, she alters those texts (at times they become unrecognizable), or she embeds chunks of another work into a new context, one that's so unfamiliar that the pirated text's meaning is radically distorted. Let's call it appropriation, for lack of a sexier term -the music industry came up with "sampling
, The Beat Hotel, p.62, 1983.
, but left after two years. An amateur bodybuilder, tattoo enthusiast, and adjunct professor at the San Francisco Art Institute beginning in 1991, Acker also appeared as a visiting instructor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Idaho in 1994. Shortly before her death, she produced Bodies of, Acker was raised by her mother and stepfather. Her biological father, whom she never met, abandoned her mother before she was born, 1997.
, A Conversation with Kathy Acker, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol.9, issue.3, pp.15-21, 1989.
, A Conversation with Kathy Acker, p.16
, In other words, you can make your own montage, you could appropriate and re-order, just as Kathy Acker had appropriated and re-ordered the writing of others
, Leslie Dick once remarked that Kathy Acker's writing was an extension of her reading, that her plagiarism was a way of reading, or re-reading, appropriating and customizing what she read, writing herself, so to speak, into the fabric of the original text, Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker
, Acker took revenge on a male literary tradition by raiding it mercilessly; her so-called plagiarism is a way of appropriating what is otherwise denied. As a woman, she can't inherit. As a pirate
, The Novels of Claude Simon, p.222, 1975.
, After the Wake, pp.150-151
, After the Wake, p.151
, After the Wake, vol.152
, After the Wake, vol.153
, One can see a remarkable coincidence of thematic material and some examples of such encounters have already been noted -the blasphemous Mass in Histoire and the divine dove in Pharsale, for instance, recall the early chapters of Ulysses. A long list of others could easily be compiled. The tramcars in Le Palace crisscross the city like those in Joyce's Dublin. A constant preoccupation with cuckoldry, journeys, puzzles, chamberpots or chalices, plumbing, the zodiac, the significance of certain letters or numbers, The later novels clearly demonstrate that Simon moves in the same paths as Joyce
, The Novels of Claude Simon, pp.241-243
, New Criticism"), whose attempt at rational grasp of literary work as text displaces, to Pinget's mind, such traditional features-examined by e.g. Poe or Baudelaire-as "innateness, spontaneity, inspiration, the Gargantuan fantasy of Joyce and relies far more extensively on the literary, vol.242
, Robert Pinget, French Novelists Since, vol.83, pp.177-185, 1960.
, After his law studies he moved to Paris in order to take up painting as a pupil of Souverbie and acquired certain renown as an artist. His gradual shift to writing occurred in the early 1950s, when, following the rather modest reception of his first two novels, his third novel, Le Renard et la boussole (1953), caught Robbe-Grillet's attention and earned Pinget the stable publication platform with the Éditions de Minuit. His long travels took him on an extended sojourn at a kibbutz in Israel. His work, like that of the other New Novelists, covers multiple genres including theatre -here, his life-long friendship with Samuel Beckett gains in importance. Their collaboration was mutual: among other things, Pinget translated All That Fall into French, a favour Beckett returned by transposing Pinget's La Manivelle
, Robert Pinget -The Novel as Quest [The University of Alabama Press, 1979.
, Joyce prend un texte, on pourrait presque dire n'importe lequel, il rêve sur lui, il déchiffre à travers lui un autre texte, qu'il y intègre et qui devient aussi important que le premier, qui joue exactement le même rôle que lui
, car ce portrait de moi-même que j'y discerne, ce n'est pas celui que j'aurais dessiné avant la lecture. Ces phrases dont l'orthographie ambiguë me contraint de les interpréter au moyen d'innombrables lapsus servent de catalyseurs à ma conscience, rongent et minent peu à peu les étages de ma censure. Ce n'est donc pas, comme on le dit souvent, la simple description d'un rêve, mais une machine à provoquer et faciliter mes propres rêves
, On en avait beaucoup parlé à une certaine époque, puis la vague de l'Occupation l'avait recouvert, comme tant d'autres choses. Ce qui m'a influencé chez lui, c'est l'utilisation de grilles, le fait d'écrire non pas au fil de la plume, au long du texte, mais en quelque sorte perpendiculairement à lui, vol.57, 1948.
, Michel Butor -Entretiens, vol.1, pp.1956-68
, Effectivement il y a beaucoup de choses en littérature contemporaine actuelle qui sont des exploitations de détails de l'oeuvre de certains grands écrivains du début du XXe siècle et en particulier de l'oeuvre de Joyce : cela est tout à fait normal? C'est un phénomène très courant et qui ne permet pas du tout de dire qu'il soit particulièrement difficile de faire quelque chose après Joyce ; au contraire, c'est plus facile
, Both these Perequian particularities and divergences from the Oulipian doctrine make him closer in spirit to, Michel Butor -Entretiens, vol.3, pp.1979-96
, the 1985 posthumous volume Penser/Classer) contain much by way of homage to, or address of, Joyce -it is to Perec's interviews and talks, and of course his own fiction, particularly La vie mode d'emploi, that one must turn for specific textual evidence. Of the early interviews, one instance specifically stands out: in 1974, Perec acknowledges the destructive aspect of Joyce's heritage and voices the need to surpass it, Joyce than any other Oulipian. Still, unlike Queneau for instance, neither his criticism nor his non-fiction writing
, most of them to do with La vie mode d'emploi, Joyce begins surfacing as an exclusively positive influence: in an interview for Le Devoir from, 1979.
