCLA and the Sorbonne, coming to command seven languages, as written and spoken; and she was a graceful as well as forceful stylist in English. The last quality is the most important for any translator, while her editing prowess gave her a rare reader over her shoulder—herself. Her editing extended to the books themselves: I recall a shocked academic discovering that Helen had trimmed Sábato’s Of Heroes and Tombs and also recall a critic, Latin American, who told me that the English translation was the only version of the book, including the original, that she cared to read.

Helen’s manner of working, as she described it to Margaret Sayers Peden and as I observed it at her home in France where Dennis Dollens and I had gone for a weekend and stayed three months, was remarkable, literally astonishing. Early on, between the lines of the books themselves, later, on enlarged photocopies (140% was her preference), she wrote brief solutions and posed queries as she read the book. Then, on her doughty Selectric or, later, her Mac, she typed out the translation, apparently retained in her head from that preliminary reading, leaving only the puzzle passages and the revision of her English to the final editing phase, which she relished. All accomplished between 10 P.M. and 3 or 4 A.M. on seven-day workweeks. She hated bright sunlight as much as she hated bending over, so she tended her vegetable and flower gardens seated on the ground, shielded by an umbrella-sized straw hat; she kept her main dictionary and Roget exactly at her fingertips on a low, deskside table in her midnight study.

Helen’s greatest satisfaction came from difficult texts, the harder the better; her final pleasure from squaring up the pages for mailing, knowing there was not a grace note she could add or subtract. When she, reached that final state, her expression matched the silently beaming one when she ate fine, exotic food. Translating was both art and service, work and ritual for her: “To translate is to ‘carry across’—and what better way of helping in the dharma-task of bringing all sentient Being ‘to the other shore?’”

With Helen’s being carried across, literature loses a great artist; to translators, publishers, and authors, an intimate idol. Her prized friend, the award-winning translator Carol Maier, whom Helen admired for her dedication as well as her craft, writes:

During the last decade, it was my honor and privilege to be Helen’s friend. From her I learned what it means to define oneself as a translator. Her written words about translation were few, but her words in translation are innumerable. In those words she leaves an unparalleled legacy, a rich example to be treasured and studied in depth. She was a woman of wit, precision, candor, and spunk. And she knew how to laugh.

And Petch, our grand doyenne, recalls:

When I began translating, there was a role model ready and waiting: who but Helen Lane? I am, and have always been, awed by the scope of her knowledge as well as her unerring ear. Imagine, memorable translations from French, Portuguese, and Spanish. We have lost a treasure, a friend, a stellar member of our community, but she has left us a legacy: her work, and the inspiring figure of her person. We will miss her, but she is here.

Indeed, Helen Lane ¡¡presente!!

This piece by Ronald Christ originally appeared in Context No. 16, circa 2005.

Selected Works in Translation from Helen R. Lane

Jorge Amado: Pen, Sword, Camisole

Edmond Barincou: Machiavelli

Maria Isabel Barreno, Maria Teresa Horta, and Maria Velho da Costa: New Portuguese Letters: The Three Marias

Marguerite Duras: “An Interview with Marguerite Duras,” in Destroy, She Said

Tomás Eloy Martínez: Santa Evita; The Perón Novel

Saul Friedländer: When Memory Comes

Carmen Martín Gaite: The Back Room

Juan Goytisolo: Count Julian; State of Siege

Juan Carlos Onetti: Let the Wind Speak

Ricardo Palma: Peruvian Traditions

Octavio Paz: The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism; The Other Voice: Essays on Modern Poetry; Alternating Current

Georges Perec: Les Choses: A Story of the Sixties

Nélida Piñon: Caetana’s Sweet Song

Elena Poniatowska: Massacre in Mexico

Augusto Roa Bastos: I, the Supreme

Ernesto Sabato: On Heroes and Tombs

Juan José Saer: Nobody Nothing Never; The Event; The Investigation

Fray Servando Teresa de Mier: The Memoirs of Fray Servando Teresa de Mier

Claude Simon: Conducting Bodies; Triptych

Luisa Valenzuela: He Who Searches

Mario Vargas Llosa: Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter; The War of the End of the World; The Storyteller; A Fish in the Water

Cirilo Villaverde: Cecilia Valdés or El Angel Hill

In the meantime, the Reds still aren’t favorites to pull this off (the have a 41.9% shot entering into the games on September 22), so I don’t have to back up that claim quite yet. And given my generalized bad luck related to sports, I believe I just cursed both teams somehow the D-Backs will make an improbable run, in which case, I’ll . . . IDK, write about snakes for a month or something.

If for one reason or another—like my ADHD, feeling the need to post about other books and authors, wrapping Echenoz into a podcast with one of his translators or fans, or in a post about Minuit & Jérôme Lindon, etc.—I never get to this, I just want to recommend, wholeheartedly, Echenoz’s Command Performance. Along with the two Solvej Balle books, and Stanislaw Lem’s The Investigation, this was one of my favorite reads of the summer. Funny, engrossing, well-plotted, overstuffed with characters, and, like most Echenoz books, it features a rather surprising ending.

And while I’m on about NYRB and baseball—two of my favorite things!—you might be interested in knowing that NYRB is reissuing Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. next March (with a new intro by Ben Marcus), just in time for spring training! As a big Coover fan, who absolutely loves this book and wanted to reprint it more than any other book in recent memory, I’m so glad that it’s coming out again. Also, Coover does have a couple books with Dalkey, sorta: A Night at the Movies is currently out of stock (but brilliant) but the ebook of Stephane Vanderhaeghe’s Robert Coover and the Generosity of the Page is available via Bookshop.org and other e-book retailers. (The print version is out of stock, but probably findable.)

Anyway, let’s get to the whale.

For today’s CONTEXT reprint post, I have a piece from Issue No. 23—one of the last to be printed—about a Dalkey Essential that was reissued earlier this year, Orly Castel-Bloom’s Dolly City. (This piece is also the afterword to both Dalkey editions of the novel.) To date, Dalkey Archive Press has published two Castel-Bloom books (An Egyptian Novel being the other, but that’s also out of stock . . . I’m whiffing like Oneil Cruz today!). And Feminist Press has done Textile, which was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award—here’s a piece about it from P. T. Smith for anyone who is interested.

Dolly City is the novel of hers I like best, the most upsetting, strange, discomforting, and curious. Given that I’m no expert—and reread this almost exactly two years ago, I’m going to turn this over to Karen Grumberg, the Stiles Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas.

Enjoy!

Reading Orly Castel-Bloom’s “Dolly City”

Dolly City is an astonishing novel. It leaves some readers enthralled, some stunned, and others intimidated. Orly Castel-Bloom told me that, in the months following the Israeli publication of the novel in 1992, people who recognized her as its author were actually afraid of her. Castel-Bloom’s writing—confrontational, fearless, and disconcertingly funny—often evokes such visceral reactions. Now, nearly two decades after its appearance first shocked the Israeli reading public, the novel remains as provocative and powerful as it was then.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1960 to French-speaking Egyptian Jewish parents, Orly Castel-Bloom spoke only French during the first years of her life. She studied film at Tel Aviv University for one year and theater for another at the Beit Zvi theater school. She started publishing in 1987. By the time Dolly City appeared, Israeli critics had already been debating the merits of Castel-Bloom’s writing for five years. Her first collection of short stories, Lo Rahok mi-Merkaz ha-Ir (Not Far from the Center of Town, 1987) evoked much critical controversy, particularly regarding its unconventional language and style. Her second collection, Sviva Oyenet (Hostile Surroundings, 1989), and her first novel, Heykhan Ani Nimtset (Where Am I, 1990),confirmed the originality of her voice, but some critics still questioned the “literary” value of Castel-Bloom’s writing: the unadorned, conversational Hebrew of her stories, peppered with English expressions, was labeled flat and therefore inadequate for literary expression. Her unsentimental and sometimes absurd characters were considered devoid of humanity and incapable of evoking the reader’s sympathy or interest.

The publication of Dolly City, while it did not dispel entirely the questions regarding Castel-Bloom’s literary merit, established her as a prominent figure, impossible and irresponsible to ignore. Gershon Shaked, an influential literary critic, deemed that Castel-Bloom had “done nothing less than change the face of Hebrew fiction.” The esteemed author S. Yizhar praised her writing, and the prominent critic Dan Miron declared her to be one of the most interesting writers of her generation. Dolly City was reviewed in all the major Israeli newspapers. Adi Ophir, in his review for Ma’ariv, recommended that readers read the novel three or four times: first, “to absorb the shock”; second, to understand how and why Dolly does what she does; third, to connect Dolly’s world to one’s own; and fourth, to get to the bottom of Castel-Bloom’s idiosyncratic use of language. In a review in Ha’aretz, Ariel Hirschfeld declared that Dolly City constitutes a new Israeli-Hebrew dictionary, challenging all accepted definitions and values. Indeed, Dolly City helped establish Castel-Bloom as one of the most important living writers of Hebrew, compared to a diverse array of authors from Dostoyevsky to Kafka. Though not everyone agrees on the merits of Castel-Bloom’s writing, it leaves no one indifferent.

By now, four novels and four short story collections later, the centrality of Dolly City in the world of Israeli letters is undisputed. This is somewhat incongruous, given that the novel is itself an attack on all forms of authority, political, social, or linguistic. Zionist ideology, represented here by Dolly’s acquaintance Gordon (a parody of the Russian Zionist A. D. Gordon), is tolerated but not taken seriously. The Holocaust, the memory and memorializing of which is a primary component of collective identity in Israel, is presented in Dolly City as a crime warranting bloody vengeance, and also as a means of exclusion of non-European Jews like Dolly from the nation’s consciousness. The novel’s critical confrontation with Israeli society leads it to raise questions about gender as well. Dolly’s obsessive and fiercely independent motherhood is complicated by the fact that her son’s paternity is unknown and by the mystery of her own father’s death. In Israeli literature, which historically has been preoccupied with fathers and sons, the dearth of literal and metaphoric fathers in this novel makes a significant statement. The language, too, contributes to the novel’s iconoclasm. Some readers dislike what has been called Castel-Bloom’s “thin Hebrew,” which they see as stripped of the richness and depth of the “literary” Hebrew considered the epitome of Zionist ideals. A close reading of her stories and novels, however, shows that there is more to Castel-Bloom’s use of language than meets the eye: it is informed by biblical allusions, clever word games, and an awareness of the ideological dynamics of language. Moreover, her Hebrew resonates with readers because it acknowledges and incorporates its own perpetual development through television, slang, new technologies, and the languages of immigrants. Not surprisingly, Castel-Bloom’s “thin Hebrew” has spawned more than a few admiring imitations.

One need not know Hebrew to get a sense of how revolutionary Dolly City is. The prose pummels the reader. Dolly, by turns apathetic and enraged, is articulate and perhaps overly perceptive. “Madness is a predator,” she observes. “Its food is the soul. It takes over the soul as rapidly as our forces occupied Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza Strip in 1967. [. . .] And if a state like the State of Israel can’t control the Arabs in the territories, how can anybody expect me, a private individual, to control the occupied territories inside myself?” She explicitly relates the chaos within her to the political mayhem that plagues her environment. Violence reigns in her city. And a strange city it is: dystopic, fantastic, phantasmagoric, nightmarish—Dolly City is unlike any other setting in Hebrew literature. At once Tel Aviv and every other city in the world, Dolly City recalls the alienating metropolis that is by now a familiar setting of modernist writing, at the same time adding terrifying new features to this landscape. It is a city whose inhabitants are not only lonely, anxious, and unfriendly, but also deeply depressed and murderously violent. Dolly’s own aggressive tendencies, which drive her to surreptitiously inject unwitting passersby with morphine, murder a host of German orphans, castrate her psychiatrist, and more, reflect the violence of her city and affect every aspect of her relationships with others, from strangers on the street to her own son. No recognizable ethical or moral code governs Dolly City, and nothing is too sacred to escape the blade of Castel-Bloom’s pen. This is a world where everything has lost its significance—Dachau in Dolly City is just a word on an old plank—so the reader must question everything.

The violence that is so prevalent in Dolly City is related to two particular overlapping concerns that Castel-Bloom addresses: motherhood and the nation. The experience of motherhood as expressed in Dolly City is at once universally human and specifically Israeli, as attested by two of the most striking images in the novel: Dolly’s son glued to her back and the map of the Land of Israel she carves on his back. The first image speaks to phenomena that cross linguistic, geographic, and cultural boundaries: it magnifies the fears and concerns that are part of every mother’s experience, and casts the son as a burden the mother must bear. The latter image, an explicitly political, fleshly cartography, addresses the idiosyncrasies of Israeli motherhood, subject to the demands of national identity and, more concretely, of the military, in which every secular Israeli Jew—male and female—is required to serve at age eighteen. Dolly’s raison d’être is to protect her son: “I wanted to be in command on all fronts, and what’s wrong with that?” she demands. “I’m not entitled to demand sovereignty over the defense of my son?” The vocabulary of war is not coincidental in this context. Dolly’s son’s eventual conscription to the Academy of Brutal Seamanship denies her “sovereignty” over his “defense,” even as it liberates him from his obsessively protective mother. The mother/son interaction is one of many in the novel marked by aggression, paranoia, and impatience. Perhaps Dolly City’s most chilling accomplishment is laying bare a society in which not only politics and war but also interpersonal relations are exceedingly violent. A mother cuts into her son’s flesh; suicides regularly plummet earthward from skyscrapers; vehicles collide into each other relentlessly; Jews crucify non-Jews in the street. Subject to Dolly’s keen gaze, these violent social relations erupton the surface of Dolly City itself in the form of cancerous tumors. Dolly’s response—a frenzied attempt to cure the city, followed by indifference—parallels the broader postmodern concern at the heart of the novel: contemporary society is sick and there is no cure in sight.

It would be a mistake, however, to allow this bleak assessment to overshadow other qualities of the novel. Perhaps one of the most effective resources in Castel-Bloom’s critical arsenal is her sometimes macabre sense of humor. Despite the seriousness ofthe issues it confronts, Dolly City is a very funny book. Like the novel and two collections of short stories by Castel-Bloom that preceded it, Dolly City uses black humor, satire, parody, and sarcasm to express anxiety and to criticize social norms. Castel-Bloom, like her contemporary Etgar Keret, finds new discursive possibilities in humor: the language of humor allows her to make the banal original, and the horrible somewhat palatable.Dalkey Archive’s new edition of Dolly City at last makes this important novel available to English-language readers worldwide, filling a lacuna in the library of Israeli works available in translation. As we move into the second decade of the millennium, the relevance and acuity of Dolly City become increasingly apparent, not only for Israel, but for contemporary society as a whole.

—Karen Grumberg

This piece has appeared in the 2010 and 2025 Dalkey Archive Press editions of Dolly City by Orly Castel-Bloom, and in Context No. 22.

Works by Orly Castel-Bloom in English Translation

Dolly City

An Egyptian Novel

Textile

In that essay, Calleja writes mostly about a Werner book that has yet to be translated (Festland), so I thought I’d tie off the Werner thread (for now) by posting this overview by Alex Andrisse (who was very instrumental in terms of Dalkey generally, CONTEXT, Best European Fiction, and the Review of Contemporary Fiction during John O’Brien’s later years) for Context that discusses Werner a bit more broadly, and with the two Dalkey titles—Zündel’s Exit and Cold Shoulder—at its center.

[Unfortunately, both of the Dalkey books are out of stock, but hopefully the Deep Vellum team can rectify this in the near-ish future. In the meantime there are libraries—for now—and used copies, and the NYRB Werner book, The Frog in the Throat, which came out earlier this year and is available.]

Enjoy this, and I’ll be back next week—hopefully with some more original content about the next series of Dalkey Essentials, Jean Echenoz, and a couple key Dalkey Archive translators.

“The Uncontemporary: Reading Markus Werner” by Alex Andrisse

Contemporary literature is, whether we like it or not, firmly yoked to its market value. A new novel comes to us packaged, promoted, and prone to be read in the light of its jacket copy, its reviews, even its author photo. There’s nothing inherently sinister about this state of affairs, although it does sometimes lead us to dismiss or embrace unfamiliar writing for reasons that have little to do with the writing itself. Even those who should know better sometimes treat new novels unconscionably, if unconsciously, as commodities—as the author’s merchandise. Today, the majority of book reviewers have altogether dropped the genteel pretense of literature as a realm apart. Instead, they proudly speak of writers “producing” novels, and readers “consuming” them.

The writer at odds with this brave new book-world is almost guaranteed to be ignored by it. He is hard to advertise, indifferent to review, unfriendly to the reader out to consume. Until he fell silent a decade ago, the Swiss writer Markus Werner was one such writer, out of joint—though not out of touch—with the times. Werner, who was born in 1944 and died in the summer of 2016, began as an academic; his dissertation was devoted to the fiction of his fellow Switzer Max Frisch. From 1975 until 1990, he was employed as a lecturer at the Kantonsschule in Schaffhausen, and it was during this period that he began to write novels, the first, Zündel’s Exit (Dalkey Archive, 2014), appearing in 1984, followed by six more, including Cold Shoulder (Dalkey Archive, 2016) and On the Edge (Haus Publishing, 2012). [Ed Note: And The Frog in the Throat, NYRB Classics, 2026.]

All of Werner’s fiction is characterized by an extreme, borderline deranged sensitivity to the insults of modern life above all to the modern use and misuse of language. His protagonists are for the most part educated men, given to outrage and revolted by the vulgarity that surrounds them—men whose outlook the adjective “pessimistic” doesn’t begin to do justice. Also, these protagonists are funny as hell.

Here, for example, is Zündel, having just lost a tooth and discovered a severed finger in the restroom, scrutinizing his fellow train passengers:

All this continual assertion of self. Everything is hostile, everything that happens to me exceeds my capacity to endure it. Why does God have to send me a finger? And take my tooth. Sooner or later, everyone feels unviable. Humanity is assembled from partially reformed bed-wetters who never quite shake the feeling of existential displacement. No sphincter, no melancholy. Look at them, sipping their coffee.

Obviously, it’s fair to compare Werner to Frisch, as well as to Thomas Bernhard. All three of them are sublime misanthropists, capable of articulating a distaste for humanity which, fired by the humor and passion of their prose, detonates in great bursts of scathing, self-loathing soliloquy. You could say that a character such as Werner’s Zündel gives new meaning to the phrase “painfully self-conscious,” so long as you acknowledge that Herr Zündel himself would find both the phrase “gives new meaning” and “painfully self-conscious” excruciating to read.

Like many of Werner’s characters, Zündel would like to be a citizen of the world, a man among men; yet he is always butting up against his own inalterable prejudices and peculiarities. Arriving in a new city, he buys a newspaper (“after all I’m not an ostrich. I know there are more current things than me”), but no sooner has he ordered a Campari and started reading than he notes that all the “sentences and terms didn’t bore him so much as simply disgust him.” “The words stink and the sentences stink, as if they’d slipped out of the hemorrhoid-wreathed intestines of pest-infected morons.” A fairly lively definition of journalese.

To say the least, Werner has a gift for the well-turned vitriolic phrase. Zündel’s Exit abounds with examples, as does Cold Shoulder, in which the protagonist, Wenk, a didactic man, always lecturing, is asked why he hasn’t become a teacher: “He lacked the belief, he said casually, in the educability of the species.” Werner, like Bernhard before him, isn’t averse to taking his characters’ crankiness to extremes. The aging widower Thomas Loos, one of two main characters in On the Edge, launches into a particularly inspired diatribe on the state of men’s underthings:

I only wanted to say that normal briefs are being systematically squeezed out by underpants that are not fit for purpose, that have no fly and can thus hardly be distinguished from women’s panties [ . . . ] But there it is exactly: the world is out of joint, and there is much we seek in vain therein.

Much of Werner’s writing depends on just this kind of ironic rhetorical turn. The state of men’s underthings becomes synecdochic for the state of the world. Righteous anger edges into ridiculous rant. Cynicism slides into self-parody.

I wouldn’t want to give the impression, however, that Werner’s only gift is for rancor. Zündel’s Exit is a frank depiction of a man’s descent into madness, a portrait of a person who cannot escape from his own mind and ends up absconding from his own life. The unexpectedly poignant ending of Cold Shoulder moved me almost to tears. And On the Edge, with its Conrad-like structure and submerged story of grief and love, is a masterpiece of oblique emotion—as well as a catalogue of deep-seated antipathies. Humanity, in Werner’s view, is horrific, but humans, taken one by one, are not all bad. Wenk, in Cold Shoulder, wanders one day into a village graveyard and sees a “rather ravaged-looking” grave overgrown with ivy. On the stone he reads:

CLUMB UP

FELL DOON

DONE FER

And he finds himself delighted. “Was there a swifter way of formulating a life,” he wonders: “No, this was the fate not just of one individual, but of all mankind, even though the villagers might disagree and prefer their dismal ‘Released.’”

Werner has so far been a slight presence in English, although he has been extraordinarily well served by his translators—above all by Michael Hofmann, who has lent his hand (and inimitable ear) to both of the novels published by Dalkey Archive. Probably Werner is not destined to reach a much wider audience. His irony is too subtle, his humor too black to make him a writer fit for mass consumption. But his books are well worth the time of any reader who harbors misgivings about the march of human progress. He is a connoisseur—to borrow a few words from Hofmann’s foreword to Zündel’s Exit—of “the highly evolved, the uncontemporary, the thoughtful, the delicate, the unlikely.” A connoisseur of everything that today’s reductive literary consumerism would have us pass over in silence.

“The Uncontemporary: Reading Markus Werner” by Alex Andrisse originally appeared in CONTEXT No. 25.

Books by Markus Werner in English Translation

Cold Shoulder (translated by Michael Hofmann)

The Frog in th Throat (translated by Michael Hofmann)

On the Edge (translated by Robert E. Goodwin)

Zündel’s Exit (translated by Michael Hofmann)

La Bâtarde has enjoyed a great amount of notoriety and praise since its original publication by Gallimard in 1964 and by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1965. It’s been compared to the work of Jean Genet and Henry Miller for its frank depiction of Leduc’s sexuality and experiences, as well as for its directness and incredible prose. It was reprinted as part of the “Blue Series,” which also includes the (much delayed) Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein (more on that and its first-ever reader’s guide, As I Was Saying, coming in the next couple months), Pierrot Mon Ami by Raymond Queneau, Nobodaddy’s Children by Arno Schmidt, Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino (for which we did a whole season of the Two Month Review podcast), and Chimera by John Barth.

And of all those classics, La Bâtarde has reached the most readers, and is the Essential I’ve most seen on display at indie bookstores across the country.

Another book that’s been reissued as a Dalkey Essential is Billy & Girl by Deborah Levy, part of the “Orange Series,” and a book that might surprise some Levy fans. I’ll run an excerpt later this week to give you a taste of what this is like, but it’s a lot weirder than, say, Hot Milk, the film version of which came out earlier this summer (and is available for rent on Amazon Prime). In Billy & Girl, the titular characters go door to door searching for their mother (by addressing whoever answers the door as “mom”), when they’re not playing some violent games. The ending to this is really wild and lends itself to a few contradictory interpretations . . .

That was the first of two books by Deborah Levy published by Dalkey Archive Press in the early 2000s, the other being Pillow Talk in Europe and Other Places, a short story collection that I really loved working on. Both of these came relatively early in Levy’s career, although it was already abundantly clear that she was going to be one of the great writers of our times.

Anyway, below you’ll find Levy’s introduction/CONTEXT piece on Leduc, which is quite appropriate to appear during Women in Translation Month.

Reading Violett Leduc’s La Bâtarde by Deborah Levy

At the age of five, of six, at the age of seven, I used to begin weeping sometimes without warning, simply for the sake of weeping, my eyes open wide to the sun, to the flowers . . . I wanted to feel an immense grief inside me and it came.

La Bâtarde is a harsh title for an autobiography that is full of animals and children and plants and food and weather and girls falling in love with girls. It’s true that Violette Leduc was the illegitimate daughter of a domestic servant who was seduced by the consumptive son of her employer, but to choose such a melodramatic and reductive title, “The Bastard” tells us how hard it was for Leduc to escape from the way her mother described her, and in that description gave her daughter an internal crucifix on which to nail her life’s story.

It’s not surprising then, that the furnace at the center of Leduc’s autobiography and indeed all her writing, is stoked by her ambivalent steely-eyed mother of whom she writes, “You live in me as I lived in you.” Yet if the young Violette’s tears spill from eyes that are open to the sun, the older Violette’s words spill from the same place too. She is not blinded by her tears, nor are her eyes shut to the pleasures of being alive.

Which is to say Leduc was a writer very much in the world despite the distress she suffered all her life. What’s more, she was a writer who was going to give maximum attention to the cause of her distress and create the kind of visceral language that often irritates men and makes women nervous.

This is because Leduc experiences everything in her body:

As Isabelle lay crushed over my gaping heart I wanted to feel her enter it . . . She was giving me a lesson in humility. I grew frightened. I was a living being. I wasn’t a statue.

She doesn’t just (infamously) describe the physical sensa­tions of sex between women, she describes the physical sen­sation of being unloved, the physical sensation of poverty, of snow, of war, of peacocks chuckling in a meadow—she is tuned into the world with all her senses switched on. This is an extraordinary (and impossible) way of being in the world, but for Leduc it was ordinary. She is a writer who energizes whatever she gives her attention to, an orange shriveling in the sun, an ink stain on a table, the white porcelain of a salad bowl. Leduc refused to bore herself. Nothing is decoratively arranged to suggest atmosphere or a sense of place or to set a scene. Everything on the page is there because the narrator perceives it as doing something.

Even as a young girl, Leduc knew she had to find her own point to life. Her mother wanted her to be a Protestant, the religion of her absent father, but every time Violette tries to hear God, he is absent too. When she describes watching her beloved grandmother pray in church, Violette is shocked to realize that although she is sitting next to her, she has lost her. At that moment her grandmother is not there, she is in com­munion with somewhere else while Violette is doomed to be here, to be present, to be in this world. This is no small matter if you’re poor, female, a bit bent, not that attractive (Simone de Beauvoir referred to her as “the Ugly Woman”), and have nothing but your cunning and your talent to buy you a loaf of bread. We know that Leduc’s equivalent of the prayers that transported her grandmother elsewhere will be language. For Leduc was a born writer, a genius, as good as James Joyce, sometimes better. With words she not so much found the point to life, as sharpened life to a point.

The French essayist Antonin Artaud, who was sometimes mad, wrote, “I am a man who has lost his life and seeking to restore it to its place you hear the cries of a man remaking his life.” Is that why people write autobiographies? Are they attempting to remake their lives? La Bâtarde is not an attempt to remake Leduc’s life, although there is no doubt that writing books was her salvation.

It is probably an attempt to stage her life and in so doing witness herself as its main performer—and what a perfor­mance. By the time she wrote her autobiography, Leduc had lived through two world wars, had intense and volatile affairs with women—the end of a love affair, she says, “is the end of a tyranny”—been married and separated, written and published a few novels (in between lugging heavy suitcases of black-market butter and lamb from Normandy to sell to the rich in Paris), worked as a telephone operator, secretary, proofreader, and publicity writer. She also had her relationship with the writer Maurice Sachs to make sense of. It was Sachs, a flam­boyant homosexual, one-time reader for Gallimard, admirer of Apollinaire, Kant, Cocteau, Duras, and Plato—not to mention fresh cream cakes, apple brandy, and cigarettes—who encour­aged Leduc to write instead of “sniveling” all over him. Leduc portrays him as a sort of French Oscar Wilde, a man both bewildered and fascinated by women, who filled her with terror because of “the gentleness in his eyes.” Leduc became infatuated with him because she has a “passion for the impossible.” What kind of accommodation can be found, she won­ders, with people we deeply love but who cannot give us all we want? What Sachs can do is tell her to get on with what she is best at. “Your unhappy childhood is beginning to bore me to distraction. This afternoon you will take your basket, a pen, and an exercise-book, and you will go and sit under an apple tree. Then you will write down all the things you tell me.”

There’s a fairy godfather if ever there was one.

It was under that apple tree that she wrote the wonder­ful first line of her first novel, L’Asphyxie—“My mother never gave me her hand.” Simone de Beauvoir read the manuscript and was so impressed she became Leduc’s mentor, using her contacts to help get it published in post-Second World War Paris. When Leduc’s editor Jean-Jacques Pauvert offered her 100,000 francs for the manuscript she demanded the sum in cash, preferably in small bills.

By the time Leduc wrote La Bâtarde, she was going to return to themes she had written about before (her mother, the deprivations of her childhood, the erotics of lesbian sexual pas­sion, the erotics of everything, coffee, shoes, hair, landscape), but as a writer at the peak of her literary powers. In fact, she was uniquely placed to write an autobiography because she was a novelist who knew how to make the past and present seamlessly collide in one paragraph. Leduc also knew some­thing that lesser writers do not know. She knew the past is not necessarily interesting. Eight lines into La Bâtarde she declares, “there’s no sustenance in the past.” This made me laugh, because I was on page one with 637 pages of “the past” to go. But I laughed in bittersweet recognition too, and here is a confession. When I read autobiographies I usually skip the early chapters that describe the house the subject was born in, her parents and early childhood. I start when the subject is about seventeen and begins to make choices for herself rather than react to the choices that have been made for her. I see no reason why I should be forced to meet aunts and uncles who are of no interest to me in the hope that I will better understand the subject’s motives and psychology.

To observe so soon into her life story that there is no suste­nance in the past is to give the past an edge. To make us curi­ous about what the past lacks in sustenance for the narrator. What is the past anyway? What kind of place is it? Yes, it’s a series of events that happened before now, but the past, like writing, is mostly a way of looking.

La Bâtarde is the first autobiography I have read all the way through. This is mostly due to Leduc’s cunning decision to begin a work of tremendous narcissism by pretending she has no self-esteem and is a totally hopeless case. The first thing she tells the reader is that she is not unique, which is a relief—most people write autobiographies to persuade us they are. She then goes on to wish she had been born a statue—presumably because if she were made from bronze rather than flesh she would not have to feel the painful things she is going to tell us about. Still on page one, she tells us she is sitting in the sun­shine outside, surrounded by grapevines and hills, writing in an exercise-book. Suddenly she imagines her own birth. She is in a dark room. The doctor’s scissors click as he separates the child from her mother—“we are no longer the communicating vessels we were when she was carrying me.”

“Who is this Violette Leduc?” she asks. And then it’s the next day, she’s picked some sweet peas, collected a feather and is now writing in the woods staring at the trunk of a chestnut tree. Every moment has breath and every breath pushes the narrative on to a surprising place, to somewhere that matters because it matters to Leduc. When she steals flowers “always blue” from a park, she connects the action to a perception. She says the flowers are her way of “taking her mother’s eyes back,” by which I think she means she wants to find her mother’s image in something beautiful. And when she is convalescing from an illness in the countryside, she writes, “Whenever I looked round at the objects and furniture in the room I felt I was sitting on the point of a needle. So much cleanliness was repellent.” Her prose is kinetic and it is poetic, but it never collapses into poetry. In fact, her books are much more grounded in the realities and uncertainties of everyday life than her existentialist contemporaries.

Despite being acclaimed by Camus, Genet (who Leduc described as a burglar poet), Simone de Beauvoir, and Sartre, Leduc’s books are not to be found alongside theirs. If in my view she stands shoulder to shoulder with them as a writerly equal, she certainly does not stand spine to spine with them in Barnes & Noble. Perhaps this is because nothing had taught her (or Genet) that life or literature was respectable. Literature for Leduc was not a comfortable sofa or a seminar room in a university—nor was it a place where flawed human beings undergo some sort of catharsis and emerge happy, whole, healed, miraculously cleansed of anger, lust, and pain. For Leduc, literature, like life, is a place where some people damage us and some people save our lives—and then it is lunchtime. Referred to as “France’s greatest unknown writer,” it is time to stop fetishizing Violette Leduc as a female outsider existing on the fringes of everything and allow her to take her place in the canon of great writing.

To declare there is no sustenance in the past is of course a half-lie. What sustained Leduc is that she wrote out her life with an audience in mind. It is for this reason she “bit into the fruit” of her “desolations”—that’s what many writers do and Leduc is no crazier than them for having the audacity to believe that she too could spin some ideas into the world. I disagree with de Beauvoir, astute as she is, when she describes “the unflinching sincerity” of La Bâtarde as written “as though there were no one listening.” De Beauvoir certainly did not write her own books thinking no one was listening to her and she must have been aware that even in an uninhibited autobiography such as this one, there is no such thing as an abso­lutely true memory—all writing (except for diaries, but that too is debatable) is shaped with an audience in mind. Leduc, who addresses the reader throughout as “Reader, my reader,” felt more entitled to be listened to than perhaps de Beauvoir unconsciously thought she should feel. Given the turbulent historical time in which she lived, Leduc did not have a partic­ularly remarkable life. It is how she crafts language that made her life remarkable.

“To find relief in what has been,” Leduc whispers to her reader, “we must make ourselves eternal.”

I am staring at a photograph of Violette Leduc now. She is smiling, a wry half smile, an expression I recognize in her writing too. I reckon she laughed out loud when she wrote, “I was afraid of having to present my big nose to strangers” or “I thought one’s personality could be changed by wearing expensive clothes.” She has a dry, camp wit, rarely discussed in a critical atmosphere that has often reduced her work to unstable female tragedy on a grand scale. Her eyes are slightly narrowed (is she flirting with the photographer?), her chin resting on her left hand. She holds a pencil between her fin­gers—or is it a cigarette? Violette. An old-fashioned name. She was born in 1907 after all. The very beginning of the twentieth century. She was seven years old when Freud told us the most interesting secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves—but Leduc knew that anyway. The secrets we keep from ourselves were her material.

Violette Leduc had to spend a lifetime unlearning how to see the world as her mother saw it. Most of us choose to be less alert to the things that grieve us. This was just not possible for Leduc. Reading La Bâtarde is like discovering a whole new nervous system.

The above piece appears in the 2003 reissue of Violette Leduc’s La Bâtarde by Dalkey Archive Press, the 2023 Essentials edition, and in issue No. 14 of CONTEXT Magazine.

Books by Violette Leduc in English Translation

Asphyxia (aka In the Prison of Her Skin)

La Bâtarde

The Lady and the Little Fox Fur

Mad in Pursuit

The Taxi

Thérèse and Isabelle

This is also timely because Levine’s new memoir, Unfaithful: A Translator’s Memoir, is now available from Bloomsbury Academic, and builds on her early book, Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman: His Life and Fictions—as does the piece below. And if all goes according to plan, the Three Percent Podcast will have an episode on Jill’s new memoir coming out later this month.

For now though, here’s a piece she wrote for CONTEXT No. 3, circa 2000. It’s an interesting look at Manuel Puig from someone who knows his work as well as anyone, and places him squarely in the Dalkey Archive tradition.

When I was at Dalkey in the early 2000s, we did reissue three Puig titles—Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (now in print, maybe?, from McNally Editions), Heartbreak Tango, and The Buenos Aires Affair—which are, along with Kiss of the Spider Woman, his strongest books. At least in my opinion. (Although I do really enjoy Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages and want to include Pubis Angelical in a piece on Llorenç Villalonga’s The Dolls’ Room and Andrea Victrix.)

I’m shocked by how many of these Puig books seem to be out of print—even Kiss of the Spider Woman! Puig was essential reading when I was in college. (God damn I’m old.) Although I remember it being fairly complicated to deal with the estate, so maybe there’s a rights logjam, or a new publisher is going to gather all his titles under one imprint . . .

Anyway, here’s Suzanne Jill’s Levine’s piece about an author I highly recommend, and whose books should be available at a lot of libraries. (Shouts to librarians: You are all heroes. Especially in this political climate.)

“Reading Manuel Puig: A Biographer's View” by Suzanne Jill Levine

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinons, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Ocsar Wilde, De Profundis

“This dream is short but this dream is happy” are the redemptive words uttered on the last page of Kiss of the Spider Woman, Manuel Puig’s most famous novel. This dream, turned into an Oscar-winning film and then a glamorous Broadway musical, reached a vast audience, but its dreamer never saw the musical that opened in 1992 and won seven Tony awards. He died July 22, 1990, a few days after emergency surgery on an inflamed gallbladder, at the age of 57, in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Whether or not his name or his Argentine nationality is remembered by the public, his prison romance under the stars of Hollywood nostalgia—in which William Hurt as Molina, a gay window dresser, falls in love with Raul Julia as Valentín, a Marxist journalist who looks like Che Guevara—still remains. Kiss of the Spider Woman was Puig's most affirmative, most daring, the book to come out of the closet, the only one with heroes: the Marxist, prejudiced by his politics or blind to their contradictions, learns that tolerance for the Other is essential for true political action, just as his gay cellmate is liberated by a selfless act.

Puig was one of the most significant as well as enigmatic Latin American writers of the second half of the twentieth century. While collective memory of him is sustained mainly by the film and the play, this fourth novel was, like many literary milestones, only part of a life’s work, only part of his vision and impact, certainly on Hispanic culture, beginning in the late sixties when his first two books appeared in Spanish. Considered Latin America’s first “pop” novelist, this slight timid man took a giant step beyond the famous “Boom” literary lights such as García Márquez, tinkering ingeniously with the raw materials of film nostalgia and mass culture, exploring compassionately the (then) forbidden territory of sexual identity and politics.