, Je ne me considère pas comme héritier de Queneau, mais je me considère vraiment comme un produit de l'Oulipo. C'est-à-dire que mon existence d'écrivain dépend à quatre-vingt-dix-sept pour cent du fait que j'ai connu l'Oulipo à une époque tout à fait charnière de ma formation, de mon travail d'écriture, Georges Perec -Entretiens et conférences, vol.II, pp.148-157, 2003.
, Georges Perec, Oulibiographer
, But there is another, more significant factor in his development which surfaces in his autobiographical works of 1973-78: his discovery and gradual understanding-with the aid of analysis-of the effect of his parents' death, especially his mother's, upon his creative imagination, As critic Paul Schwartz has similarly observed, vol.3, 1988.
, Georges Perec, Oulibiographer
, Introduction, p.42
URL : https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01625265
, Joyce a montré qu'il est facile de détruire l'écriture; le problème me paraît être maintenant de la réinventer. C'est pour ça que je suis à l'Oulipo. Je le répète, nous sommes des artisans, (Entretiens et conférences, vol.I, pp.1965-78
, is an author who draws "une sorte de constellation avec au centre (ou sur les bords) une pièce vide qui est celle que je vais venir remplir
, despite the deep overall respect harboured for both the man and the oeuvre, Perec again refuses to classify Joyce's Ulysses as an unreadable text, placing it firmly into the genealogy of his development as both reader and writer
, Perec avows freely that his earliest work, for "reasons which I absolutely couldn't explain to myself," was parody and pastiche of some of his favourite writers. Again, just as Queneau, Perec emphasises Joyce's influence as part of his own general interest in Anglophone literature -as he confided in an answer to Gabriel Simony's question regarding the "shaking off of the weight of all our literary heroes
, 40 The Perequian corpus-comprising 22 texts from 1965 to 1981 and 15 more volumes of the posthumous editions of his manuscripts, non-fiction, criticism, collected interviews, etc.-is notable not only for its scope and sheer bulk, but also for its unique variety. As Schwartz has remarked, the differences of style and subject in Perec's first three novels-Les Choses (1965), Quel petit vélo (1966), and Un Homme qui dort (1967) give the impression of "a man with a need to write, searching for a personal means of expression, vol.II, p.76, 1969.
, pour des raisons que je ne pouvais absolument pas m'expliquer. [?] Puis j'ai commencé à écrire plusieurs livres qui portaient les influences successives de Joyce, Malcolm Lowry? Le premier essayait de ressembler à du Malcom Lowry. Le second essayait peutêtre de ressembler à du Joyce, j'en suis pas très sûr? Le troisième essayait de ressembler à du Leiris. Le quatrième, c'était Les Choses, qui ressemblait beaucoup à du Flaubert, avec Ulysse ce n'est pas arrivé, vol.II, pp.147-155
, Moi, ce poids, je le ressens encore plus avec la littérature anglo-saxonne
, Cela m'a empêché d'écrire. À la fois empêché et tellement donné envie! Effectivement, si on reste terrorisé par Flaubert, c'est vrai que l'on se dit que l'on n'y arrivera jamais, que ce n'est pas possible, Mais aussi très forte avec Flaubert, vol.II, pp.1979-81
, Georges Perec -Entretiens et conférences, vol.II, 1979.
, C'est un risque que tout écrivain court tout le temps, que tout poète court, à savoir qu'il a impression que [?] à force de faire un travail qui détruit les conventions qui existaient avant lui, il va se retrouver en face d'un mur et qu'il n'aura pas de successeurs. C'est sûr que pour Joyce? il y a? à la fin de Finnegans Wake, il y a quelque chose qui est du domaine de l'échec. Bon. Eh bien, c'est possible, Georges Perec -Entretiens et conférences, vol.II, pp.1979-81
, Si je tente à definir ce que j'ai cherché à faire depuis que j'ai commencé à écrire, la première idée qui me vient à l'esprit est que je n'ai jamais écrit deux livres semblables, que je n'ai jamais eu envie de répéter dans un livre une formule
, , vol.1
, Magpie-like, he evidently gleaned from his voracious reading, as well as from his work as a scientific documentalist, a heterogeneous memory-bank of choice morsels-sentences, odd names, incidents real and fictional, technical terminologies-on which he drew in profusion and in unexpected juxtapositions to nourish his writing. In the literary and narrative games which he plays, many of the constituent materials and of the particular techniques can be found to be derived from writers whom he admired and constantly reread, vol.47, 2006.
, , p.695
, Perec's "Citations" notebook consists of precise references to quotations carefully garnered from a list of twenty authors. Here is Perec's list for Joyce: JOYCE 1 ch 23 Ulysse p 637 2 ch 32 Ulysse 550 (carte postale) 3 ch 36 " Homme Libre 4 ch 43 " p 151 (gomme Héphas) 5 ch 59 " p 608 (instruments) 6 ch 60, Perec, thus, reveals a novel which had seemed such a highly original, hyper-realistic universe unto itself, to have in fact been a veritable mosaic, tissue, or puzzle of quotations. Notably, pp.9-46
, To the left is the number of the quotation in Perec's listing, followed by the number of the chapter in La vie mode d'emploi in which it was to be inserted. We then have the title of the book from which the quotation is to be drawn. The words to the right indicate that Perec was working from the French translation produced by Auguste Morel with Stuart Gilbert and Valéry Larbaud in 1929, p.53
, Although Perec's quotations from Joyce have certain distinguishing characteristics and generate particular kinds of intertextual glee-often relating, for instance, to the theme of translation that they both enact and represent-they are not of a markedly different kind from Perec's other adapted quotations. In La vie mode d'emploi a deliberate structural flattening or equalisation prevails: the lists, the chess and complex mathematical formulae that govern the trajectory of the narrative within the building and regulate the distribution of elements within each chapter preclude the possibility of one author being elevated above another. Evenly weighted, these voices form a gigantic intertextual puzzle. To quote in this way, for Perec, is to conjure a personalized literary microcosm within the wider literary macrocosm, a fictional space or constellation wherein the coordinates of specific authorial reference points define a space of writing in which
, consciously and self-consciously opens up his text to a plethora of other voices
, he makes intertextuality a compositional principle, and in his own eye-popping Oulipian style, finds astonishingly ingenious ways of flooding his text with quotation, even though Perec's intertextuality is of an order different from that of Joyce's. 55 Still, as Jacques Mailhos has argued in "The Art of Memory: Joyce and Perec," there is one Ulysses borrowing (the first one
, Discussing how Perec resorted to similar solutions to the similar sorts of compositional problems Joyce faced while organising his encyclopaedic narrative, Mailhos shows "the extent and importance of Joyce's presence in Life: A User's Manual, while concentrating on an analysis of the similar use, by both writers
, For a closer analysis of these quotations, see Scarlett Baron
, Mon ambition d'écrivain est donc de balayer, ou en tout cas de baliser, les champs de l'écriture dans tous les domaines où cette écriture m'a permis d'écrire à mon tour. Cela implique un travail sur les genres, sur les codes, et sur les "modèles" dont mon écriture procède: un certain nombre d'auteurs (de Joyce à Hergé, de Kafka à Price, De Scève à Pierre Dac, de Si Shonagon à Gotlib) définissent
, 56 It is in its functioning as mnemonic system that Perec's intertextuality should be given its proper due without necessarily regarding it as inferior to Joyce's. 57 The notion of "memory places," in Mailhos' essay, gives rise to the idea of the book as textual space, a "house" of sorts, conjuring up Perec's first "altered quotation
, of La Vie, turning him into a room decorator -with reference to a "doll's house" taken from the end of the "Ithaca" chapter, where it forms part of Bloom's fantasy of his "ultimate ambition
, 59 Josipovici's argument is most convincing in his discussion of Perec's hyper-realism -"Is Perec a hyper-realist, only concerned to detail what is to be found in the average Parisian building around 1975? Or does he perhaps wish to tell us something about the characters through the descriptions?" is the question, and Josipovici answers: On the contrary. What we realize as we read this book is how very selective the ordinary novelist is and how Perec's method actually destroys the delicate balance of foreground and background on which novels depend for their effect of reality, Moreover, where the Perec/Joyce relation is concerned, one need not stop with intertextuality
, Another feature, one in which Perec does seem to surpass Joyce, is the extreme non-linearity of his narrative -in the
, Josipovici's intervention makes a compelling case for Perec's La Vie as "a homage to tradition, the storehouse of possibilities" and in particular, "a homage to Joyce, the man who above all others made it possible," by which is meant "the book as it stands possible, but also made possible the pleasure which work on the book no doubt gave to Perec, Perec's jigsaw puzzle, no affirmation of linearity and archetypical status can be said to take place
, Trained as a mathematician specialising in algebra, Roubaud began "composing"-as he refers to the activity-poetry before producing vast prose works. A member of the Oulipo since 1966 (the first new member apart from the founders, making him the longest-serving member in the group
, The Art of Memory: Joyce and Perec, p.151, 1998.
, This phenomenon reveals itself, of course, in the interplay (in the necessary absence of complete coincidence) between the author's narrative trajectory through memory places [?] and our own personal reading trajectory in which each of us has the capacity to unfold different stories to varying degrees, vol.162
, This doll's house is a typical memory image which contains Bloom, Bloom's dreams, but also the idea (the possibility) of a different Ulysses with a different character [?]; besides, the fact that this is an image which, in the narration, is presented as having been created by a pseudo-Bloom (Henry Fleury) only reinforces this aspect. [?] Thus, in a way, Bloom himself was presentunder cover-in Perec's Parisian building (and book
, Given the way in which this book functions, Bloom, as an interior decorator, thus becomes something like the author of one of its chapters" (Mailhos, The Art of Memory: Joyce and Perec, vol.165
, Georges Perec's Homage to James Joyce, p.179
, Georges Perec's Homage to James Joyce, p.183
, Even when a writer as boldly innovatory as Joyce wants us to get away from the anecdotal and the linear he can only do it by trying to present Bloom as Everyman. Joyce, like Freud, was very often confused by his own instincts and interpreted his discoveries in terms of the nineteenthcentury patterns of thought which these very discoveries were in the process of subverting. Thus "Cyclops" and "Ithaca" pull in one direction, centrifugally, while "Circe" and "Penelope," for all their flirtation with fragmentation and the dissolution of self, really affirm a rather old-fashioned view of character and archetypes, pp.189-90
, Georges Perec's Homage to James Joyce
, , 1985.