Puig did not set out to be a novelist, however; his dream, from early childhood, was to make movies. Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1968), his first novel, had started as a screenplay but developed into something else, which, during the early stages of composition, he described to a friend as “Spoon River” (Edgar Lee Masters) type monologues spoken by characters taken from his childhood. At first he thought this material could serve as the basis for a screenplay:

In order to put some distance between me and the autobiographical stuff, I planned to write a description (for my exclusive use) of each leading character. Learning from past mistakes, I wrote in Spanish, but didn’t know how to do the description. One day in March I was roughing out a scene in the script in which the off-screen voice of my aunt was introducing the action in the laundry room of a typical Argentine house. Suddenly her voice, in the first person, came out quite clearly, talking about my cousin’s triumphs with girls. I began to write a kind of voice-over. I could remember exactly what she had been saying twenty years before, and I took note of it. . . . Though her voice was supposed to take up at most three lines of dialogue, she went on without stopping for almost thirty pages. There was no way I could shut her up. Everything she said was banal, but I couldn’t cut a lot because it seemed to me that the sum of the banalities lent a special meaning to what she was saying. . . . It was my desire for more narrative space. . . . I could play with it all I wanted. . . . By the second day it was clearly a novel. I had stories that needed more space than the two hours a movie gives you. I needed to explain my childhood and why I was in Rome, thirty years old without a career, without money and discovering that the vocation of my life—movies— had been a mistake.

He first called these pages “Birds in the Head,” a self-mocking title connoting “bats in the belfry.” To maintain distance from this explosive material he could not use his own voice but he felt he could handle dialogue or, as he put it in filmic terms, “voice-over.” He discovered fiction writing by pure accident, as a game or an expediency, as if family “voices” helped him revive his own feelings toward the small town, way out in the Argentine pampas where he grew up and where, like his mother, he had felt like an outsider. Happily, and not so innocently, both his hunch and his initial insecurity about writing in third person or in his own voice chimed with modernist poetics—Joycean stream-of-consciousness—and the postwar existentialist nouveau roman (Sartre, Natalie Sarraute, Robbe-Grillet): all confirmed conversely that the omniscient narrator was dead.

Puig would later remark that Freud was his model, throwing a theoretical bone, so to speak, to the Argentine intelligentsia. Freud was the father of the modern novel: if we are ruled by our unconscious, the only way to know a character is to listen to what he says, and especially to how he says it. The “talking cure” was an inventive narrative mode, with the writer playing two roles, shifting between the analysand’s couch and the analyst’s note-book. Omniscience was a myth, and hence no one version could be taken at face—but this also meant, with multiple voices on the page, that Puig was not writing a viable script. He realized he was not constructing a linear sense-making story but that, with those many voices, he could oblige the reader to connect with the complexities of the human heart:

Ninety percent of the novel is real. Sometimes for the sake of economy two characters from films became one; but it was about me, and the people close to me. The characters were the family that didn’t have time for me as a child, as well as the people who shared something with me in that era, relatives, neighbors, people who had time to listen to me. I wanted them to give me their secrets, their intimacy. Letting them talk or write a letter, they would reveal things to me.

Betrayed by Rita Hayworth had unmasked more candidly than Puig ever would again the life within; it remains (particularly in the guileless soliloquies of Toto, Puig’s fictional self) his most lyrical novel. He began writing Boquitas pintadas (1969; literally “Little Painted Lips,” this second novel, in our English translation, became Heartbreak Tango) in the mid-sixties, following a return visit to the town of General Villegas after an absence of eleven years. Living in Buenos Aires, and having spent years in Europe as a struggling screenwriter, he

met up again with some of the characters from my childhood. I was struck by an overwhelming disenchantment in those whose lives fitted into the social system of the period and who had never made any attempt to rebel. They had accepted all that world of sexual repression, had accepted its rules, the hypocrisy of the myth of female virginity and, needless to say, they had accepted authority. They struck me as disillusioned, now that they were growing older. . . . It wasn’t that they were conscious of being let down, just that they gave off an air of frustration and unhappiness . . . these people had believed in the rhetoric of irresistible love, irresistible passion, but their lives had not reflected this in any way.

“These people” had married and produced children, had gone the normal “bourgeois” route, which a part of him would always envy: they had grown up to continue the biological cycle of life, but they were also unaware of their stagnation. They were the ones who, in his childhood, seemed to be the winners. Puig had been molded in that remote town, but he had resisted. Simulated by this backward glance, which also confirmed his good fortune in having left that world behind, he recaptured the past once again, but this time in an even more distanced frame.

Puig saw that stifling town as a circular melodrama, a soap opera like the ones people used to listen to on the radio every afternoon in General Villegas. Their emotional lives seemed inhabited by the soap operas or women’s pictures they attended regularly; their feelings were the feelings of characters in a melodrama, and they spoke the language of those old songs, radio plays, and movies to which they were addicted. Puig’s image of Villegas as a soap opera led to a friend’s suggestion that he write a folletín in the popular style of the best-selling Spanish author Corin Tellado. “Impossible,” Puig at first responded, “I couldn’t even write a letter of condolence.” Boquitas pintadas would begin with an ending, an obituary notice, followed by the standard folletín-style letter of condolence. His characters, comatose consumers of soap operas and tangos, were social conformists who needed to “act,” who resisted self-knowledge and honest self-expression; they saw themselves as romantic heroines or the star-crossed lovers in popular songs. The book took the shape of a radio drama, subtitled folletín, “serial novel,” and like Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, it had sixteen chapters, or episodes—sixteen would become the magic number of chapters in nearly all of Puig’s eight novels.

“There are two elements that need to coincide for me to write a book,” as Puig later explained his writerly urge:

I have to feel a need to exorcise certain personal obsessions. There are others I have no need to exorcise. Each of us has his own little masochistic game, and wants to continue with certain tortures until death, but there are some tortures of which I do say “enough of this already.” But I don’t write a novel since for me it’s not only about writing but about communicating if I have the sensation that the problem is not shared. That is, I’m interested in situating myself as one more victim of the collective unconscious. . . . Yes, I’m interested in clarifying certain things for myself and achieving certain stylistic [aesthetic] goals, but the book has to be read too; if not, it lacks a certain sexiness. Writing is a dialogue with another person. On the other hand, I go alone to see a movie: that’s an act in which the other person is for me the movie.

Movie going was easy, passive play: something to sit back and enjoy; writing, on the other hand, was an active testament of emotional engagement, an ongoing relationship, hard work, often painfully confrontational.

His next and even more controversial novel, The Buenos Aires Affair (1973), would place his life in danger in the fascist Argentina of the seventies, and he went into permanent exile, where he wrote Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976), Pubis Angelical (1979), Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages (1980), Blood of Requited Love (1982) and, finally, Tropical Night Falling (1988).

This last book begins with the voices of two aging sisters speaking about the sadness of twilight and how the death of the day reminds them of the loss of loved ones, evoking also their own impending fates. They echo a soliloquy uttered by “the Mistress” of the house in one of Puig’s three stage plays, Under the Mantle of Stars, written shortly before he began writing Tropical Night:

This time of the day always frightens me, the death of the day. Because it’s not always certain the sun will rise again. One day or another, things die. That afternoon when I was waiting for you . . . it was growing dark . . . and for me the dawn never came again.

When asked to translate the novel (it would be the fourth and last I would translate), at first I found it oppressively gloomy, but Puig’s mischievous humor still sparkled in the subtle kernels of semi-senile chatter between the two cranky, endearing old ladies. Tropical Night Falling was conceived, Puig recounted,

more than anything, because for the first time, very close to me, are persons who have entered their old age. I’ve had to bring my parents to live with me because they’ve suddenly turned very old and dependent economically on me. I have realized that old age is the epic age par excellence, since you are no longer master of your near future. You have to consult death on everything. And these people are not only taken by surprise by age with these terrible problems, but are also living in times where fundamental changes are happening.

The querulous conversations between Nidia and Luci, elderly Argentine expatriates in Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s, echo the dialogues of at least two inseparable duos, Manuel and Malé, his mother, and Malé and his aunt Carmen. Hope for transcendence permeates Luci and Nidia’s conversations but Tropical Night Falling has a decidedly portentous air. The title, like a stage direction, gives the feeling of the curtain falling on the last act. Puig’s ambivalence is evident as he records and chuckles at their clichés, but also feels the grip of their sentiment.

Puig’s work-in-progress at the time of his death included over twenty unproduced plays and screenplays; he stepped out of the limelight at the height of his global success. He was, as Juan Goytisolo wrote in his obituary, not only a great writer but a “tenacious defender of the rights of women and homosexuals in a ferociously machistic world, who, with honesty and dignity, captured reality despite the mists of fear and bandaged eyes of ideologies.” With similar zeal Severo Sarduy eulogized Puig as the “strongest” of his generation, the one whose gift for parody enabled him to face, more squarely than any other writer, the daily tragedy of Latin America. Cesar Aira, one of Argentina’s more talented novelists today, considers Puig a mentor who made the novel more vividly a continuum of reality, a “fuller literary machine.” Beyond most novelists of his time, Puig could still generate engaging stories and interesting characters: he cleverly sideswiped the ennui of postmodernity in his resurrections of popular genres, and he also evaded the clichés of the Latin American novel (that is, magical realism) by affirming the everyday and not resorting to magician’s tricks.

Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, which depicts movies as fictions that transform lives, anticipated Bogdanovich’s Last Picture Show, Woody Allen’s Purple Rose of Cairo, Ettore Scola’s Le Bal, notably Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso, and certainly Fellini’s Fred and Ginger. And Valentín, the imprisoned guerrillero, was liberated by Molina’s tales of Hollywood before a glamour girl poster became the threshold to a man’s freedom in Stephen King’s story “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption.” Manuel Puig was a writer ahead of his time, whose fictions foretold that the total fiction machine—the media—would not only consume art as we have known it, but would absorb all that we call reality. Puig’s vision was ambiguous, or rather irreducible, and like those images or virtual existences he glimpsed in the fleeting, phantasmal experience of the movies: you return to the scene in a text by Puig you thought was there and it has vanished, as when you return to a moment you remember seeing in a movie, only to find that your memory was false. With a naughty wink to his readers, Puig was always one step ahead of his critics. And though the spider woman's bite was deadly, Molina survives.

Suzanne Jill Levine’s “Reading Manuel Puig: A Biographer’s View” first appeared in Context No 3.

Books by Manuel Puig in English Translation

Betrayed by Rita Hayworth

Blood of Requited Love

Buenos Aires Affair

Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages

Heartbreak Tango

Kiss of the Spider Woman

Pubis Angelical

Tropical Night Falling

The first time I clocked Sébastien Brebel’s name was while unpacking all of the boxes containing the bulk of Dalkey’s library. It was a name that was new to me, and caught my eye due to the fact he isn’t mentioned in any of Warren Motte’s books on new French literature—my go-to sources for information on the most exciting voices in contemporary French literature.

John never mentioned Brebel to me, but he did mention the translator: Jesse Anderson, whose novel, The Western Contingent, John was very excited to publish, referring to Anderson as a great writer and excellent translator.

I have read The Western Contingent (it’s great! I’ll run a sample from it later this week), and based on that—along with the piece below—I’m now very intrigued by Brebel . . . which is one of the points of CONTEXT magazine: generating interest in fascinating authors who have flown under the radar.

More to come on Jesse’s novel, but for now, here’s his piece introducing Brebel, who, as best as I can tell, has three books that haven’t been translated: Place forte (2011; mentioned below), Erre, erre (2021), and L’appartement (2023).

“Reading Sébastien Brebel” by Jesse Anderson

The world Sébastien Brebel presents in his fiction is a bleak one. Most of his characters have come to a point in their lives where existence has begun to seem either meaningless or overwhelming, and so, in a desperate attempt to make life bearable again, they find themselves obsessively engaged in some time-consuming endeavor. They tend to be isolated—physically, emotionally, or both—and their isolation is often crucially tied to the pursuit of their obsession. For Brebel, life is impossible without self-deception, and the most effective way to deceive oneself about the emptiness of life is to let consciousness be completely overtaken by some self-obliterating task.

This take on life can be seen in the opening pages of Brebel’s first book, Place forte, in the thoughts of a jaded notary driving aimlessly along a country road in western France:

Everyone’s life is comic, not vaguely or partially comic, but completely and radically comic, a hopeless comedy devoid of nuance.

And on the next page:

Because it’s not enough to simply act in the comedy, it’s also necessary to hide from ourselves that we’re acting, it’s necessary to render ourselves indifferent and perfectly ignorant, necessary to employ exorbitant intellectual and moral powers to hide our very own game from ourselves.

In Place forte, a nameless notary (unless there’s some humor or irony to be extracted, Brebel rarely reveals the names of his characters) accidentally hits a dog with his car. The injured dog gives the notary an opportunity to focus on something other than the morbid cycle of his thoughts; it offers temporary relief from the onslaught of existence, and the notary soon becomes obsessed with finding treatment for the animal. He finds a vet’s office in a small town, but the veterinarian’s wife is there alone: the veterinarian, she explains, has become obsessed with the mass extermination of cows in the region, where they’re currently in the midst of a bovine epidemic. He leaves the house each morning in a state of euphoria and returns home late each night delighted, looking forward to the next day’s slaughter. She can’t understand his change of mood, but in Brebel’s world there is nothing surprising about the veterinarian’s obsession. He has his cows, the notary has his injured dog; both have found respite from the vacuity of life.

The search for a veterinarian then leads to an isolated farm, where the notary finds himself at the scene of a suicide. Without a word of introduction, the farmer’s wife insists on recounting her story, which is, as one might expect, a story of obsession. What the notary and the vet have only dabbled in, the farmer perfected, living inside his dual obsession with farming and German literature. There are rarely permanent solutions in Brebel, and after several decades the veil the farmer had thrown over reality begins to tear. Suicide was his last available option.

Brebel’s second book, Francis Bacon’s Armchair, is his most elusive. While the familiar elements of obsession and isolation can be found throughout the novel, they serve as a backdrop rather than as the driving force of the story.

The book’s unnamed narrator has recently been released from an insane asylum and has decided to isolate himself in an eleventh-floor apartment in order to meditate and decide what to do next with his life. After several days of self-imposed isolation, the narrator becomes restless and rushes out of his apartment. He knocks on a door he feels instinctively drawn to, two floors down, where he has his first encounter with Sauvage, a morbidly obese translator who seems never to leave his armchair. Sauvage is in the process of translating The Dictionary of Rare and Incurable Diseases—he and the narrator share a preoccupation with illness—and through his work he has developed some discouraging opinions regarding language:

So many times, he says, he has felt the hopeless insufficiency of language, so many times he has described the terrible illness that hides behind each definition. Whether or not language is the bastardization of thought, he says, he is its first witness, the pure witness.

The limitations of language and the effects of language on reality are ideas that come up repeatedly throughout Francis Bacon’s Armchair. The narrator worries that “I might be misinterpreting the meaning of my own words, that what I think I’m saying is not what I’m saying in reality.” Later, while reflecting on Sauvage’s persistent silence, he thinks “it’s in silence that one must confide the secrets of one’s actions, whereas words can do only one thing: throw doubt upon the mind, corrupt the impact of our decisions.”

The narrator has the same relationship with reality as the reader does with the story. Both are mediated through language, but language is unreliable, unstable; both the reader’s experience and the narrator’s could ultimately be a delusion. It is significant that the narrator goes unnamed and that Sauvage’s name is so unfitting that he might as well be nameless. A name, after all, is how we are represented through language, and naming characters in a story about the futility of language would be hypocritical. By finishing his translation of the dictionary, the narrator says, “Sauvage had been cured of the word illness,” because to know something is “to no longer fear it.” To be cured of a word, at least in some limited way, get a hold of language and, in turn, of reality these are the ideas at the core of Francis Bacon’s Armchair.

Villa Bunker, Brebel’s third book, is narrated by an unnamed philosophy student whose parents have recently moved into an isolated seaside villa. He reconstructs their experiences in the house through letters sent to him by his mother.

For most of the book, there are only three characters in play. The plot unfolds almost entirely within the villa, giving the story a claustrophobic and constrained atmosphere. The villa’s interior is extremely complex and seems to change daily; rooms the couple is sure they’d been in one day appear to have completely transformed the next. As the weeks pass, the nature of the villa—and of reality—becomes increasingly difficult for the narrator’s mother and father to grasp. Communication between them breaks down and the mother, already isolated with her husband in the villa, begins to feel her solitude even more acutely. But her take on isolation is complicated. Writing to her son about the terrifying sound made by waves crashing below the villa, a sound which seems to disappear when she wakes up, she says:

. . . I feel much better in fact, almost relieved, writes my mother, I can imagine the villa is located in the middle of the desert, in the midst of a desolate landscape, out of reach, I can convince myself that the villa is in no way threatened by the waves; we’re in the middle of nowhere, a barren expanse, sand stretches as far as the eye can see, and the silence is total; for days on end, the crashing sound disappears and a worrying silence, perhaps just as terribly heavy and oppressive, pervades the place in its absence.

The relief the mother feels by imagining the villa even more isolated than it already is, “in the midst of a desolate landscape, out of reach,” quickly morphs into another source of anxiety, one that may be “just as terribly heavy and oppressive” as the waves. An initially comforting thought has been turned inside out and revealed to be as frightening as what prompted it. Similar types of inversion occur frequently throughout Brebel’s fiction.

As the story proceeds, the narrator’s father becomes increasingly obsessed with the villa’s renovation and ends up locking himself away, in a room at the top of one of the villa’s towers. The mother, left on her own in the immense structure, pursues her own obsession. Gardening starts out well but, like the comforting thought of the villa in the desert, soon turns on her:

She’d developed a hypersensitivity to smells, and she’d begun to fear that each plant’s fragrance was delivering a coded message, the toxicity of which was growing by the day, or perhaps hour. It wasn’t long before the sight of the lush indoor plants had become a negative influence . . .

The narrator himself has his own obsession, a dissertation on Foucault, “an idée fixe that had wound up killing any sympathy I might’ve had for the world, and which in the end had cut me off from the world.”

Toward the end of the book, the house finally offers the mother a potential distraction (and obsession) in the form of an unexpected visitor, and the mother soon succeeds in drawing consolation from her discovery. But, of course, she should be wary of her own motivations. As the narrator reminds us early on in the novel, and as Sébastien Brebel makes clear throughout his fiction: “Self-deception is the goal of every undertaking.”

Brebel’s most recent book, A Perfect Disharmony, is a collection of stories, but the book maintains a fluidity of mood and atmosphere that at times makes it feel more like a novel. Every story centers on either a woman or a man’s obsession with a woman, and certain details are repeated throughout the book, adding to the collection’s sense of unity. As in Brebel’s earlier books, isolation and obsession propel most of the stories, but what is most worthy of attention in A Perfect Disharmony isn’t its themes but its experimentations with form—indeed, the book serves as a healthy reminder to Anglophone readers of the versatility of the short story.

The stories in A Perfect Disharmony contain only limited amounts of action. Brebel fills his stories with details, returning only sporadically to the situation presented at the beginning of the story. At first glance, many of the details could be considered superfluous to the story, but it is through the accumulation of these details that the character’s limited action in the story takes on great significance for the reader. Here’s a passage typical of A Perfect Disharmony:

She’s lost her interest in the seasons, in trees and in rainbows, she doesn’t think about how old she is. She remembers that when she arrived here there were other houses in the area, but she doesn’t wonder what’s become of their occupants. For the most part, she’s uninterested in her past. She experiences no desire to express her thoughts or to be listened to. When she talks in her sleep she says words whose strange beauty would astonish her.

Brebel’s details tend to have an unforced quality about them that, in turn, gives his stories a strong sense of naturalism; they feel like random thoughts crossing a character's mind or the disinterested observations of a third party, not the contrived details of a writer trying to push forward a plot. Brebel also gives a great deal of attention to his characters’ imaginations, to their dreams, daydreams, and fantasies—things that many writers would dismiss as aimless digressions. By allowing these detours into his characters’ minds to take over the narration, Brebel gives his characters a dimension of complexity absent from most fiction.

“Reading Sébastien Brebel” by Jesse Anderson in CONTEXT No. 25. Brebel’s three books translated by Jesse Anderson into English—Francis Bacon’s Armchair, A Perfect Disharmony, and Villa Bunker—along with Jesse Anderson’s novel, The Western Contingent, are all available from Bookshop.org and better bookstores everywhere.

I did eventually become friends with Greg Beech, bonding over, of all things, Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino, and the—at that time—recent reissue of The Third Policeman by Flann O’Brien.

Honestly, I don’t remember if CONTEXT played a role in bringing us together, but we did set aside all new arrivals from Dalkey Archive so that we could pick them over before they got shelved, and, coincidentally, the first article to ever appear in CONTEXT—setting the tone for the ensuing 24 issues—was by Gilbert Sorrentino on Flann O’Brien.

Before getting to that, here’s a quick rundown of what else was in the inaugural issue:

R. M. Berry on “Reading Beckett’s Fiction”

Brian Lennon on “Reading Diane Williams”

Joseph Tabbi on “Reading David Markson”

John Barth, “‘The Parallels!’—Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges”

Ford Madox Ford, “Chaucer the Story Teller” from The March of Literature

Flann O’Brien from At Swim-Two-Birds

Henry James from The Art of Fiction

Etienne Gilson from The Arts of the Beautiful

Viktor Shklovsky, “The Novel as Parody” from Theory of Prose (Sher translation)

William Carlos Williams from Spring and All

Curtis White, “Saving Private Ryan: Don’t Try to Do No Thinkin’!”

Anne Burke, “Reviewing the Reviewers”

Martin Riker, “Review of Literary Magazines” (Marty reviewed McSweeney’s)

Michael Bérubé, “Days Off”

John Kulka, “The Polish Complex”

Editors’ Picks: Gerald Howard on “Stephen Amidon’s The New City” and Robert Dreesen on “Michael Faber’s Under the Skin”

University and Bookstore Advisors for CONTEXT

Reading Guides (which includes lists for “Literary Worlds All Students Should Have Read,” “Most Influential Critical Books of the Twentieth Century,” “Most Influential Novels of the Twentieth Century,” “The Twentieth Century Novels Students Most Like, “The Pre-Twentieth Century Novels that Most Influenced the Twentieth Century Novel,” and “Novels That Will Be Considered the Most Important Literary Works of the Twentieth Century in the Year 2100.”

Booksellers (every store that had agreed to stock CONTEXT for interested patrons)

and this ad:

which was very much an homage to Apple’s slogan of the time:

but, to be fair, is still a solid slogan and something I wish more readers did?

Anyway, at some point soon, I’ll run some of those lists—to see how they play in 2025—along with “Anne Burke’s” articles. (There is a larger series on the horizon that these pieces ties into.)

But for now, let’s bring together two foundational Dalkey authors in one essay.

“Reading Flann O’Brien” by Gilbert Sorrentino

Flann O’Brien is one of the half-dozen or so greatest comic writers in the English language of this or any other century, the equal of such geniuses of comedy as Sterne, Joyce, Beckett, Waugh, and Firbank. His mastery of comedic prose, its nuances, tropes, and subversions, is of such high degree that the merest gesture of his stylistic hand can turn a sentence or phrase from its course as sober conveyor of information to sabotager and ridiculer of that same information. Done the right way (and O’Brien invariably does it the right way), such writing can virtually collapse referential material and transform it into brilliant constellations of devastating hilarity. Little can stand before comedy of such purity, comedy so intensely focused and authoritative that it rises above ideology, factionalism, religion, and the bloated niceties of propaganda and “right thinking.” Inventors, or if you please, marshals of such anarchic laughter are dangerous people indeed, informed, as they are, by love, hatred, and, above all, perhaps, a salutary shame for the human species and its ridiculous pettinesses and pretensions.

I think that O’Brien was fearful of or apprehensive about these extraordinary comic gifts, even as he permitted them to flourish, and flourish most notably, in his two greatest books, At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman. It's impossible to know or even to guess at whether this fear was caused by the classically Irish, macabre nature of the works themselves (both novels are cruel at their core, and many of their most deliciously risible scenes, conversations, and set pieces are rooted in pain, anguish, ignominy, humiliation, and death); or whether his very being as a comic artist was one he could not or would not change, lest such change damage his lavishly inventive psychology. Put simply, if, perhaps, reductively: Did he fear his books or did he fear the talent that created them? Whatever the case, he, arguably, attempted to protect himself, to shield himself from his own work, at once to own and disown it. At Swim-Two-Birds brusquely avoids its eerie logical conclusion—the assault upon and possible erasure of its primary creator, the writer himself—and The Third Policeman was, remarkably, repressed by its author during his lifetime (behind the preposterous, trumped-up story of the supposed loss of the supposed single copy of the manuscript), appearing soon after he was safely dead. The Dalkey Archive, a “re-vision” of The Third Policeman, and published during O’Brien’s lifetime, has, not facetiously, in my view, a dedication to “my Guardian Angel, impressing upon him that I’m only fooling and warning him to see to it that there is no misunderstanding when I go home.” I see this novel as a non-sinister apologia for the unearthly terrors of The Third Policeman, as well as a barrier between the latter and O’Brien; and the charge to his Guardian Angel has to do with the suppressed text, for which The Dalkey Archive was but a surrogate.

O’Brien believed that fiction is not far removed from life, that it is, in a sense, another kind of life, separate from the mundane by the thinnest of walls. He would have been, I suspect, highly amused, in his slashing, merciless way, at the claims to truth made by solemn, didactic, and “transgressive” memoirists. I don’t mean, it should go without saying, that he harbored the innocent notion that will have the page famously mirroring the world, and that the more precisely representative the mirrored image, the closer we are to life. Joyce, with his precise detonations and subversions of specific locations, mores, events, and speech, with his straightforward retelling of the Facts—his realism, that is, that pulls its house down around itself—taught O'Brien (and everybody else who was paying attention) that such a notion was no more than a literary shibboleth. O’Brien’s sense of the presence of the porous wall between what is here and what the writer makes to add to it was sophisticated and not a little spooky.

It would seem that in O’Brien’s world, that which occurs within the confines of a book can “bleed” out of the book’s pages and perform, in three dimensions, here in the actual space of the material world. It is as if the myriad signs of the book exist not only as the markers that can never represent or approximate the actual, but that can also—in a moment of authorial carelessness or even exuberance—escape from the book, shed their lives as signs, and become substantial, become, that is, the things that they had only pointed at. And when, as in At Swim-Two-Birds, the characters of the book are writers, storytellers, fabulists, bullshit artists of every stripe—linguistic magicians of one sort or another—their power to influence reality becomes enormous. And this, as I’ve suggested, frightened O’Brien in the odd, superstitious way that writers are often frightened by their work. It may be that literature is the last profession for which training does not equip its practitioners to understand its power over them: hence writers’ reliance on hunches, talismans, coincidences, luck. It wasn’t merely Brian O’Nolan’s frivolity or eccentricity that effected his concealment of himself behind such names as Flann O’Brien, Myles na Gopaleen, George Knowall, and, even as a student, Brother Barnabas. “I didn’t write this stuff!” one might imagine O’Nolan saying (to his Guardian Angel). And, in a certain odd but profound way, O’Nolan never wrote anything.

As I’ve noted, the ending of At Swim-Two-Birds is sudden and unexpected, although I can’t for a moment imagine what a “satisfactory” ending might look like. The mysterious and beautiful virtuoso prose of the last three pages comprise, I would argue, a coda that is outside of the novel’s narrative of web-like and multi-planed concerns. That book ends with the destroying fire which brings to a close the various existences of the invented writers who might well have succeeded, such was their power, in calling into question the very fact of O’Nolan’s existence; or, perhaps more potently, written him off as a creator.

In At Swim-Two-Birds, we are proffered, then, a dizzying proposition: any fictitious character can be made into a writer, who, in turn, can create his own fictitious characters who are writers, and so on. And there is nothing to prevent—so the machinery of the novel posits one of these characters from hitting on the idea of writing the ultimate creator of the book (O’Nolan/O’Brien) into another fictitious character, distorting the work beyond recognition. That the “prime mover” of the text might do this himself and to himself is of little moment: writers, as a regular practice, use their work to comfort, soothe, excite, entertain, amuse, and flay themselves. There is, indeed, a cure for such possible distortion of the text—its destruction. Get rid of the book and the writer cannot be at its mercy.

O’Brien didn’t destroy his book, but he made certain that the novel’s major writer, the lazy and sullen student of literary bent who creates Dermot Trellis (a nicely exaggerated surrogate for the student, and himself a sullen writer), is left without the book that we have been reading. It is suddenly burned in a stove by Trellis’s servant. It’s very much to the point that this fiery destruction of the text occurs—if you will bear with me for a brief excursion into vertigo—not within the frame text created by O’Brien, but within the frame text created by O’Brien’s student writer; and that the servant who does the burning is Trellis’s servant, Trellis being, as the reader, of course, knows, the writer who has created characters who exist in yet another frame also inhabited by Orlick Trellis, Dermot’s son, who has been born out of wedlock as a fully grown, wholly developed, adult writer who hates his father.

O’Brien, shielded from the dangers of his own fiction by a pen name, strengthens that shield by placing even the obliteration of his narrative at two further removes from himself, viz., Dermot/the student/O’Brien/O’Nolan. The burning of the text, that is, occurs within a fiction that O’Brien’s fictitious writer has created; and O’Brien is himself a fiction created by O’Nolan.

This is a magical book, a book of great risk and danger, and O’Brien would never attempt anything like it again, since, I believe, the “solution” to such a book must have been, for him, always the same: to get rid of the thing before it could get rid of him. The Third Policeman presents a circular hell filled with demons and the dead, a hell of terrible adventures and stygian comedy. But it has a single narrator and the terrors of the novel are rigidly contained in its circular form: there is no vertical movement apparent in the text, and the magnificently loony footnotes are encrustations, not new levels, of story.

Hugh Kenner says that O’Brien was “somehow scared” of this latter novel, suggesting that this may have been so because of the fact that there is no Satan in O’Brien’s hell, this absence calling the existence of God into question. The implication here is that the book frightened O’Brien because of its odor of blasphemy, if not heresy. This may well have been so, but I can’t quite agree with Kenner, who calls At Swim-Two-Birds “a preternaturally gifted student’s jape,” and praises The Third Policeman at its expense. I think that such fears that O’Brien may have felt because of the possible religious transgressions of his book of the damned were, indeed, religious fears. It can be argued, and I would argue it, that the phony disappearance of the text was its author’s penance for its impieties, real or suspected. O’Brien distanced it from himself by refusing to allow it existence. But At Swim-Two-Birds is distanced from its author by a radical act of formal literary violence.

Basically, The Third Policeman was a book that was “possible” for O’Brien to write, despite its flirtation with Manichaeism; while At Swim-Two-Birds was the book that was “no longer wonderful but terrible,” as the dead hero of The Third Policeman says of the demon policeman, MacCruiskeen’s, creation of intricately fashioned chests, one of which is said to be smaller than a bigger chest which is itself too small to be described. The hero says, “I shut my eyes and prayed that he would stop while still doing things that were at least possible for a man to do.”

This piece appeared in CONTEXT magazine in 1999, and is collected in Sorrentino’s Something Said, which contains seventy-two essays on a range of authors, including William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Edward Dahlbert, Coleman Dowell, Paul Bowles, Italo Calvino, David Antin, Robert Creeley, John Hawkes, and more.

So for today, we have this interview John conducted with Susana Medina that originally appeared in CONTEXT No. 25. Born in England, but raised in Valencia, Spain (before going back to London as a teenager), Susana is the author of several works, including Borgesland, Red Tales, Souvenirs of the Accident, Chunks of One, and Rebel, Rebel: An Emergency Dialogue (with Roc Sandford), and, of course, Philosophical Toys, which came out from Dalkey Archive in 2015, and is being reissued this month (July 2025).

Her writing has been praised by the likes of Deborah Levy (“Susana Medina is a genius!”), Will Self (“A prose both spare and lush, a commendable tension about the enterprise.”), Steward Home (“[Red Tales] will come as a total shock to mummy porn fans—E. L. James meets J. G. Ballard! Makes both writing and BDSM dangerous once again. Eat your heart out, literary establishment.”), and many others.

In terms of Philosophical Toys, here’s the jacket copy:

Nina, a drifter from southern Spain, comes to London in search of experience, only to find that the strangest of stories is hiding in her father's loft in Almería . . .

A playfully concocted, fast-paced novel committed to the irresistible pleasure of reading, both a celebration and a critique of our relationship to objects (from fetishes, to curios, to commodities, to objectum sexuality, to our becoming cyborgs through our addiction to technology), Philosophical Toys travels through different times, countries and experiences as chance leads Nina to encounter time and again the enigmatic nature of things, which end up transforming her into that most rare of species: a female philosopher.

Witty and elegiac, Philosophical Toys takes the reader on a tour of fetishism, late capitalist culture, Buñuel’s films, psychoanalysis, Alzheimer's disease, as well as the avatars of belonging to two cultures, an experience increasingly shared by myriad expatriates.

John and Susana were quite close, and met up whenever John was in London. Personally, I’ve met Susana twice. Both times she appeared on the street in front of me during the London Book Fair. The first time, I didn’t recognize her at all—although she knew me from a picture online, maybe of me holding a cat?—the second time she left a rather sexy lipstick kiss on my cheek1 that I was unaware of for at least an hour . . . Both times, she was incredibly fun to talk to and I could totally see how and why she and John became close friends.

And why John wanted to publish Philosophical Toys. And why he wanted to do this interview.

Informal interview about Philosophical Toys, Susana Medina

John O’Brien: I don't quite know how to ask you this. I've told you that your novel reads as though it could be a memoir, but you have said that it is largely not autobiographical. Did you have the memoir genre in mind? Did you want it to read as memoir? I will point to just one scene in particular: when your character is stopped at Customs because of the collection of her mother's shoes. That reads like memoir (to my mind, at least).

Susana Medina: No, I didn’t have the memoir genre in mind. I rarely read memoirs, although, of course, there are plenty of first person narratives out there. All fiction contains inevitably autobiographical material. Anecdotes, experiences, anxieties, something you once heard suddenly crops up in the narrative, because that’s how memory works. It’s interesting how memory unearths things through context, place, word-association, emotional resonance . . . The permutations the creative mind tends to perform make the end result unrecognizable as autobiography. Emotional memory is interesting. Someone says something and if it makes an imprint in your memory, it’s because it was emotionally loaded. A character is a composite or it might develop into an extension of what someone you know could have been, or done, in your mind. Most of the ingredients that make up a character might not be real, but the flavor is.

As I wasn’t writing in my native language, I thought the narrator had to be non-English. Thus, Nina, the Spanish narrator was created as an alibi, and it gave the narrative another layer, which was to do with language. All this is pretty autobiographical, I’d say, and might give it the flavor of a memoir, but it’s blended with sheer fiction . . . I tend to write about places I haven’t been to . . . it’s more exciting . . . except for London.

That scene at the airport is fictional. I thought of the shoe collection as a metaphor for the baggage we inherit from our parents and how it affects our lives. The shoe collection becomes baggage straightaway and starts traveling. It becomes trouble straightaway, as it takes up a lot of space and she’s besieged by it in her small flat . . . I think that the baggage that we inherit we first experience as obstacles, until you learn to be your own person . . . Of course, over the years, I’ve had to move around different flats and countries with boxes full of books . . . So, in a way, the experience with all these boxes full of shoes, it’s the experience I’ve had with boxes full of books . . . Shoes are leather-bound stories . . .

JOB: Why are women philosophers so rare? You opened the gate to this question, and so I am walking through it.

SM: History cannot be undone in just one century. As everyone very well knows, social order is not founded on reason, but on a series of interests, and gender inequality is still a worldwide problem. Anyone with a modicum of intelligence, cannot but be perplexed at how History has excluded women from so many fields. The western canon echoes this exclusion, in some fields more acutely than others. It’s interesting philosophy should be one of those fields. Any thinker could have written at length about the absence of women from History, but it is, of course, women, who have found that absence most bewildering. Female thinkers, artists, writers, scientists have to deal with this absence, something most male thinkers are not overly concerned with. Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings took over two centuries to be digested. We have mainly twentieth century female philosophers: Weil, Arendt, Luxemburg, de Beauvoir, Zambrano, Kristeva, Cixous, Irigaray, Sontag . . . Most female thinkers have tended to veer towards feminism and social activism, because that’s the area where work was most needed, and many put their thought into practice by trying to improve the social condition of women—and men, because we are all in it—thus becoming above all social actors or commentators—like Greer, Paglia, Klein. Another reason might be that as there is such an emphasis on what women look like, women have felt pressed to articulate their views on their sexuality and bodies from their own perspective. This is by no means the only subject women thinkers write about, but sadly, whereas female readers read independently of gender, most male readers tend to only read pieces written by men. This is still a problem, not only for female philosophers but for female writers too.

Also, many female thinkers are interdisciplinary, or hard to categorize, often not delimiting themselves to one genre. As new disciplines like psychoanalysis, anthropology, semiotics started to be incorporated into intellectual inquiry about reality, perhaps the word ‘philosopher’ wasn’t applicable anymore. It depends on your definition of it, but female thinkers feel more comfortable in this new soup.

Recently, there was this article in The Guardian (Jan. 2015): “Philosophy is for posh, white boys with trust funds”—why are there so few women? . . . Over 70% of philosophers in UK universities are men. So, it’s still perceived as a problem . . . Though I think female philosophers have migrated to other fields where they can be more hybrid . . . more concrete . . . Of course, money, and trust funds, enable all genders to do all sorts of things . . . It’s just so wonderful when they’re used for utopian purposes, to help others.

JOB: How long did the novel take you to write?

SM: The first draft took me over two years and I was already working on a pre-existing developed outline. Luckily, when I did my MA in Hispanic Studies, I was “allowed” to do a creative project, so that was the very first sketchy outline for my novel. I worked on fetishism and Buñuel. I had lost all my hearing (I struggled with sudden hearing loss for three years) and had a cochlear implant operation. I was so excited about hearing again, about being a bionic woman. I wanted to ration solitary work. I started a PhD on Borges—It was kind of therapy—so I’d have some social interaction, and went out a lot. I worked on the novel on and off for five years, adding layers of thought and changing a word here and there, with lots of things and projects happening between one draft and the next. I made two short films: Buñuel’s Philosophical Toys and Leather-bound Stories (co-directed with Derek Ogbourne). As I wrote the script for the later and we made the film, I added to the novel fragments as well as an extra frame which is the structural device in the film: the red notebook.

JOB: What were the biggest challenges for you in writing this?