, , 1987.
, , 1990.
, On Reading Jacques Roubaud, Paths to Contemporary French Literature, vol.2, p.141, 2009.
, Possible worlds: trans-world travel, haecceity and grief in Jacques Roubaud's The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis, Journal of Modern Literature, vol.34, issue.3, p.162, 2011.
, Le projet n'est pas sans rappeler l'entreprise joycienne qui opte pour un style nouveau à chaque chapitre d'Ulysse [?], mais chez Roubaud, le style n'est pas un facteur parodique, étant donné que la plupart des lecteurs occidentaux ignorent tout de ces distinction, et auraient de toute façon beaucoup de mal à les percevoir s'ils en étaient informés, Véronique Montémont, Jacques Roubaud, l'amour du nombre
, That is, Roubaud approaches language as a series of numbers, as families of forms, whose connectivity becomes the architecture of his memory and his innovative techniques. The second precept underlying his poetics, purportedly borrowed from Octavio Paz, is the imperative to adopt an attitude of homage and profanation toward literary tradition. Revising, recollecting and rewriting tradition-all fundaments of extending innovation-requires both a respect for and battle with literary tradition, This is how Jean-Jacques Poucel defines it: Plainly stated, it is a strategy by which a methodical memory of tradition becomes the basis of literary innovation, vol.12, 2006.
, Roubaud and the Invention of Memory, p.14
, It is in this confrontation between emotion and constraining form, between a pre-planned literary-mathematical structure and the painful vicissitudes of personal history, that Roubaud's writings raise so many essential questions. Most of the books written since his wife's death revolve around phenomena of memory, and in this respect he forges a different model of remembering than that underlying the unavoidable landmark for French (and other) writers in this domain: Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. In contrast to Proust's notion of memory as expanding from some small, insignificant detail (like a madeleine cookie, of which the author of The Great Fire of London must surely be thinking when he in turn brilliantly describes a fresh croissant, Proust and Bergson rather than a filiation with the Joycean "hypermnesis
, Critical of Joyce's project and of its academic veneration, his chief objection as regards the usefulness of Joyce's Wake was chiefly this: that Joyce, contrary to the beliefs maintained by his transition supporters and promoters, did not create a "new" language in the Wake, as his neologisms, At an international conference on "The Poetics of Multilingualism, 2013.
, Roubaud's criticism is not without its Oulipian predecessors and co-adherents. The only extended mention of
, 70 These aside, though, Le Tellier's main issue with Joyce's Wakean Babel-project is this: Le meilleur argument contre les partisans d'une langue universelle reste celui, remarquable, de Saussure, lequel rappelle l'évolutivité des langues, que nul ne saurait maîtriser, et à laquelle on imagine mal une langue, fût-elle "la chose de tout le monde" échapper : l'homme qui prétendrait composer une langue immuable, que la postérité devrait accepter comme telle
, Ironically, the only mention of Joyce in another prominent work of Oulipian historiography and poetics, Mathews' coedited Oulipo Compendium, comes in a similarly twisted manner -as "an interesting use of restricted vocabulary
, An interesting use of restricted vocabulary is James Joyce's translation of the last four pages of "Anna Livia Plurabelle" from Finnegans Wake into Basic English: a reduction of the English language (to 850 words) invented by C.K. Ogden in which, he claimed, "everything may be said, 1932.
, a utopia doomed to fail, as Saussure's lesson teaches all too clearly, whereas for Mathews' Compendium, his interest lies in submitting his Wakean project to a proto-Oulipian constraint. A similar position has been expressed by another prominent contemporary Oulipian, Jacques Jouet
, Jacques Roubaud himself went a step further, claiming that although "je l'ai lu avec plaisir" it was with the exception of "Finnegans wake, qui est d'un ennui mortel," and that Oulipo as such "n'a rien à voir avec Joyce," since "je vois assez mal une influence de Joyce sur Queneau ou Perec
, On Reading Jacques Roubaud, p.142
, , p.106
, , p.109
, , 2013.
, , 2013.
, 81 What deserves pointing out is how numbers operate at once on the realist (i.e. contained in the narrated reality), the symbolic (11 as the end and the beginning), and the material (i.e. contained in the narrating reality of language -11 sentences, 11 letters, etc.) levels. Joyce's work with formal constraints is one of amplification, multiplication and layering of various means of ordering. Thus, to revert to Roubaud, if Joyce's "language games" (the numerological one above is by far not the only one) can be seen as Oulipian, it must be as rule-(if not exactly constraint-)bound, and definitely not as works of
,
, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, p.21, 1929.
, The Stoic Comedians, p.58, 1962.
, The Stoic Comedians, pp.53-57
, For in this book 11, the fresh start after a decade, is the number for the two primary kinds of events, beginnings and endings; and while sometimes it is specified, it sometimes lurks behind a count of episodes or paragraphs or words. A sampling of elevens
, and the hour of their tryst is set in the 11th episode; 11 paragraphs of entry and 11 of exit precede and follow the 40 paragraphs of gestation in "Oxen of the Sun"; as late as 1919, when he conceived "Wandering Rocks
, Joyce is as perfect a proto-Oulipian, as ideal example of an "anticipatory plagiary," as one can find in the Anglophone literary tradition (except perhaps Lewis Carroll). However, apart from his un-Oulipian tendency toward the multiplication and amplification of rules and systems of presentation, JJ, vol.542
, Joyce's techniques-it is one of his principal lessons-are without exception derived from his subject, often excerpted from his subject. They are not means of representing the subject, and imperfectly; they are the subject's very members laid on the page, fact reverses it. As Kenner has put it, p.82
, Joyce's techniques, his rules and constraints, are always motivated by the subject matter, and inseparable from it
, not-as is so often the case in Oulipo-vice versa, where the text is the result and an illustration of a pre-conceived method at work. It is in this twofold sense-as both their colleague and a writer of profoundly different sensibility and style-that Oulipians have conceived of Joyce as "anticipatory plagiary
, The Stoic Comedians, 50. icant affect is in the other direction: science becomes undermined by its object. This is happening when, the theoretical discourse of Tel Quel, the twin dimensions of the subjective and the political come increasingly into play
, This scientific outlook, then, pervaded Tel Quel's theory as much as its practice of literature
, Tel Quel's literary canon was also a "work in progress" of sorts: if Joyce and Céline are signalled as primary objects of analysis and celebration from early on, then a colloquium in 1972 highlights Artaud and Bataille as "subjects of excess," and Julia Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language (1974) consecrates Lautréamont and Mallarmé as "proponents of a radical shift in knowledge
, As Chapter V in the present work strove to show, any "ideology" of the nouveau roman, which Tel Quel set out to confront, is itself an illusory phenomenon since the creative practice of each of the New Novelists was different. That said, the Tel Quel group found their common characteristics in the formalist experimentation with narrative and the reduction of the traditional elements of character and psychology, and it is this common characteristics that Tel Quel must confront in order to establish its own practice as distinct. Vastly different are the two avant-garde's literary and philosophical traditions within which they place themselves -and so, by extension, is their treatment of Joyce's legacy of the materiality of language. As long as in Robbe-Grillet's Pour un nouveau roman, Joyce is merely a name alongside those of Flaubert, Roussell, Proust, Kafka or Faulkner, in Sollers' tradition of the oeuvre limite, The 1960 foundation of Tel Quel was a gesture aimed against another anti-traditionalism within French writing, the nouveau roman. In a 1963 issue of Tel Quel, Sollers claims that "a livelier lucidity can in effect, in making language the principal subject of all writing, open new perspectives" (TQ 17, back cover)
, according to Julia Kristeva, within the group's "cult of the Great Man": L'originalité de Tel Quel consiste à reconnaître le besoin de culte du Grand Homme, au coeur même du langage et au sein d'une société laïque. Et à accompagner ce besoin d'une stratégie qui propose une relecture du christianisme, à la fois pincesans-rire et sérieusement scandaleuse, dont l'exemple le plus net est le rôle majeur que Tel Quel a accordé à Joyce -Joyce le polyphonique -, ainsi que la continuation de cette veine par Sollers. En ces temps de dénigrement des valeurs
, Ffrench & Lack, pp.4-5
, From Nombres to Lois to H, the textual space of Sollers' writing becomes organized as much by Chinese ideograms and exclamation marks as by number and sequence, before finally attaining unpunctuated seamlessness; [?] in Maurice Roche's explosively visual textualizations, from Compact through Circus to Codex, the space of the scientific equation or diagram is invaded by figures and drawings, turning these "scientific" forms into different, figural space, vol.5
, Why literature?" changes according to the different versions of canonicity promoted by or ascribable to TQ: firstly, because it is the vehicle of an epistemological radicality reflected in social and philosophical change, and of a rhetorical analysis of it which engages the participation of the reader; secondly, because it is the vehicle of a subjective excess which incarnates political and cultural revolution; and thirdly, because it is dissident with regard to any system, exceptional with regard to any rule, vol.6
, On serait bien en peine de trouver dans les interventions de Robbe-Grillet, réunies en 1963 sous le titre générique Pour un nouveau roman, la moindre remarque qui témoignerait d'une connaissance réelle de l'oeuvre de Joyce" whereas for Tel Quel, "même sous cette forme pour le moins sommaire, l'inscription du nom de Joyce, dans des débats auxquels participent les animateurs de Tel Quel dès les premières livraisons de la revue, garde une valeur symbolique importante : cette oeuvre est bel et bien là, comme en réserve énigmatique, sollicitée pour des enjeux esthétiques, culturels, fondamentaux, qui mettent aux prises non pas ces spécialistes
, Histoires de ruptures, De Tel Quel à L'infini: L'Avant-garde et après? (Colloques de Londres et de Paris -Mars, p.61, 1995.