SM: The biggest challenge was to switch from writing in Spanish to writing in English. Writing in English was an experiment. I had to work with linguistic limitations. Rather than working on the language itself, I thought I had to make good use of other devices such as rhythm, ideas, plot and structure.

Another big challenge was that after I finished the first drafts, my dad was diagnosed with vascular dementia, echoing the ill father I had written about in Philosophical Toys . . . So every time I went back to the manuscript to edit this and that I became more and more conscious of what was happening to him. So, editing became painful, because at all times, it brought about my father’s reality, which was rather different, and very real . . . It was like, in some ways, I was re-enacting my novel . . . going back to Spain to look after him . . . and that made me look more after him and become closer, which was good. I suppose the ill father and the trips in the novel where there as a manifestation of a fear I didn’t know I had. It foretold the future.

JOB: There are several references to her sexual experiences, but these are only references. But there is little in the book about them. Reason?

SM: I thought it was more interesting that way, as it’s up to the reader to imagine. Nina, who’s rather bashful here and there, is mainly dealing with ideas, and the references to her own sexuality are deliberately vague, funny, and revealing. Somewhere she says she’s a knowledge fetishist. What if her own sexuality is inextricably linked with exploring all these ideas? Knowledge and learning are intimately linked to pleasure, our libidinal energies aren’t limited to physical acts. Her voyeuristic imagination makes her wonder about her parents’ sexuality. I thought there was something naughty and humorous in this, and saw it as kind of part of her own sexuality . . . Also, Red Tales, my previous book, contained explicit sex . . . so, I didn’t feel the urge to write about it in an explicit way. In Philosophical Toys, many things are intentionally second-hand . . . at one remove . . .

This interview originally appeared in CONTEXT Magazine No. 25 circa 2015. Philosophical Toys is available via Bookshop.org and better bookstores everywhere.

1

Proof!

Of all the members of the Nouveau Roman,1 many of which Dalkey Archive/Open Letter has published (Alain Robbe-Grillet, Robert Pinget, Claude Ollier, Claude Simon, Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Jean Ricardou), Nathalie Sarraute is one of my absolute favorites, which led to reissuing three of her books in the early 2000s—The Planetarium (now a Dalkey Essential), Martereau, and Do You Hear Them?

In contrast to most of the other French New Novelists, Sarraute’s work tends to be more internally focused, employing her idea of “Tropisms” (illustrated in the book of the same name) in which the clear depiction of a character’s surroundings and situation delineate—for the reader—their emotional state without Sarraute having to laboriously explain how the character is feeling. It’s an incredibly effective technique, in my opinion, and as a result, many see her books as being more engaging and less cerebral than some of the other New Novelists.

Anyway, as Barbara explains, she replaced Maria Jolas as Nathalie Sarraute’s (1900–1999) translator, working on many of her later books, such as Childhood, You Don’t Love Yourself, and The Use of Speech. And what follows is a piece she wrote about meeting and working with Sarraute.

Enjoy!

“Nathalie Sarraute and England”

It was she who taught us that it was impossible ever to categorize, classify, pigeonhole anything whatsoever. That every human being is made up of infinite facets, and that it is therefore totally idiotic for us to believe we can say of someone: “That’s the way he is (was).”

So what can I say about her that is not idiotic?

I can tell anecdotes. I can also say how she was with me, her translator. And I can describe how, together, we produced her English translations. I have always insisted that the English publisher should print: “Translated . . . in consultation with the author,” because there is always a great deal of her in the final result. Just as well.

I wouldn’t dare speak of her intellectual qualities but, obviously, they were omnipresent. And they were always surrounded and accompanied by her sense of humor. She was kind, friendly, accessible, simple, amusing, witty, sympathetic . . . She was interested in everybody—I can’t say “from the greatest to the most humble,” because that was not the way she saw human beings. The word “hierarchy” didn’t seem to be in her vocabulary.

Naturally I knew her by sight, and had heard her speak, a long time before I came to know her properly. Nathalie Sarraute quite often came to England to give lectures, and I always went to listen to her. Everyone knows that she adored England, the English, the English language, . . . and she always made this very clear. She was regularly invited to lecture at our French Institute, and I always noticed that the moment she came into the hall and started to walk up to the platform, it was as if the whole audience had fallen in love with her. She came surrounded by her own ambience, and we felt we were welcome in it. She was a born orator—although when she spoke in public, it was just as if she were chatting to you and me.

In this context, here is an example of her kindness. Quite some time ago, there at the French Institute, Nathalie was speaking about her books. When questions were solicited, an unfortunate young man stood up and asked her what she had had in mind when she was writing Jealousy. . . . The whole audience held its collective breath. . . . The lecturer, with a charming smile—no indignation, no scorn—simply replied, as if she regretted it: “That is not one of my books.”

Still before I knew her, a literary magazine sent me to interview her—after yet another lecture at the Institute—and one Saturday afternoon I went to see her there, in the flat where she was spending the weekend with her husband, Raymond. That was where I heard from her own mouth how much she loved our country, and even why. This was before she had written Childhood, so it was only later that I read in that marvelous book her account of how her passion began. Her stepmother, Véra, engaged a series of English girls as governesses for her own daughter, Lili.

They were to teach Lili English, but Véra insisted that Lili should be the only one to benefit from this privilege.

“Few of them managed to hold out for long in this ‘hot seat,’” Nathalie was to write later of these badly-treated “Misses.” But they all made friends with Natasha and were only too happy to speak English with her when her stepmother was not there. “Especially in the evenings,” she wrote in Childhood (1983):

When Véra and my father had gone out, we came together, these lonely young English girls and I, in their room near mine . . . which had the advantage of being closer to the front door . . . from there it was easier to hear the sounds on the stairs, the street door closing, the steps coming up . . . they stop on the landing . . . the key fumbles in the lock, it’s going to open . . . I must tear myself away from the joy of listening to this language, of trying to speak it myself, of discovering through the delightful nursery rhymes and the little children’s books intended for Lili, a country in which everything charms me, awakens tenderness, nostalgia in me too . . . but there isn’t a moment to lose, I take to my heels and close my door quietly . . .

A few years later, still in Paris, Nathalie took a degree in English. After that she managed to persuade her father to let her go to Oxford to study, and she spent a year there reading history at Saint Anne’s. Right up to the end of her life, recalling that happy year, she spoke of England as an “earthly paradise.” And it must have been at Oxford that she made such a determined effort to get used to our incredible English “cuisine” that in the end she came to love it. Not to say to adore it . . .

That too she told me when I was interviewing her. She had put me so much at my ease that when I left her I had no hesitation in rushing off to the nearest supermarket and buying disgusting things like Bird’s Custard and Porridge Oats, and going back and discreetly depositing them outside the door of the illustrious Institute. I heard some time later that they had reached her and was reassured to be told that this little episode had amused her as much as it amused me.

Right. Two or three years later, the publisher John Calder suggested to Maria Jolas, who was the last living Paris member of James Joyce’s circle, that rather than “waste her time” translating, she would do better to write her memoirs. And he asked me to take over from her as Nathalie Sarraute’s English translator. I won’t even try to describe my reaction to this suggestion. . . . But Nathalie understood it at once.

(Parenthesis: Alas, Maria Jolas only got up to 1922 in her memoirs. . . .)

It’s the oldest cliché in the world—the notion that every conscientious translator who loves his trade aspires to produce “what the author would have written if he had written his text in the target language.” The fact that it is a cliché doesn’t bother me a lot, though, because I feel it is exactly what everyone should aim at. Nathalie immediately saw that that was what I was going to try to give her, and she was pleased. Nevertheless, while she was indeed often satisfied with the finished translation, she herself, as I have already said, had a great deal to do with it.

I was never able to persuade her that she could—almost—have made her own English translations. She loved the language so much that she had acquired a profound knowledge of it, with all its nuances and eccentricities. . . . She read it with ease, she listened regularly to the BBC radio, and she spoke it fluently. She did have a slight accent, of course, although everyone agreed that it was charming. She would never believe this, though, and was always reluctant to talk English with people who were supposed to speak French.

Thus she was the translator’s perfect author. I should add that while I have almost without exception had kind, patient help from “my” authors, with Nathalie it was something else. She really did care passionately that her translations should be as if she had written them herself, the way she imagined them, the way she heard them. Everything she wrote was poetry, so every effort had to be made to reproduce its musicality. For Nathalie, every word, every phrase, every cadence, counted. In every language.

It didn’t take us long to invent our way of working. That’s to say, it somehow established itself. The first texts of hers that I translated were fairly short: the play It Is There and the essays collection The Use of Speech, so it was no problem for me simply to go to the Avenue Pierre ler de Serbie and read them aloud to her, while she followed with the French text. When there was something she didn’t like or wasn’t sure about, she would stop me, and we would discuss it. Very often it turned out to be a passage that I myself was not very happy with: I’ll come back to that. But when it happened to be something that I was pretty sure I had gotten right and could say why, I would tell her, and she would never argue. She never sought to impose anything on me. She even said: “You’re the boss.”

For both of us, nothing counted but the text. That’s to say: when we started working. Before that, everything counted, everything that exists in the world. I was fairly stunned when I realized that she was interested in me too—that she saw me not as a simple translating machine but as a fellow human being. . . .

So this is how it was. I arrive. Nathalie opens the door to me and greets me warmly. (I must put in a parenthesis here: twice she opened the door to me with an Anthony Trollope [in English] in her hand, and asked me to excuse her while she finished a paragraph, it was so fascinating. . . .) (And a further parenthesis: that was how I now have so many Trollope books that they are falling out of the bookshelves—whereas before, I had never read him. . . .)

. . . Nathalie opens the door to me. Latterly, we went straight to her bedroom, which was where she liked to work. (It was only in the very last years of her life that she gave up her little morning walk to work in her favorite café in the Avenue Marceau.) Then it was gossip (amusing).

Laughter, offers of vodka or whisky, cigarettes, exchanges of opinions, enquiries about our respective families. At some moment, we decide to work. And there, everything changes. With hindsight, I can see that it was an almost brutally dramatic change, but at the time it was automatic and couldn’t have seemed more normal and natural. Not that Nathalie became the mistress and I the servant, nothing of the sort, but we both became the servants of the text. And we behaved as such; we became totally serious.

But when we took a break, presto!—everything changed again. Always within the framework of my respect for her, we laughed and joked, made fun of the self-important people of this world, almost became irresponsible schoolgirls. . . .

And here, I want to state that Nathalie was never an old lady. At the end of her life all the critics vied with each other to be the one who praised her new books the most highly, but not one of them ever failed to start his review with: “Now well into her nineties . . . ,” with variations. She merely shrugged her shoulders at it—she had been used to such irrelevances for decades. But for my part, it infuriated me. Talk about categorizing, classifying, pigeonholing, stereotyping. Talk about condescension, to say nothing of ageism. . . . It was pathetic. Threadbare, banal, idiotic. And what on earth did her age have to do with her writings?

There were three possible results of our translation discussions: 1) We found the solution together; 2) I suddenly found it; 3) Nathalie came up with it on her own.

Only three or four years ago she spent a weekend in England to fulfill various engagements, the most important of which was an interview, once again at the French Institute, in its theater. Presiding over the evening was Ann Jefferson, professor at Oxford, contributor to the Pléiade edition of Sarraute’s (almost) complete works, and friend of Nathalie—in short, the perfect choice. Also on the platform, of course, was Monsieur the French cultural attaché, but this amiable gentleman didn’t think that that was sufficient entourage for the star of the evening, so he forced me (yes, forced is not really too strong a word) to join them there. Disaster! Everyone knows that I hate appearing in public, maybe for the simple reason that I’m no good at it, I never know what to say, I was never taught, I am not an academic. However, I climbed up on to the platform bravely, I sat down as far behind the others as possible, I made myself as small as I could, while doing my best to look perfectly at my ease, so as not to get noticed. . . . What a hope! The moment came when Monsieur the (amiable?) cultural attaché politely shoved the mike under my nose, turned to the audience and said: “And Barbara, the translator, what has she to tell us?”

All that the translator could find to tell them was what she had already told her friends a thousand and one times—how we worked together, and the three possible results of our discussions. But when I arrived at number three—that Nathalie alone would find the solution—something like an electrical discharge flashed through the air. I thought Nathalie was going to jump out of her chair. . . . She almost yelled: “WHAT! I! I found solutions IN ENGLISH?! Not possible! Never!”

Whereupon all my inhibitions left me, all I could do was contradict her, and me too I almost yelled, I insisted that oh yes you did, don’t you remember, that happened lots and lots of times. . . . We stared at each other for a moment—and then we both burst out laughing. And the audience laughed with us.

At that same evening there was a very touching incident. George Steiner, sitting in the front row, stood up and said, very briefly and in a voice full of emotion, for a long time he had been wanting to tell Madame Sarraute the inspiration she and her writing had represented for him ever since he was a student. And then he sat down.

I know very well that Nathalie was often full of anguish . . .

I know equally well that she was also often full of joy . . .

I have so many pictures of her in my head, so many anecdotes . . .

I was with her in Oxford three or four times. . . . When she was made a Fellow of her college . . . When she was the guest of honor at the Oxford Maison Française . . . When she was made a Doctor Honoris Causa in 1991. . . This took place in a really extra-super-British ceremony, that’s to say there were lots of very dignified elderly gentlemen moving around in a very old, very beautiful building in episcopal robes (or as near as makes no difference), with the elderly gentleman number one standing at the far end of the central aisle, his back to the altar (or what represented it), and little Natalie, splendid in her academic robes, standing a little lower down in the same aisle, facing the master of ceremonies and waiting for what was going to happen next. What came next was a longish discourse (in Latin), praising her merits. . . .

They had thoughtfully placed a chair for the “elderly lady” just behind her, but the elderly lady didn’t even deign to notice it and stood all the time. For the first time in my life I had been assigned a seat among the Elite, so I had a wonderful view. And from where I sat I could have sworn that Nathalie had some difficulty in keeping her face straight. . . .

Which is absolutely not to say that she wasn’t extraordinarily pleased, extraordinarily moved by being honored in this way. And she was even more moved because it was her beloved Oxford that was acknowledging her. . . .

She was always so happy there. She went everywhere, she spoke to everyone. . . . Recently she was talking to a porter of one of the colleges and telling him of her memories, and he asked her politely: “And in what year was that, Madame?” When she replied, “In 1920,” he exclaimed: “Oh, my dear!” She was delighted with this exchange.

In her later years, she liked to have someone to accompany her when she traveled, and this someone was almost always her youngest daughter Dominique, the photographer. By some miracle, Dominique always managed to free herself from her work to accompany her mother, and often, when I went to meet them in London before a lecture or a play, they waited for me in a hotel foyer. We shouldn’t forget that Dominique had her photographic studio in Nathalie’s big apartment in the Avenue Pierre ler de Serbie, so mother and daughter saw each other every day. Yes but, without exception, when I finally spotted them, they were always engaged in an animated conversation, sometimes in gales of laughter. . . .

Two or three years ago, in one of the pauses in our working sessions, Nathalie adopted a very serious look and asked me if I would be prepared to do her a great favor. Oh là là! Naturally I would do anything. And the favor?—Would I be really kind and talk English to her? She would be so pleased. . . .

But the pleasure was mine—it was so much easier! From time to time I would forget, but soon remember again, and then she would redouble her thanks.

If her father hadn’t insisted on her going back to France after the year of paradise in Oxford, she may well have spent her life in England. That was what she thought she wanted to do at the time, but Alas!—if she had, I very much doubt whether she would have become the real Nathalie.

“Nathalie Sarraute and England” by Barbara Wright originally appeared in CONTEXT Magazine No. 14.

I’m not sure of the order of events here, but when I was first at Dalkey, we reissued three Themerson novels: Tom Harris, Hobson’s Island, and The Mystery of the Sardine. We also met Jasia Reichardt (Franciszka’s niece) and her husband, Nicholas Wadley, either just before or just after we started reprinting his works. They lived in a brilliant apartment chock-a-block with captivating artworks from the Themersons along with their archives—including all the information about Gaberbocchus Press, which they founded in 1948 and through which they published more than 60 titles. In addition to bringing out many of Stefan’s works (such as Mr Rouse Builds His House, which was co-authored with Barbara Wright), frequently with illustrations by Franciszka, they also published works by Bertrand Russell, Raymond Queneau, and Stevie Smith, along with Alfred Jarry’s incredibly influential Ubu Roi.

If you’d like to see some of the artworks, and get a quick overview of Stefan and Franciszka’s work, definitely check out this video produced on the occasion of the exhibition “Franciszka & Stefan Themerson: Books, Camera, Ubu” at Camden Arts Centre in 2016.

Both Jasia and Nicholas ended up being published by Dalkey Archive Press: Nicholas with four art books (Man + Book, Man + Doctor, Man + Dog, and Man + Table), and Jasia with the poetic biography, 15 Journeys: Warsaw to London.

Jasia, whose life and work as an art critic, curator, writer, and more is absolutely fascinating (for example, she was the curator of “Cybernetic Serendipity,” a show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in 1968 featuring algorithmic and other device generating art), is still alive, and definitely deserves a post of her own. As does Nicholas (who passed in 2017), whose collections of drawings are the only books of that sort in Dalkey’s catalog.

Also, at some point, I would love to reread these Themerson books to see which one(s) would be best for the Essentials series . . . Tom Harris was always my favorite, but tastes change as the years pass by . . .

Anyway, here’s Nicholas’s extensive look at Stefan’s work, along with images that first appeared in CONTEXT No. 16, which I believe came out in 2004, since Tom Harris is listed as being in print, but not Hobson’s Island (reprinted in 2005) nor The Mystery of the Sardine (reprinted 2006).

Reading Stefan Themerson

There cannot be many philosopher-novelists who started their careers as visual artists. But it was part of Stefan Themerson’s philosophy to defy categories. He made films; he ran a publishing house. As well as his nine novels, he wrote stories for children, poems, a play, an opera, and essays on philosophy, language, logic, literature, science, art, film, and typography. Until his death in September 1988, he also spent spare moments making drawings: abstract, colored configurations in which lines, points, and planes are bent into paradox, satirizing their own logic. The sum of this prodigal diet of interrelated activities reveals itself now as concentration, justifying his fundamental belief that the effect of respecting boundaries or classifications—whether cultural, professional, or political—is at least inhibiting, and usually negative.

The first experience to fire his imagination was discovering the magic of the camera. Drifting out of his studies in physics and architecture in the late 1920s in Warsaw, he started to improvise with photograms, collages, and various combinations of the two. Subsequently, he made seven experimental films—five in Warsaw and two in London—in collaboration with his wife, the painter Franciszka Themerson (who also died in 1988, two months before him).

Themerson later wrote that these films were a form of collage, free of symbolism. He recalled Moholy-Nagy’s reaction to the most ambitious of them, Europa, when he saw it in London in 1936. Nagy called it “a sophisticated film,” about which Themerson said:

I was too young then to tell him that he was wrong. That the film was primitive. . . . Primitive people would have taken it as it was meant to be taken. Would have seen it as it was shown. Without further interpolation.

He referred to his first films as “photograms in motion” and he likened their syntax both to the concentration of poems and to the rhythmical patterns of music. He insisted on their autonomy:

It is something unique.

It is a photogram.

It doesn’t represent anything.

It doesn’t abstract from anything.

It is just what it is.

It is reality itself.

Four of the five Warsaw films did not survive the war. And none of those that did survive allows us close enough to the free, lyrical attributes that he prized so much in the medium, to properly evaluate his achievement as a filmmaker. Adventures of a Good Citizen (1937, Warsaw), while it is a shrewd satirical fantasy, full of autograph poetic qualities and morals, is nevertheless uncharacteristic of his Polish films as he described them. Unlike the lost films, it has a clear narrative sequence and it has a spoken soundtrack.

Of the two films that the Themersons made together in London, Calling Mr Smith (1943) is an explicit protest—moral, not nationalistic—against the systematic destruction of Polish culture by the Nazis (outspoken enough to be refused by the British censor). The Eye and the Ear (1944) is an imaginative improvisation with abstract forms, representing the interaction of musical sounds.

Of all their films, Themerson saw Europa (1932) as their major achievement. It was a visualization of Anatol Stern’s futurist poem and was highly praised by Stern himself. The few frames that survive can only hint at the fluid visual sequences that he described. However, the qualities that he valued in film as a medium, especially the free association of images that refer to nothing outside themselves, are clearly recognizable in most of his work as a writer. The initiative behind his concern with semantics was to free words of confusing sentimental or literary references, and as with the photograms, to expose their own incontrovertible identity. The autograph character of his later novels is of several simultaneous currents of narrative and thought that may appear only obliquely related and that, together, create their own cumulative reality and sense. His whole œuvre as a writer is like that: a continuous collage, its parts distinct but full of allusive echoes and repetitions.

In the winter of 1937–38, the Themersons moved from Warsaw to Paris, intending to live and work there. “There was no sense of escaping from Warsaw,” Stefan told me, “I simply knew I had to be in Paris.” It was “a sort of Mecca”; one which realized all of his expectations. But his plans were disrupted by the course of the war, and by 1942 he found himself in London, where he and Franciszka spent the rest of their lives.

Themerson wrote in the three languages of the countries in which he successively found himself. That the majority of his writing was in English is a matter of the vagaries of history. When asked why he chose to write in English, he replied that the language chose him. During the war he experienced the loss, disorientation, and cultural negation that was the lot of his generation. As well as his first four films, the (Polish) manuscript of his first novel also disappeared. But his reaction to the force of events was more positive than simply stoical. He upheld unequivocally a concept of the writer carrying his culture with him and he believed creeds of nationalism and patriotism to be actively dangerous:

Writers are never, writers are nowhere in exile, for they carry within themselves their own kingdom, or republic, or city of refuge, or whatever it is that they carry within themselves.

Ad at the same time, every writer, ever, everywhere, is in exile, because he is squeezed out of the kingdom, or republic, or city, or whatever it is that squeezes itself dry.

As a teenager in his native town of Plock, he already saw English and French literature as major elements of his indigenous cultural world. Nevertheless, up to a point, his writing in each of the three languages—Polish, French, English—appears to have different characteristics or points of focus. Apart from articles, principally about film, most of his pre-war Polish writing consists of stories for children. In France he wrote poems and the prose-poems, Croquis dans les ténèbres, and he mused to me once about how different his writing might have been had he stayed in Paris: might it have remained as lyrical as the Croquis? There is no doubt that much of the imagery of the Croquis appears quite distinct from his English writing, more oblique and submerged. In Barbara Wright’s translation, the poetic mirror-image of poet and angel on each side of the window-pane, with its evocative inversions of interior and exterior, of the emptiness of matter and the “hardness” of abstraction, is a case in point. The angel looks “outside from the exterior,” a paradox he emphasized typographically. Both the poet and the angel lose their sense of balance as they approach the world of the other. Even in the poems written in England, we seldom find this sort of imagery, and the poems are only a small part of his English œuvre. It was in London that he embarked upon his theoretical writings on philosophy and language.

In other respects, these apparent differences of place are misleading. The early “English” novels (Bayamus, Professor Mmaa, Cardinal Pölätüo) were written originally in Polish, and Bayamus was first published in installments in Nowa Polska, 1946. They read now as the bedrock of his English writing and there is a remarkable homogeneity—in meaning as well as content—throughout his œuvre, whatever the medium or language.

He was absorbed by language, fastidious as well as idiosyncratic in its usage. His meticulous and sometimes eccentric use of punctuation, for instance, often plays an important role in the repetitive structures of his writing. He wrote extensively on aesthetics, semantics, and typography. His writing on the art of Kurt Schwitters is essentially about meaning contained in the uses of language, as is his revealing essay Apollinaire’s Lyrical Ideograms (1968). Set beside such concerns, the question of the language in which he wrote appears a secondary issue. And he almost never pursued his interests in language for their own sake. The short novel Wooff Wooff, or Who Killed Richard Wagner? (1951) might appear at first reading like a semantic diversion, but in reality is as cautionary a tale as anything he wrote. Elsewhere, in discussing the value of linguistic philosophy, he went out of his way to dissociate himself from those obsessed with language per se. He wrote, of “the academic Goddess of Ethics,” that

she is only interested in herself. I am interested in ethical behaviour, but she is interested in ethical terminology. For the last eighty years she’s been sharpening her linguistic tools, but she thinks it would be unladylike to use them.

He came to feel at home with the English language remarkably quickly. He took English lessons while stranded in France, 1940–42, and again when he arrived in London, and in 1946 he published his first article in English, in Polemic. He often spoke of the dual properties peculiar to English: its exactness and its crystalline shades of meaning—the latter a quality that he alternately relished and mistrusted.

Feeling at home with England and reading its social codes was another matter. He once talked to me about cultural differences between Poland, France, and England:

In Poland when you met someone, their instinct was to doubt your values or worth. You had to prove them. Friendships were hard-won. In Paris, you were accepted as a friend until and unless you did something to lose that status. In London, of course, it’s different, neither one nor the other. There’s this objectivity and you sometimes don’t find out if you are a friend until long afterwards.

He was to remain as detached from the British literary establishment as when he arrived. He did not fit into established groups; he was not even an émigré academic. As Anthony Burgess once complained, “there’s a strange idea in this country that you can’t be both a composer and a writer,” and Themerson was both of these things and others besides. But these were circumstances he observed with sardonic amusement. He valued his independence and anyway, in art as in life, he despised synthetic categories. During the 1950s and 1960s, he submitted a number of poems to the Times Literary Supplement but none were accepted. To prove a hunch to himself, he sent to the editor yet another poem, “My childhood . . . ,” as a translation, over the signature Tomasz Woydyslawski. It was published (on 5 March 1964)—and identified as Themerson’s work by friends.

It was a wish for independence as much as anything else that motivated the Themersons’ decision in 1948 to found their own publishing house in Maida Vale, the Gaberbocchus Press: to be free to publish what they wanted and in what form they wanted. The earlier Gaberbocchus books were printed at their home on Randolph Avenue. Subsequently, they acquired premises on Formosa Street and at that point, the Themersons were joined by two other directors, Barbara Wright and Gwen Barnard. The full list of Gaberbocchus titles demonstrates the imaginative character of their publications, including Barbara Wright’s first English translations of Jarry, Queneau, Pol-Dives, and others. What a list cannot do is express the originality of format, typography, and design that rapidly became a Gaberbocchus hallmark. Franciszka Themerson was the art director and she illustrated many of the books, but they worked together in the same close collaboration as on their films, to produce what they described as “best-lookers” rather than best-sellers. Asked in a questionnaire what were the Press’s main strength and weakness, Themerson gave the same answer to each question: “refusal to conform.” The “unclassifiability” of Gaberbocchus Press expresses the essential Stefan Themerson.

As an offshoot of the Press, the Gaberbocchus Common Room was opened on Formosa Street, to provide “a congenial place where artists and scientists and people interested in science and art can meet and exchange thoughts.” Themerson’s concern was again with the dissolution of obsolete boundaries. In 1946, he had edited five issues of Nowa Polska on “Literature, Art and Science in England” and by the later 1950s, had become increasingly interested in exposing the common philosophies of art and science. He corresponded at the time with C. P. Snow. For two years, from 1957 to 1959, the Common Room was a vital, informal weekly forum with a membership of more than a hundred. The members were addressed by writers, painters, poets, actors, scientists, musicians, filmmakers, and philosophers. There were talks on physics, metaphysics, and pataphysics; readings of Jarry, Shakespeare, Beckett, Strindberg, Queneau, and Schwitters; performances of modern music and scientific film. Among other contributors, Sean Connery and Bernard Bresslaw read O’Neill; Dudley Moore accompanied Michael Horovitz’s poetry reading; Konni Zilliacus spoke on the immorality of nuclear weapons. The project was only reluctantly abandoned because it consumed too much working time. In such a catalog lies at least part of the reason why, as a writer and publisher, Themerson was not embraced by the establishment.

In the 1940s and 1950s, his circle of significant friends included writers, artists, scientists and philosophers, some of whom he had known in Warsaw or Paris. He enjoyed close friendships with Kurt Schwitters and Jankel Adler, both of whom he published. In 1950 Bertrand Russell wrote in warm praise of Bayamus (1949), “nearly as mad as the world.” Their long correspondence and exchange of manuscripts, bantering criticism and thoughts on philosophy and the world at large began early in 1952 and continued until Russell’s death. The original draft of factor T (1956) was written as a long letter to Russell. Russell wrote the preface to Professor Mmaa’s Lecture (1953) and Gaberbocchus published Russell’s Good Citizen’s Alphabet (1953) and History of the World in Epitome (1962), both with Franciszka Themerson’s illustrations which, Russell said, “heighten all the points I most wanted made.”

As well as becoming deeply involved in Russell’s principles and methods as a philosopher, Themerson appears to have drawn strength from his scale of human values. Although he later felt reservations about Russell’s total commitment to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament—it was too much like one of the burning “aims” by which Themerson felt the native instincts of individuals were led astray—he shared Russell’s doubts about faith in a good society. “A good society” inspired less hope for the future than “good people.”

Russell’s supportive appreciation also seems to have encouraged Themerson’s pursuit of semantics as a major interest. But, if any single factor bore significant influence upon this area of his activity as a writer, it was the earlier encounter with Kurt Schwitters, in wartime London. Themerson heard Schwitters perform his sound-poems on several occasions and was the first to publish Schwitters’s English writing. He gave many talks on Schwitters—the earliest in the Gaberbocchus Common Room in the 1950s—and his notes for these talks include his most sensitive and eloquent thoughts on anyone else’s work. As well as his justly celebrated essay Kurt Schwitters in England (1958), he published “Kurt Schwitters on a Time-Chart” (1967) and Pin (1962), the polemical manifesto of new poetry that Schwitters was compiling with Raoul Hausmann shortly before his death in 1947. The choice of title for Themerson’s “Semantic Sonata” (written 1949–50; published in factor T, 1956) may be seen as some sort of homage to Schwitters’s Ursonata. Furthermore, the initiative behind his concept of “Semantic Poetry” sprang from a polemical wish to purify language that strikes very comparable attitudes to those advanced in Pin. In Bayamus, the narrator explains to the audience at the Theatre of Semantic Poetry, “each of the S.P. words should have one and only one meaning.” In a radio talk in Warsaw, 1964, Themerson elaborated:

Semantic Poetry doesn’t arrange verses into bunches of flowers. It bares a poem and shows the reality behind it. There is no room for hypnosis in a semantic poem.

And finally, in introductory notes for a reading of the 1970s, which are themselves full of bravura verbal bouquets, he wrote more on his rebellion against “linguistic harmonics.”

I wanted to strip words of their associations, to cut their links with the past. This rebellion was anti-romantic and anti-ecstatic. It was directed both against political rhetoricians and against Joycean avant-coureurs. Against associational thickets of Eliot and the verboidal surrealisms of History. I wanted to disinfect words, scrub them right to the very bone of their dictionary definitions. That was how—somewhat ferociously and sardonically—I invented Semantic Poetry. It was meant to be funny. Both serious & funny. It became the subject of my novel Bayamus.

In some respects it is inappropriate to consider Themerson’s novels separately, so closely is all of his writing interrelated. There are several instances in which Themerson brought together plots and structures from very different writings to create a new work. The opera St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio (1972, written 1954–60) was born from the text of Semantic Divertissements (1962, written 1949–50) and a paragraph in factor T.

He viewed the novel as one of several vehicles available for his current concerns. In 1952, having read the manuscript of Cardinal Pölätüo (1961), Russell wrote to Themerson suggesting alterations, because “I think you have tried to combine into one book things which do not readily fit together.” But Themerson never saw this as a problem, and in any case he saw most of his novels as each having its own distinct philosophical or linguistic subject. He deliberately chose to treat philosophical subjects in novels because of the freedom that the genre offers:

Fiction allows you to do things that history or treatises can’t—especially in the sense that you can rescue or retrieve meanings that are lost from generation to generation. These time barriers are harder to cross than geographical barriers.

He was genuinely concerned that the ideas of any one time should not be lost to another generation of readers. (He discussed the publishing policy of Gaberbocchus in these terms.) Themerson’s natural ability to treat matters of gravity with apparent levity comes to the fore in the allusive style of his novels. (As one reviewer saw it, “Death and philosophy have rarely been so much fun.”)

Of the longer novels, Professor Mmaa’s Lecture is the earliest. The original Polish version was mostly written at the same time as Croquis dans les ténèbres, from 1941 to 1942 during the eighteen months or so that he was stranded in Voiron, in the “free zone” of France, and then finished in Scotland in 1943. In his preface to the book, Russell likens its form of satirical allegory to Swift. The follies of human conduct are observed with guileless candor by a society of sightless termites. They observe by their highly developed sense of smell and they learn through their digestive systems. It is an exposé of human conformism in face of “progress” and absolute government.

Themerson wrote Bayamus (the first novel to be published, in 1949) to launch his invention of Semantic Poetry. The poet-narrator is aided and abetted in propagating his new art by the mercurial, three-legged Bayamus, with all the fugitive wisdom of a Shakespearian fool.

In the later long novels like Tom Harris (1967), The Mystery of the Sardine (1986), and Hobson’s Island (1988), he approached the genre differently, flirting openly with the form of the modern thriller. (He read a lot of detective fiction and had particular respect for Chandler.) Within that seductive idiom, he played many concurrent games. Usually there is a large cast of characters:

Sometimes it is like a party. Many people meet each other there. No special reason why they should meet, but just to give a picture of life. Otherwise, it seems somehow—provincial.

The characters bring with them an equally large cast of ideas, arguing, and discussing, as at a party, whatever concerns them (him). Burning political issues mingle with discussions of social mores, realities with dreams, the dramatic with the mundane. There is a lot of sensible pragmatism. “If a young man becomes depressed by reading Samuel Beckett,” one character declares, “that very fact proves that he’s perfectly sane.” Faced with the implausibly spectacular circumstances of the early plot of Hobson’s Island, a perplexed secretary at the Vatican asks over the phone, “please tell me straight: is this meant to be a parable or is it on the level?”

The Mystery of the Sardine and Hobson’s Island form, with Cardinal Pölätüo and General Piesc (1976), a sort of family saga, their plots enacted by successive generations, with several characters reappearing. In the cast of The Mystery of the Sardine, General Piesc—who does not in person appear in the novel because he is dead—is listed as “absent.”

Themerson wrote Hobson’s Island with the knowledge that it would be his last book and it is not difficult to read it as a final work. In turn, it is the most spectacularly dramatic and the most introspective of all of his novels. The isolated simplicity of life of the Hobson’s islanders is set on a collision course with the overwrought values and conduct of the outside world. The conclusion is a tour de force, both tragic and contemplative. At the end, the narrator (Scan D’Earth) levitates above the island, surveying those actors that survive from the theatre of a life’s work.

For all the diverse riches of their discourse in mortal and immortal values, there is nothing in these later novels without a calculated role in their elaborate jigsaws of logic, paradox, and morality. Extravagant and comic images always refresh meaning and are crafted into the structure as meticulously as the elegant clarity of the language. The lurking love of paradox is only allowed to run loose in an occasional “wild card” character. One of the things Themerson enjoyed in detective stories of the 1930s and 1940s was their characteristically irrational element, the character from nowhere. The surreal role of the man from Mars in The Mystery of the Sardine or the enigma of Nemo in Hobson’s Island are comparable devices.

The moral principles that underlie all of Themerson’s work were first clearly set out in the essay factor T. This essay exposes the “Tragic factor”—a fatal flaw in the human condition. It is the product of a discrepancy between man’s Dislikes (D) and his Needs (N). Themerson’s first analogy is about members of a tribe and their Need and Dislike for tomatoes. They have a vital, biological Need of tomatoes as their only local source of vitamin C. However, since the eating of tomatoes is forbidden by their religion, the tribesmen have developed an equally vital Dislike of the taste. Hence, “factor T.”

Later on, he examines the example of “killing”:

I do not know about weasels, but it is difficult to imagine two anthropoid apes that would kill each other, or steal from each other, unless they happened to be unanimous. They have to be unanimous in their desire for one and the same female, or for one and the same coconut, if they are to fight. And even then their dislike for killing and stealing must be great if they feel compelled (as soon as they develop a language) to invent some lofty reasons for this unpleasant behaviour, and thus build philosophical systems, religions and police forces.

We invent our god to exculpate us when we find it necessary to perform the unpleasant act of killing those who invent their god when they find it necessary to perform the unpleasant task of killing us. And we invented the police force, not only to prevent others from killing us when they find it necessary, but also to force ourselves to kill the others whenever this act, which we dislike, is found necessary for us.

There is a tragic discrepancy between our dislike of killing and the necessity of doing so. I call that discrepancy factor T, and it seems to me neither virtuous nor wise to ignore it.

And again:

Certain vital needs of our guts (N) cannot be satisfied without affecting our nervous system in a certain way (D). The resulting state of perplexity (T) is basically unavoidable.

He successively investigates the inability of philosophy, religion, and science to deal with the problem, suggesting at one point:

It seems to me a pity that rational ethics underestimates our need to know that our original Tragedy is at least recognised. Rational ethics concentrates either on Dislike or on Necessity, but refuses to face the Tragedy that is imbedded in the situation. And this is why we are compelled to think rational speculation utopian or sentimental when it emphasises Dislike; materialistic or fascist when it emphasises Necessity; opportunist when it switches from one to the other; hypocritical when it preaches D and kills for its N, and donnish when it studies our N and leaves D to believers.

Just as elsewhere he suggests that the novelist may have more to say on morality than the computer scientist, so here he proposes literature as the only fruitful field of research into the tragic dilemma, because without it “we shall never know what it is that has been built up . . . in our brains.”

He concludes:

I propose to call “Man” anything (a beast, a plant, or a machine) whose nervous system is split into two parts so that one part prompts it to perform actions leading to the satisfaction of its primary needs while the other part restrains it from performing such actions whenever they are (as they invariably are) to the detriment of other organisms—thus producing a neural tension which results in. its building gothic cathedrals, chinese pagodas, houses of parliament, bull rings, Royal Societies, revolutions, counter-revolutions, heavenly kingdoms, Stratford-on-Avons, in short, anything uneatable and uninhabitable, even if it doesn’t amount to more than an aspirin tablet of hypocrisy.