, Les Samouraïs tels quels, De Tel Quel à L'infini, p.23
, s became an influence far more palpable and useful than any "symbolic value" (Houdebine) or "the cult a great man" (Kristeva) might have accorded him at the start. Even though Joyce came to prominence only together with the appearance of Jacques Derrida's essays in mid-to late 1960s (later collected in Dissemination), it was thanks to Tel Quel's interdisciplinary bent that discussions of Joyce were not limited to literary critics. Rabaté has noted how Derrida's interest in Sollers was in fact emblematic of Tel Quel's interest in Joyce, both aimed at the examination of the functioning of language: Derrida identified in Sollers' novel Nombres the utopia of a purely textual novel soon to become the hallmark of Tel Quel: resolutely 'experimental' texts half way between poetry and prose. Like Finnegans Wale, they did not represent anything but just exhibited the functioning of language
, De Dante à Sade," a text whose historical scope necessarily leaves out Joyce, but whose call for a multiplication of styles of writing by means of the "destruction of language" does relate to him, Joyce was part of the line between Mallarmé, Sade, Lautréamont
, The bulk of Tel Quel's essays on Joyce, 1968.
, dans leur déstabilisation, renvoient non à un context-et donc non à quelque 'Réalité'-mais à un intertexte" [TQ 50: 30]); its staging of the "matérialité des effects d'écriture," and its employment of the rhetorical strategies of "parodie -pasticheplagiat -contrefaçon" (TQ 50: 32). The second half is devoted to the Wake's elaboration of, the first attempt at a philosophically rigorous articulation of the operations of the Wake's semantic ambiguity and linguistic materiality, for which it gained so much currency among the Tel Quel practitioners, with reference to, among others
, The Joyce of French Theory, p.259, 2008.
, Histoires de ruptures, De Tel Quel à L'infini, p.62
, Post-scriptum: Shem trouvé" and Jean Paris' study "Finnegan, Wake!" in which three words from the Wake ("venissoon," "cweamy," and "notshall") are subjected to an exhaustive etymological and comparative linguistic examination which yields lists of possible analogues and echoes from several dozen languages. Joyce's work is regarded by Paris as the consummation of Shklovsky's ultimate goal in art: "cette singularisation, cet obscurcissement de la forme qui, en retardant, en déroutant la perception, nous rend au sentiment que 'la pierre est de pierre'" (TQ 30: 59). Lavergne's "Avant-Propos, TQ 11&12, 1963.
, is that Finnegans Wake is a word, one immense word but in a state of skidding, of lapsus; a word jam-packed with words, in fact a name full of names, but "open," spiraling. This play on words seems to me to function on a simple nucleus where to give one word (or rather an
, Joyce writes SINSE, reading since, sense, and sin. The 'syllogistic' development of this condensation is as follows: ever since sense, there is sin
, In one word, as in a thousand, you have a thesis on language and man's fall from paradise; and, simultaneously, it is funny, TQ 64: 7). This "syllogistic" poetics has also ramification for
, aggregates of sounds, of syllables," a state which Sollers reads as laughter towards the one via a Francophone reading of the Wake's opening word "riverrun" as rire-vers-l'un (TQ 64: 8). Such and other French re-readings and re-writings of the Wake tie in with Sollers' opening statement, later on rephrased in terms highly reminiscent of Jolas, the beginning were neither heroes nor gods, nor even men, but collisions, vol.64
, Joyce -challenges to linear meaning, squarings of circles" (TQ 64: 10). Sollers concludes by linking his linguistic exploration of the Wake's mytho-religious conceptual framework to a third crucial Joycean topic, his treatment of sexuality in which "the language is transformed into the joyance of languages" in which the last word-both of Ulysses and the Wake-is entrusted to a woman: It is this saturation of the polymorphic, polyphonic, polygraphic, polyglottic, varieties of sexuality, this unsetting of sexuality, this devastating ironicalisation of your most visceral, Sollers does recall Beckett's early essay and agrees that, vol.64
, 18 Besides that, and even more importantly, they formed the basis on which Tel Quel's three crucial novelists (Sollers, Roche, and Cixous) founded their linguistically materialist poetics, and its chief literary theorist (Houdebine) formed his numerous forays into discursiveness and the politics of language
, This is performed across genres (both literature and philosophy/theology), across languages (the German of Hölderlin, Hegel, Marx, and Freud, the Latin of Duns Scot, the English of Hopkins and Joyce, the French of Sollers), and across discourses and traditions (Duns Scot's medievalism, Hegel's phenomenology, Cantor's set theory, Freud's psychoanalysis, Joyce's and Sollers' literary avant-gardism). In a short text on "La question langage face aux révolutions totalitaires, Houdebine's essays on (not only) Joyce from the period between 1974 and 1983 have been collected in his magisterial study Excès de langages, which deals with linguistic transgression (via excess) of all types of imposed normativity
, The Joyce of French Theory, p.257
, Moscow Congress of Soviet Writers and the famous critique levelled against
, from the Surrealist camp, particularly from André Breton and Louis Aragon. The last of these refusals is worth dwelling on. In Houdebine's opinion, the Surrealist hostility toward Joyce had the following rationale: A nouveau, comme s'il y avait là, dans Ulysses, puis dans Finnegans Wake, quelque chose d'énorme, de trop énorme, de trop dangereux pour la doctrine et l'écriture surréaliste, et que celles-ci s'avèrent incapables de penser ; quelque chose, pour ainsi dire, de trop dangereusement proche et pourtant de totalement différent, et qui relègue immédiatement au rang de babioles mondaines les poèmes de ces Messieurs, p.163