I propose not to call “Man” things (whatever their anatomy) whose nervous systems, free of the split, allows them to do without hesitation the necessary pillage in the woods of the world.

The study of the split is a pleasure. Yet, if our scientific research goes so far as to make us able to meddle with it, the pleasure will become a danger. Because, if the split is what makes a thing a “Man,” then mending it would be synonymous with the extinction of human kind.

Towards the end of his life, Themerson returned to the subject in another essay, The Chair of Decency, given as the Huizinga Lecture at the University of Leyden, 1981. Using a generous repertoire of allegory and fable, he set out a sustained argument for a return to basic human values. He suggests that the self-conscious aims and missions of the modern world have deluded us into losing sight of the intuitive decent values in our behavior towards each other that we are born with. Aims are cultural, he says, but the proper Means are biological. The highest of our natural human instincts have been discarded in the misguided and blinkered pursuit of beliefs and causes:

no Aim is so exalted that it be worth a heartbeat more than Decency of Means. Because, when all is said and done, Decency of Means is the Aim of aims.

Looking backwards from this declamatory manifesto of his philosophy, we may see different faces of the same thought in almost everything else he wrote. The Polish stories for children address themselves to questioning the real world—the practical experience of daily life, human values, the ambiguities of language—with no suspicion of condescension or cultural improvement. The lyrical parable of the film Adventures of a Good Citizen champions the liberating experience of walking backwards, in face of conventional prejudice.

The ironic meaning of Themerson’s 1949 version of Aesop’s The Eagle and the Fox was so coolly stated that it went unobserved by any reviewer. After the original rendering, he repeats the whole fable, word for word, except that the two protagonists exchange roles: At the end, he appended this moral, tongue scarcely moving in cheek:

These two fables are a warning to us not to deal hardly or injuriously by somebody who can defend himself by dealing hardly or injuriously with us. There are many less subtle and imperious creatures which we can eat in peace, and to the Glory of God.

Quite apart from the stories for children, there are several instances of a fable-like use of non-human characters. There are the termites in Professor Mmaa’s Lecture, and in the tragi-comic opera St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio (1972), the hero is confronted with the modern dilemma of survival by the wolf, who runs a factory canning lamb chops. (“God gave me a carnivorous stomach,” the wolf argues, “God must help me fill it.”)

Time and again, we see characters in Themerson’s novels possessed by and then growing out of the consuming ambitions of their time. The accumulated wisdom of these characters in their old age reflects Themerson’s own growing certainty about the relative value of Means and Aims. Dame Victoria, surrounded by young political zealots in The Mystery of the Sardine, says in her dying speech:

I’m so thankful that I don’t understand about Ideas. I’m thankful that when I was a young girl I wasn’t educated to have Ideas.

The subtitle of General Piesc is “The Case of the Forgotten Mission.” When the ageing general is at last in a position to realize his lifelong mission, its reality dissolves and he no longer remembers what it is. Instead, he spends his last days in a tender relationship with a fellow-being (from which union is born Ian Prentice, the prodigious critic of Euclid in The Mystery of the Sardine). And all of this without trace of sentiment. It is another child of General Piesc, the ubiquitous Princess Zuppa, who voices one of the final statements on the theme of decency, towards the end of Hobson’s Island:

Beware of love. Love is cruel, and decency is gentle. Love is ugly and decency is beautiful. Love is easy and decency is difficult. Love creates hate.

“But what does decency create?” she is asked.

Alas Mrs Shepherd, decency creates love, and that’s our human vicious circle.

Stefan Themerson’s writings methodically expose religion, politics, patriotism, power, success, and love as equally unerring paths towards inhuman behavior. Stated so baldly, this seems an unreasonably bleak account of his work, against the grain of his own affirmative openness and belying his wit, humor, and lightness of touch. Nevertheless, the stark events at the conclusion of his last novel appear to hold out little hope for the struggle between Means and Aims. When I told him of my reaction to this tragic finale, he expressed genuine surprise. For him, the same tragedy is present in most of his writing. “It just brings us back to square one,” he said. “It simply reminds us that the choice is ours.”

“Reading Stefan Themerson” by Nicholas Wadley originally appeared in CONTEXT No. 16 circa 2004.

Selected Works by Stefan Themerson in English:

The Adventures of Peddy Bottom

Aesop, the Eagle & the Fox & the Fox & the Eagle

Apollinaire’s Lyrical Ideograms

Bayamus and Cardinal Pölätüo

The Chair of Decency

Collected Poems

factor T

General Piesc

Hobson’s Island

Jankel Adler

Kurt Schwitters in England

Logic, Labels & Flesh

Mr. Rouse Builds His House

The Mystery of the Sardine

On Semantic Poetry

Professor Mmaa’s Lecture

Semantic Divertissements

Special Branch

St. Francis and the Wolf of Gubbio

Tom Harris

The Urge to Create Visions

Wooff Wooff, or Who Killed Richard Wagner?

Before we get to her piece though, I just want to do one final bit of housekeeping in relation to the NEA, namely explaining how Open Letter, Dalkey Archive Press, and Deep Vellum are intertwined. As many of you know, I was the associate director at Dalkey for a handful of years back in the early 2000s and left under tense circumstances at the end of 2006 to move to Rochester, NY, and start Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester. (Some day this full story will be publicly told . . .) Anyway, after 18 years, in order to maximize opportunities for Open Letter’s books—relieve some major pandemic-incurred burdens by us as, ultimately, a two-person operation—and minimize the UR’s investment, we decided to partner with Deep Vellum.

What changes does this bring? Well, to any general readers, hopefully none. I remain the publisher of Open Letter Books and an employee of the University of Rochester, where I teach classes on literary publishing and world literature in translation, and also assist with running our literary translation studies programs for both undergrad and grad students. As per the arrangement, Deep Vellum is responsible for publishing ten Open Letter titles a year—selected, acquired, and edited by me, but paid for, marketed, and produced by Deep Vellum employees. (If you’re a bookseller or reviewer, please feel free to email me, but Deep Vellum will end up handling these requests in the end.) As such, Deep Vellum will receive the sales income from Open Letter titles past, present, and future, and can use Open Letter’s activities—as a press that, since its inception, has been highly invested in nonprofit-y projects to benefit the literary community, such as the Best Translated Book Award, Translation Database, Three Percent Blog (now Substack), the Three Percent and Two Month Review podcast, etc.—for fundraising purposes.

Eighteen years of stellar works of international literature (including books by Dubravka Ugresic, Marguerite Duras, Elisa Shua Dusapin, Mathias Énard, Can Xue, Mercè Rodoreda, Rodrigo Fresán, Sara Mesa, etc.) alongside our other altruistic enterprises is an obvious benefit to Deep Vellum; and on our side, I, theoretically, should have more time to edit, read submissions, revamp the Translation Database, write for both this Substack and the one about Open Letter (which also includes posts about international literature and the business of books writ large), do podcasts, work more closely with students, etc.

The main point is that if, after learning about the termination of Open Letter’s grant from the NEA (again, we should be able to get the $30,000 for the Korean and Latvian Triptychs we published over the past year), you want to help out, you can a) take out a subscription to Open Letter, b) donate to Deep Vellum, and/or c) tell your friends to subscribe to these Substacks and encourage your local bookstore to stock our titles. (Full list of forthcoming Open Letter titles will be here in the near future.)

Also, just for transparency, my salary is entirely paid by the University of Rochester. I have never received a dime (or even a fifth of whiskey, my preferred payment) for my work for Deep Vellum/Dalkey Archive Press, from getting John O’Brien to agree to this arrangement (when UR initially balked, given this was in play at the start of the pandemic), through overseeing the relaunch of Dalkey Archive Press, to developing the Essentials series, scanning and proofreading dozens of texts, and writing posts like this—all for the love of spreading the word about various Dalkey Archive Press titles.

That’s a lot of words to say that any paid subscriptions to this Substack do go to me, mostly to purchase used copies of Dalkey titles I don’t currently have to use in future posts, and aren’t a donation to Dalkey Archive or Open Letter or anyone else.

And I do really appreciate all the subscribers and promise that you’ll be getting some fun bonuses for your support. In fact, the article below was going to be for subscribers only—totally worth it, Barbara Wright was a genius and her introduction to Queneau is fantastic and has me pulling a number of his books back off my shelves—but given all the NEA stuff, I figure we need more joy in the world. (Especially if you’re that rare bird who listened to all three of those epic podcasts last week . . . I should be paying you for that!)

As mentioned above, Barbara Wright wrote the following piece, “Reading Raymond Queneau,” for Context magazine, which ran two to four of these “readings” in every issue. These were meant to be introductions to important authors, to provide entryways to “difficult” authors, to articulate what made these authors so interesting.

And, as you’ll see, Barbara accomplished that with the same sort of grace and lightness found in Queneau’s writing.

Enjoy! And I’ll be back later this week with my own minor introduction to Queneau in the form of a list of various starting points for anyone unfamiliar with one of France’s greatest writers ever.

Reading Raymond Queneau

Right from his very first book, The Bark Tree (1933),1 Queneau acquired a few farsighted fans who understood that something new and special had arrived on the French literary scene. They remained a select few for over twenty years, until in 1959 when Zazie in the Metro became a bestseller—for all the wrong reasons. Roland Barthes suggested one explanation: he said it was doubtless that the fact Queneau’s fiction made its readers laugh out loud originally prevented it from being held in as high esteem as it deserved.

It is true that “France neither looks for nor expects humor from its great writers,” but although it may well be Queneau’s humor that makes his novels so enjoyable on a first reading, he was always an innovator, and as everyone knows, the general public has always needed to take its time to get the hang of something it’s not used to. And while Queneau’s novels always have plenty of plot, and plenty of believable (if unusual) characters, they are also chockablock full of the erudite—even serious—subjects in which Queneau took a passionate interest, but for which many of us, alas, still retain the distaste implanted in us by some of our schoolteachers . . .

His genius, though, is that he makes these subjects attractive, and even understandable; he imbricates them within his all-embracing, sui generis, and sometimes cheerfully coarse humor, and he paradoxically tends to give his most philosophical reflections to his most unsophisticated characters. Apparently simple, ordinary people, probably belonging to the “lower middle classes,” “innocents,” sometimes quite uneducated—such people are often seen as “typical Queneau characters.” (His favorite character in literature, he said, was Dostoyevesky’s Idiot.) But Queneau’s characters are never stereotypical; and although they are always entirely believable, they are never really like anyone one has ever known. Such are Saturnin the concierge, in The Bark Tree, who mediates at some length on Being and Non-Being; Pierrot the fairground worker in Pierrot Mon Ami; Valentin Brû the ex-private soldier in The Sunday of Life; twelve-year-old Zazie (in the métro). . . .

Queneau was a natural polymath. As a boy he read every word of one of the dictionaries—I think it was the Petit Larousse—for pleasure. He is the first of the ten writers featured in John Cruickshank’s The Novelist as Philosopher (1962), in which Martin Esslin writes:

Queneau is that rarest of rare phenomena in an age of specialists and watertight compartments of culture: a truly universal, encyclopedic mind, a poet who is also a philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, the editor of the brilliantly conceived attempt at presenting a complete synthesis of twentieth-century culture, the Encyclopédie de la Pléiade.

Le Monde agreed: shortly before his death, it called him “the most universal mind of our time.”

Yet he still likes to choose the “common man” as the center of his interest. This common man may start life as underprivileged and uninteresting, but Queneau allows him to find salvation. This starts when he begins to think, and not necessarily to think great thoughts—just to think for himself. Once this process is set in motion, it gradually becomes possible for him to acquire a fulfilling inner life. Jacque Bens says that “Queneau doesn’t despise anyone, because he loves his fellow-men. He loves them very simply, without saying so, without trying to improve them, in silence, and just as they are.” I think Queneau chooses humble people because he feels that the unpretentious man (and woman) in the street is potentially much more in touch with the realities of the world around him, and around us, than are the “experts,” and that when the common man makes discoveries about life and human nature he does so in an honest, straightforward way, and not in order to further his career, or his “image,” or to get people to think how clever he is. John Cowper Powys sad that “the supreme masters are never professional philosophers.”

Bens further says that Queneau’s characters are “realistic types place in unreal (poetic) situations.” Here it should be mentioned that Queneau often declared that he saw no essential difference between prose and poetry. Hence all his books, even his scientific essays, are shot through with poetry (in its widest sense). (And his many volumes of poetry are also imbued with his academic and other interests. Which doesn’t stop them from being comic, when that is what he wants.) (And it doesn’t stop his basic purpose from being to paint a vivid, sympathetic picture of everyday life.)

Queneau, a Norman, was born in Le Havre on February 21, 1903—as he tells us in his 1937 autobiographical “novel in verse,” Oak and Dog. His parents owned and ran a haberdashery. His childhood was not very happy, but he was a brilliant student and in 1920 he went to Paris to study philosophy at the Sorbonne. There he developed a passionate interest in mathematics—and also in billiards, in the cinema—and, really, in anything that took his fancy. He acquired an excellent knowledge of English. He worked in a bank, but not for long, and for a few years in the 1920s he was a member of André Breton’s Surrealist movement.

In the summer of 1932, Queneau and his wife Janine—whose sister was the first wife of André Breton—set out for Greece, where they stayed until November. There he became interested in the differences between classical and demotic Greek. He realized that the one was dead, while the other was very much alive, and flexible, and open to change. He compared this vitality with the ossification of “modern” French, and wrote: “It was then that I saw it was obvious that modern French must now finally free itself from the conventions that still hemmed it in; the conventions of style, spelling and vocabulary that date from the grammarians of the sixteenth century and the poets of the seventeenth.”

This was a peculiarly French problem, he saw, for

English writers write spoken English and American writers write spoken American. And the most striking thing of all is that their scientists, their scholars and their historians write an English that is the English of the man in the street, whereas in France, when it comes to science or history, we are still obliged to write in formal language. I want to write in a living language—in the language of the ordinary man. The language you want to write in is your so-called maternal language.

And this became one of Queneau’s major preoccupations, the creation of “a third French,” “a modern written language which corresponds to the language actually spoken. So what is needed is a triple reform, or revolution: the first concerning vocabulary, the second syntax, and the third spelling.” But he soon qualified this statement by adding: “It is not a question of reform, but of creation.”

(Without saying so, though, he reserved the right to amuse himself with these acts of creation.")

So, with a serious purpose, Queneau indulges in “language as a game.” He gives us neologisms and fantasies, plus archaisms, anachronisms, puns, real and phony proverbs, catch phrases, intentional clichés, foreign words frenchified or written as some French people mispronounce them—métinge for “meeting,” standigne for “standing” (which is franglais for our English “status”). He will change and rechange the tenses in one short sentence—and this is not purely arbitrary: on analysis you can always find a subtle reason for it. He spells words the way everyone pronounces them. . . . Since I became familiar with his word “ekcetera,” I have lent an ear in every country I have been in and, almost without exception, everyone, in every country, says EKCETERA. . . . Then there are houatures for “voitures,” ouiski for the drink the French strangely seem to prefer to cognac these days. Ekc, ekc.

Very striking is his logosymphysis. (I neologized this sonecessary word in order to work in a discreet explanation of the now-famous example of words run together—POLOCILACRU—in my translation of The Sunday of Life.) “Polocilacru” stands for Paul aussi l’a cru, or “Paul believed it too.” People really do speak like that, but we tend not to notice it until it is pointed out ot us in writing. The very first word in Zazie famously begins with a similar sort of word: “Doukipudonktan?”—which stands for: D’oû qu’ils puent donc tant? meaning “How come they stink so, though?”

Queneau forged his own very conscious theory—and practice—of the novel; he knew perfectly well what he was doing, and why he was doing it. This was one of the reasons why he soon left Breton and his Surrealistic doctrines: he couldn’t accept that anything worthwhile could come out of chance and dozy automatic writing. Nevertheless—another Queneau paradox—you will find plenty of lovely non sequiturs nestling among all his logic. He was extraordinarily articulate about his tenets, and wrote very clearly about them in his books of essays, Bâtons, chiffres et lettres (“Sticks, Numbers and Letters”), and in two published texts of conversations with Georges Charbonnier asked him how he decided on the proper proportions of “correct” French and “neo-French” in his books, and he replied:

When there is a mixture, the appearance of the spoken language is, I think, always spontaneous and involuntary. That’s to say that at a certain moment I have the impression that that’s the way it should be, I mean that it should be written in more or less phonetic language. I say: “more of less phonetic,” because sometimes it is completely so, at other times less so. Well, I don’t know . . . it isn’t at all systematic . . . it’s entirely instinctive; it’s because at that particular moment I have the impression that that is how it must be.

Many people consider Queneau’s first book, The Bark Tree, to be his most perfect novel, perhaps because it contains every element that later became so important to him. How old was he when he wrote it? In 1932, he was 29. . . . With all his other interests, mathematics was already vital to him. In his 1962 conversation with Georges Charbonnier, he said,

I have always thought that a literary work should have a structure and a form, and in the first novel I wrote I took great pains to see that the structure was extremely strict, and furthermore, that it was a multiple structure. . . . Since at the time I was, let’s say, rather arithmomaniac, I built this construction on combinations of numbers, some more or less arbitrary, others according ot my personal preferences.

This structure, he said, was like a scaffolding, which is removed when the construction is finished. He added that he hoped it wasn’t obvious. It certainly wasn’t: no one even suspected it until he wrote about it much later.

None of Queneau’s complicated constructions ever gets in the way of the story he is telling. Etienne, the bank clerk hero of The Bark Tree, starts life—his life in the book—as a silhouette, but because he is an embodiment of Descartes’s Cogito, ergo sum (although that is something you either have to be told, or be clever enough to work out for yourself), once he accidentally begins to think for himself, he first develops into a flat entity, and then finally achieves the full status of a rounded character. His fate is played out in the slummy northern suburbs at Paris.

All Queneau’s novels, though, have very different backgrounds. After The Bark Tree he wrote three autobiographical novels: The Last Days, in which Roland Travy, his alter ego, is a student at the Sorbonne in the early 1920s; Odile, in which Anglarés is an amusingly cynical portrait of André Breton; and Un rude hiver (“A Harsh Winter”), which is set in his native Le Havre during the First World War. It was Zazie (1959) which finally alerted the general reader to the existence of Raymond Queneau. Readers chuckled over the fact that Uncle Gabriel, who is looking after the child in Paris for a couple of days, is a homosexual female impersonator in a night club—although Gabriel of course denies being a “hormosessual” when Zazie a) wantes to know it is, and b) whether he is one. And the “foul” language Zazie is always coming out with without even noticing is also very funny, but the point is that she is merely parroting the language she has always heard around her from her provincial parents, and has no idea of the effect she is making. Martin Esslin wrote: “English critics did not notice the brilliant philosopher-poet behind the downing. Yet the intention of showing the mad rat-race and corruption of urban life against a figure of innocent humanity is deafly present in the book.”