, Glossaire: j'y serre mes gloses" (published serially in La Révolution surréaliste, nos. 3-6). The difference is the vastly larger degree to which Joyce's work with language is "subversive" of the cultural-linguistic material operated with by means of parody, so sorely lacking in the surrealist "automatic writing
, Joyce appears as the writer who epitomizes Tel Quel's view of literature during the 1970s as the paradigm of the experience of the writer as exception, against historically totalizing movements such as Fascism and Stalinism. The textual effects commented upon by Heath or Hayman in the pages of Tel Quel and followed by practitioners like Sollers, Roche, or Cixous, have a real political importance in that Joyce is a historical unconscious, a return of the repressed. Tel Quel champions the exceptional values of Joyce's texts, mostly Finnegans Wake, against nationalism, Beckett's insistence on the "thingness" of Joyce's words and Jolas' concept of linguistic autonomy
, Joyce becomes the touchstone of literature's ability to undermine politically totalizing systems, and thus the review's stress on Joyce is a political choice
, This referential framework, writes Joyce to Budgen, is meant to con-19 "Les petits jeux de mots de Leiris n'ont en fait à voir avec la subversion du langage et des langues que Joyce est alors en train de réaliser: subversion qui met en jeu un matériau culturel et langagier énorme, traité dans une incessante parodisation, dont la démesure est exactement proportionnée à la lucidité maitrisant qu'elle implique et contient pour aussitôt la détruire et l'excéder dans son rire. C'est précisément en ce point que la divergence, Joyce's Catholic experience is regarded as "fundamentally soliciting" his mode of writing -reference is made to Robert Boyle's James Joyce's Pauline Vision and its central conviction of the essential analogy between the mystery of religion and the mystery of literature, vol.230
, La différence entre l'économie du sujet de l'inconscient et celle du sujet de l'écriture réside essentiellement dans le fait que la première est réglée par l'assujettissement du sujet à lalangue (en un seul mot), tandis que la seconde suppose la traversée de la première pour qu'y advienne le sujet, non plus d'une lalangue
, 21 Turning to the Wake, Houdebine notes how the Freudian definition of the "dream" has only partial applicability -Joyce's multilingualism shows not so much a "language of the dream" at work as a "language of the people": Manifestement, ce n'est pas à ce niveau que se situe l'écriture de Finnegans Wake, ou du moins pas seulement : le recours à un plus-de-langues possible, qui a été soutenu systématiquement par Joyce, laisse à penser au contraire que loin d'écrire (dans) une « langue de rêve », il poursuit un projet beaucoup plus ambitieux, qui ne peut se définir en termes de linguae gentium, p.242
, whether verbal or non-verbal -the status of the obscene, in Joyce, is always of the semiological order. This inscription of the obscene has, then, the function of providing access to the sexual prohibitions and taboos: dans une écriture comme celle de J, dont je rappelle que ce n'est pas un hasard si elle s'est chargée, du même geste, des spéculations théologiques les plus sublimantes, l'obscène constitue un moyen d'accès privilègié à la symbolicité, Houdebine insists that it should be viewed as "a gesture of language
, focuses entirely on the Wake, viewed as "une multiplication du récit," a multiplication which is a function of a certain type of excess, defined as follows: "multiplication/division des paradigmes narratifs, qui correspondraient assez bien à ce qu'on a pu appeler « mythèmes », « par filtrage et agglutination » de langues
, The former takes place "au niveau de la trame narrative qui en est intérieurement et constamment secouée, inquiétée, ironisée, aux enquêtes toujours reprises, interrogatoires, tentatives d'analyse d'un document retrouvé par hasard," on the level of the narrative thread, constantly shaken, disquieted and ironised (EL, 200). The latter echoes Sollers' observation about Joyce using English as a filter through which to process dozens of other languages in a syntax which is "ni la syntaxe anglaise proprement dite
, Houdebine's conception of Joyce's signature as precisely the operation of "filtrage" through which some "one" becomes a plurality of voices
, The singularity of the exception, for Houdebine, is a post-intertextual singularity, what is described by a word from the Wake as "meandertale": "Énigme, car cela revient à (se) demander : « qui suis-je ? ». « Joyce, » bien sûr, « James Joyce ». mais « qui suis-je-Joyce » quand « j' » écris ? Qui joys quand ça s'écrit, quand ça s'écrit, Joyce's Wake is portrayed as the idea of the post-universal singularity that exists in a temporality of the pressant, the infinity of texts pressing behind the moment of writing, a temporality of the dépense of the anterior texts, pp.208-217
, Houdebine's treatment of Joyce's signature as intertextual and polyglotal multiplication of the many individual signatures preceding him resonates with some of the crucial concerns of Tel Quel's chief fiction practitioners, DIS: YES -I.R.A
, Elle nous introduit au contraire à l'ordre de ce que j'ai appelé une Incarnation du Verbe, de Joyce devenant Verbe dans l'écriture même d'une énonciation féminine, c'est-à-dire maternelle, dans la traversée incestueuse d'une chair enfin parlante, au sein de laquelle il accède à l'infinité « post-humaine » du langage. Ce qui signifie qu'il se donne à lui-même, et par un geste de paternité logique finalement très clair à mes yeux, -1997) was a writer (and musical composer) of prolific output, a "bricoleur with words, letters, drawings, signs, and symbols, 1925.