In The Blue Flowers, Queneau indulged his passion for history. The story starts in1264, with the fiercely feudal Duke of Auge appearing at the summit of the keep of his castle in Normandy, “there to consider, be it ever so little, the historical situation. It was somewhat confused.” After two and a half pages, we make the acquaintance of Cidrolin, a peace-loving citizen who is living on his barge moored on the outskirts of Paris, minding his own business—in 1964. The story unobtrusively jumps 175 years ahead every so often, which means that for a while it stops off in 1789. We realize that he Duke and Cidrolin are each the dream of the other, and when they finally meet on Cidrolin’s barge in 1964, they too begin to sort of realize it . . .

Queneau’s last novel, The Flight of Icarus, was published in 1968. Set in 1896, half its characters are various Belle Epoque novelists—and the other half are the characters these gentlemen are writing about. Hence we have a fairly complicated meditation on what is fiction and what is not, but again, the book is very, very funny. The novelist Hubert Lubert (a nod to Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert) has carelessly lost his character Icarus, after only ten or fifteen pages, and he suspects his fellow writers of having stolen him. So he engages a dopey private eye, Morcol, to find him for him. Morcol says, dreamily: “How very Pirandellian.” (In 1896.) The novel is written almost entirely in dialogue; it would make a fabulous play. (The other day, at a Queneau reading in the London publisher John Calder’s new bookstore, Calder himself and a brilliant actor, Sean Barrett, read the first scenes of Icarus, and the audience spontaneously illustrated Queneau’s useful verb, to “cry-laugh.”)

One part of Queneau’s life was properly “Establishment.” In 1938, he became a reader of English books for Gallimard; in 1941, he became their Secretary General. By 1951, he had been elected to the Académie Goncourt—but in that same year he indulged his more liberal (or anarchic?) tendencies by joining the College of ’Pataphysics. If you don’t know what that is: ’Pataphysics is the “science of imaginary solutions,” and it was invented by one Doctor Faustroll, who was a character invented by Alfred Jarry. Jarry (1873–1907) was another universal man, who as well as writing the world-shattering (that’s not a great exaggeration) Ubu Roi, also wrote erudite, symbolist, seriously serious works. The College—which has no material existence—just as ’Pataphysics, by definition, doesn’t exist—was started in the late 1940s by some frustrated super-intellectual professors of philosophy, mathematics, ekc. ekc., in Rheims. They were frustrated because the French educational system arbitrarily dispatches such people to lycées hither and yon, take it or leave it, so they found themselves stuck in what was to them the remote and philistine sticks. One of their purposes was to use their brains in a way that amused them, another was to thumb their intellectual noses at the same Establishment.

Which they most successfully did. I remember reading a pompous, indignant article in Le Figaro, complaining of their disgraceful behavior and ideas, and implying that they should be completely ignored. That was not so easy. Taking absurdity to its limits, the “College” had invented its own ’Pataphysical calendar, dating from the birth of Alfred Jarry, September 8, 1873, and based on the Napoleonic calendar, but a great deal funnier. It also created its own honors list. Queneau, of course, came into the very top category: he was a Transcendant Satrap. So, likewise, were other people it was equally hard to ignore: Jacques Prévert; Max Ernst; René Claire; Eugène Ionesco, (he had never been heard of until The Bald Soprano was published in a Cahier of the College of ’Pataphysics); Joan Miró; Boris Vian; Marcel Duchamp; Jean Dubuffet; Michel Leiris; Man Ray. . . . (Or if they weren’t actually Transcendent Satraps, they were of an only slightly less elevated rank.) (Roger Shattuck, who wrote that seminal work The Banquet Years, is a longstanding member of the College of ’Pataphysics.) (Messrs Groucho, Chico, and Harpo Marx were all Transcendent Satraps.)

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It is obvious, then, that Queneau knew everybody. And he was much loved and respected by his friends. Several of them describe his famous “pudeur”—the nearest translation I can find is “reserve”—although the word contains a bit of “modesty,” too. . . . Both Armand Salacrou (a fellow student at the Le Havre Lycée), and Jacques Prévert, spoke of the way he liked to sit in the background, taking everything in, a mysterious smile on the corner of his lips, “like someone who knows what he is not going to speak about,” after which he would suddenly explode with a great burst of laughter, slapping his thighs. . . .

The OuLiPo (Ouvoir de Littérature Potentielle, or, Workshop of Potential Literature), founded in 1960 by Queneau and the mathematician François Le Lionnais, started life as a new subcommission of the College of ’Pataphysics. (I also notice that around 1960, Pablo Picasso and Asger Jorn were made Exquisite Commanders.) The aim of the OuLiPo was to inspire new works of literature through manmade constraints, mathematical or otherwise, in the same way as the strict rules of the sonnet have given rise to some rather well-loved poetry. But the rules of the sonnet are old. And the OuLiPo was looking to the new. (Incidentally, Queneau said to Marguerite Duras: “A novel is a little like a sonnet, although it is much more complicated.”) I don’t need to say more about the OuLiPo, as CONTEXT #6 contains a most comprehensive article by Le Lionnais himself.

One of the first fruits of the OuLiPo was Queneau’s own 100,000,000,000,000 Poems. These began, very simply, by being 10 sonnets, all with the same rhyme scheme. They were printed on big pages cut into strips, so any one line of any of ht esonnets can be substituted for any similarly numbered one of any of the others. And every one of these 10¹⁴ Sonnets still makes some sort of sense. . . . A later miracle of ingenuity is Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a full-length novel, a lipogram entirely without the most common letter of our alphabet, E. (People didn’t notice.) Later came Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveler. . . .

I haven’t found room for so many other things. . . . The 1947 Exercises in Style—originally refused by Gallimard, but now translated all over the world (by Umberto Eco, among others). That Queneau was a painter who held exhibitions. . . . That he translated from English (Amos Tutuloa, Sinclair Lewis, ekc. ekc.). . . . That he acted in the original wartime private performance of Picasso’s Desire Caught by the Tail. . . . That he made films with Buñuel, with Alain Resnais. . . .

A “Universal Man”?

Selected Works by Raymond Queneau in English Translation:

The Bark Tree / Witch Grass

The Blue Flowers

Children of Clay

Elementary Morality

Exercises in Style

The Flight of Icarus

Hitting the Streets

The Last Days

Oak and Dog

Odile

Pierrot Mon Ami

Saint Glinglin

Sally Mara’s Intimate Diary

The Skin of Dreams

Stories and Remarks

The Sunday of Life

We Always Treat Women Too Well

Zazie in the Metro

This article first appeared in Context #9.

The main reason I want to run this, as a huge Kathy Acker fan, is to draw your attention to the Two Month Review podcast where, last month, we did four episodes on Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (episodes 1, 2, 3, 4), which turned out to be one of our strongest seasons due in large part to the fact that co-host Kaija Straumanis was definitely not a fan of the book. (Also worth noting that we did a season that covered all five of Ann Quin’s books, someone Wheeler references a number of times below. You can find the intro episode here.)

If you already listened to those episodes, below you’ll find someone much much smarter than me articulating what makes Acker’s work so interesting; if you haven’t heard them, hopefully Wheeler’s piece will pique your interest and you’ll check out the podcast. (Also: our next season starts Thursday and is about Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. You can subscribe via Substack, YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.)

In terms of setting the scene, based on Wheeler’s reference to when Acker died, I believe this piece came out in 2001 (or early 2002), in an issue of Context that contains “readings” of Danilo Kiš, Raymond Queneau, and Stanley Elkin’s The Franchiser (specifically, this is the intro by William H. Gass, which can be found in the forthcoming Essentials edition of The Franchiser alongside Adam Levin’s new introduction). It also contained a “Letter from Russia,” which includes references to Sorokin, Pelevin, and Akunin; and Curtis White’s essay, “The Middle Mind,” which was the foundation for his book of the same name.

In terms of Kathleen Wheeler, she’s a professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, and the author of several critical works that will be of interest to Dalkey Archive fans: “Modernist” Women Writers and Narrative Art; Romanticism, Pragmatism and Deconstruction; and, A Critical Guide to Twentieth-Century Women Novelists.

She was happy to see this essay resurface for new readers unfamiliar with Kathy Acker—something that encourages me to save more pieces from these old issues of Context that aren’t currently available online. Anyway—on to Acker!

Reading Kathy Acker

I opened my mouth, but no words. Only the words of others I saw, like ads, texts, psalms, from those who had attempted to persuade me into their systems. A power I did not want to possess. The Inquisition.

Well, no, not Acker; Ann Quin, actually, in her marvelous Tripticks. Not one of Acker’s “plagiarisms” either, although it could have been. She did remark, however, in Empire of the Senseless (1988) that “ten years ago it seemed . . . nonsense would attack the empire-making (empirical) empire of language, the prisons of meaning.” Maybe this was a “plagiarism”? Especially since she concluded that “nonsense, since it depended on sense, simply pointed back to the normalizing institutions.” On the same page, she wrote about past failure, about going beyond “deconstruction [which] is always a reactive thing . . . reinforcing the society you hate” (Hannibal Lecter, My Father). Earlier, in Empire of the Senseless, Acker wrote (copied? plagiarized?) that we do not “lovingly relate to each other in equality, whatever that is, or means, but out of needs for power and control. Humans relate to other humans by eating each other.” Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978) is a graphic account of this power/control dynamic. Margaret Atwood had, ten years earlier, humorously portrayed this conspicuous consumption of women in our society in her short novel, The Edible Woman (1969). Her character bakes a huge cake, shaped like her body, and gradually eats it all up, in an effort to communicate her awareness of and objection to this status quo. Like Atwood, Acker uses wit and humor in the service of a compelling call to her fellow humans to wake up to the tragedy of much of our lives. Tragicomedy is her genre, too, in many novels, such as those in the collection Portrait of an Eye (1992) and Literal Madness (1988).

“I need new instructions . . . new blood,” she wrote, since power and control relations are a “code of death.” In searching for a language and text “past failure” and “beyond deconstruction” (“I got sick of doing it”), Acker wrote of boredom, “borderdom,” and the transgression of borders. She wrote of poverty (as proverbial), and of their opposites, namely, wonder. (See her Bodies of Work: Essays, 1997, for some of her nonfiction writing.) She sought to articulate this idea of wonder—as at the basis of art and beauty—through myths and metaphors of the body, sex, travel, permanent and positive exile, and wandering. When asked, in an interview with Sylvere Lotringer (in Hannibal Lecter), what it meant to work “past failure” in a text, she said, “To go into the space of wonder . . . that’s what I like, all writers like. To have that sense of wonder.” “Spaces of wonder” are those “wild places”—geographical, intellectual, and bodily/emotional—places explored that go beyond known narratives, text, and experience. A space of wonder, one of those wild places, will be “a human society in a world which is beautiful, a society which wasn’t just disgust” (Empire of the Senseless). Someday, she argued, there will have to be another New World, and a new kind of woman/man/human being to live in its sunshine. Before these new realities an occur, before one can stand “there, in the sunlight,” we have to become explicitly aware of social programming. For Acker believes it has dehumanized us, and has created a “reality” more like a “hyperreal” realm of codes and simulacra, where desire has been programmed in a certain, repressive way, as, for example, she anatomizes in My Mother: Demonology, a Novel (1993) regarding heterosexual desires from the point of view of a woman.

Acker, like Jean Rhys fifty years earlier, broke through the boundaries of propriety in all areas:

Christ was right about publicans (and about sinners, too, in my opinion). They are nicer than other people—and I sincerely hope they will walk first into Heaven leaving the holy righteous and respectable outside looking very puzzled.

Rhys’s novels about the demimonde in Paris and London are instructive, as are Ann Quin’s, for reading Acker’s overtly outrageous challenges to the complex of power/money/prestige she attacked. Acker’s experimentation with every aspect of the novel—her frontal assault upon prevailing values and morals—rests on the belief that one must destroy the bastions of:

logocentrism and idealism, theology, all supports of the repressive society. Property’s pillars. Reason which always homogenizes and reduces, represses and unifies phenomena or actuality into what can be perceived and so controlled . . . Reason is alwasy in the service of the political and economic masters. It is here that literature strikes, at this base . . . [it] denounces and slashes apart the repressing machine at the level of the signified. (Empire of the Senseless)

Unlike Rhys, however, both Quin and Acker dispensed with almost all familiar conventions of the novel. They both sought to reveal the fact that familiar order and logic are much less native to our experience than we realize, whether we mean inner mental experience or the apparent order of nature and the “external” world. Sanity is, arguably, merely the most familiar form of irrationality. Both authors challenge conventional assumptions about individual identity. They also examine its construction, perpetration, and its breakdown, as for example in Quin’s Berg (1964) and Three (1966), and in Acker’s The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula and The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec (both in Portrait of an Eye). Like Jane Bowles, in her wonderful novel, Two Serious Ladies (1943), and in numerous of her witty short stories, Quin and Acker play with gender categories, as well as with stereotypes within gender which limit pleasure and creativity. Indeed, social programming is shown deliberately to prevent genuine individuality, since characters impose on each other and themselves roles and cliched forms of behavior.

Quin’s Berg, Three, Tripticks, and Passages are the most obvious literary precursors to Acker’s “wild places.” Jean Rhys’s representations of the demimonde—along with Stevie Smith’s wilder narrative and modernist experiments (especially in Over the Frontier, 1938)—are instructive, however, for the “tradition” within which Acker was working, as are such writers as Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. Yet Angela Carter and even more so Leslie Marmon Silko, in Almanac of the Dead (1991), provide an interesting and contemporary counterpoint to Acker's artistic, polymorphous perversity. More importantly Silk's writing articulates Acker’s own self-acknowledged fascination for dream and myth, particularly in the last decade of her life, when Acker was moving out of her earlier disruptive techniques into something “new.” Silko uses familiar magic realism and Native Indian myths to explode the delusions of respetable society in two of the most impressive novels of the last quarter century. Acker's artistic development parallels Silko’s own move, far away from “story” (in Ceremony, 1977) to episodic “narrative” (in Almanac of the Dead). Silko did manage, however, to wrest power away from conventional narrative writing with less obvious violence than Acker. Silko’s critique is more firmly located in apparent use of some conventions, in order to make the text more accessible and more apparently “legible.” This “legibility,” however, collapses beneath the scrutiny of close reading. Acker was also profoundly fascinated, like Silko, with the idea of magic worlds, “strange worlds,” those wild places:

I like that landscape much better. You're allowed to just move, you're allowed to wander. It's like travelling . . . I guess I just want to go on a journey and so I start with a sentence and then the language twists and turns and you don't even remember where you've been, you're always faced with the present. You're always going somewhere, you always end up somewhere. You want to be surprised. [my italics] (Hannibal Lecter)

Surprise, as Truman Capote had argued decades earlier in relation to Jane Bowles, is at the heart of aesthetic pleasure, along with that other element not normally associated with Acker, namely, beauty. “It’s all about beauty, isn't it?” said one contemporary artist recently when asked what he thought of recent experimentation in the visual arts. As Acker put it, it's all about a beautiful world, where power and control and consumption no longer run the show.

In this vein, the primitiveness of the body takes the place of the “I” as subject in many of Acker’s early texts. Yet she also described herself as a “conceptualist”; hence, there is no room for any mind/body dualism in Acker's writing or in her representations of ordinary experience. In spite of all the attacks on society et al., she sees herself as, in a weird way, a kind of humanist, who has gone from primitive instinctual deconstruction, through, and then beyond, theory. In In Memoriam to Identity (1990) and Eurydice in the Underworld (1997), she explored, explicitly, the myth of romantic love which had run throughout her work since her earliest writing, and which has such a crushing effect on the development of viable individualities. But, after that, she wanted to move on, like Silko and Quin and others, into something different.

Acker has explored the limits of experimental fiction more, perhaps, than any other writer published today. Like William Blake before her (another iconoclast thought during his time to be so outrageous, sexually explicit, and indecorous as to be held mad for some 150 years), she explicitly appealed to the importance of shock in awakening her readers from the sleep of familiarity—Blake’s Ulro. She blasts out a clarion call to awaken us from the stereotyped selves, roles, and forms of behavior that so horrifyingly, convincingly pass for our own personal experience. Her novels are ribald exposures, as in Pussy, King of the Pirates (1996), of the forces both within the psyche (“mind-forged manacles”) and without, which construct and dominate identity through gender, class, race, and so on. Her experiments represent a quest to find out what could liberate us from these habitual fictions we call reality and ordinary life. She is famous for her deconstructions of narrative personae, of story or plot, of characterization, thematics, and so on. She is well-known for her Foucault-like articulations of the dynamics of political, social, and psychological power, and was for a time notorious for satirizing realist, conventional feminist fiction (Hello, I'm Erica Jong, 1982) which, she argued, props up the very structures it seeks to challenge. Her techniques of plagiarism, her constant challenges to “intellectual property”—which got her into serious legal trouble in both England and Germany—are favorite topics for readers. Others are her erotics, or near (if not actual) pornographics, her blasts at social decorum as well as literary proprieties, her incoherent thematics, plotless texts, chaotic character non-identities (taking the “anti-novel” to its most extreme form), her mix of autobiography, fact, and fiction, or madness and sanity. These well-known narrative experiments are characteristic of most of her work; they are designed to shock the reader out of complacency, much like Blake: “You're dealing with shock. To me nothing's interesting unless it's slightly shocking. Otherwise I am just dealing with my own habits. Lulled into habits again and again. It is good to be shocked.”

What has often been overlooked, however, is the deeply-moving humanity at the basis of Acker's writing—which should put paid to notions that such experimental writing is somehow apolitical and therefore escapist. Recent extreme forms of experimentation in theory and in fiction, such as postmodernism, are said by many to be apolitical, because they do not discuss explicit political topics overtly. This notion is an indication of the misguided lengths to which critics—unconsciously committed to tradition (whatever their concious assertions)—will go in order to perpetuate confusion, inequality, and the status quo. Acker, taking society and us individuals as a series of interrelated texts, “bodies of writing,” seeks in her writing to achieve a direct connection between herself and the reader. As William Burroughs put it, “Her author moves and shifts before you can know who ‘you’ are, and that gives her work the power to mirror the reader’s soul.” Her efforts to decentralize power and reappropriate it are in the service of a more humane way of constructing societies and personal identities. There, in those sunlit places, those wild places, those spaces of wonder, those moments of beauty, people will be able to seek out more fulfilling ways of “realizing” themselves, their relationships with others, and their desires/pleasures/needs. Acker, like William Blake and others, knew sexual repression was the fundamental social instrument for the imprisonment of the human body/spirit. Escape for all of us from boredom and poverty—whether spiritual or material—was a constant quest for her, as it was for Jean Rhys and Ann Quin. Regrettably, exactly like all the writers mentioned here, Acker has often been misread and misunderstood, mixed up with her characters, thought to be hard, unfeeling. If the views of some critics prevail, that Acker’s writing is “rubbish,” it will only be we who lose. She died of breast cancer four years ago. [Ed. Note: Acker died in 1997.]

Kathleen Wheeler’s “Reading Kathy Acker,” appeared in Context No. 9.