, Si l'on peut caractériser Finnegans Wake comme un ensemble infini (mais théoriquement dénombrable) de séries de signatures, le texte, quant à lui, ne se borne nullement à les amonceler, à les juxtaposer : il les re-signe, au contraire, de la même façon que chaque nom s'y trouve renommé, pp.207-215
, This traversal is neither metaphoric nor real. It is not a question of a discourse that is consciously aware of copying all other languages-the traversée, moreover, exists within one language, although there are exceptions, of which Joyce is the obvious one-but of a writing that has no consciousness of itself as pure origin and does not close itself off from other texts, or any writing that can be read in these terms, vol.247
, Representation in Contemporary French Fiction, p.50, 1986.
, and very often the text branches into neighbouring columns. Where Joyce packs meaning into the word and includes a vast number of oblique and direct allusions to "molecular" details, Roche depends more on the technical shaping, the sentence as polyseme, the text as variable image or gesture. Via the motif of the tattoo collector, the surface on which writing is inscribed becomes none other than the body, human skin and flesh -a "bodily" language of yet another order is presented on page 55, with a whole passage transcribed in Braille. Punning, however, is also ample, and quite palpably Joycean, Circus and Codex, Roche's first three experimental texts explicitly tied with Tel Quel, use "deconstructed narratives, typographical music, 1966.
, Circus (1972) further reduces the narrative drive in presenting just the labyrinth of the brain filled with noxious and voided commonplaces, a novel made up of the detritus of novels. Its visual presentation looks like the manuscript of a book proofread and corrected, ready to be typeset, with the mistakes and their corrections appearing together on the pages and yielding two meanings. As critic Diana Sherzer notes, Roche calls these coquilles creative, drawing attention to the double meaning of coquille as a typographical error and as a protective shield for male genital organs, p.26
, Egyptian hieroglyphs. Moreover, there are the artificial indexical or symbolic languages in their graphic representation: road signs, chemical formulas, mathematical and physical symbols and formulas, shorthand, labels of products, pieces of music, symbols from the Michelin guide, and signs of the zodiac, Circus mingles fragments of discourse (advertisement, history textbooks, lewd songs) in different languages (again
, Introduction, the Wake of the Wake, p.28, 1978.
, one way to prepare oneself to enter Circus is to think of the memorable Dada evenings of the Zurich Cabaret Voltaire. The readings of prose and poetry in several languages; the shaking of bells and the beating of drums; the use of puppets, masks, and costumes; the interest in nonsense [?] all these created a multimedia, heterogeneous atmosphere. This is what is found in Circus, Sherzer has wittily suggested that, vol.50
, As Munro shows in his detailed overview, the issues and concerns central to Dedans animated Cixous' writing through the next decade, although her literary strategies became more explicitly theoretical and her style more radically innovative. Le Troisième Corps and Les Commencements, both published in 1970, blur the boundaries between fiction and theory and extend Cixous' interrogation of writing, selfhood, and the place of the feminine. It is only in Souffles (1975) that Cixous' fiction starts taking aboard further levels of meaning-production and narrative structuration, as well as some explicitly Joyce-indebted linguistic experimentation. 40 Souffles deals with the mental and physical experiences of an anonymous female narrator, who is never situated or described and who, sometimes in first person and sometimes in third, recounts experiences that take place or took place. Cixous' style can be described as "poetical, harmonious, and lyrical, shifting abruptly into vulgarity and obscenity and becoming violent and disjointed" 41 here -with the important admixture of wordplay and allusiveness to various frames of reference (philosophical, psychoanalytic, literary, etc.). The opening is an ironic echo of the gender stereotype in which the passive female is awoken by an outside voice, her 1977 novel, Angst, Cixous deals with the breakdown of a love relationship
, This technique effectively serves the role of psychoanalysis in the narrative. The narrator achieves finally a kind of rebirth and subjecthood only after she works through her neuroses and anxiety in psychoanalytic terms. In constructing the narrative in such a way, level, engaged in a process of evolution and initiation, but also an unstable, rickety place of construction and deconstruction, forced to keep moving in order to survive, vol.87
, What Sherzer identifies as "play and manipulation with words, which produce excess and multiplicity of meaning" (Sherzer, Representation in Contemporary French Fiction, vol.158
, A web of allusions, references, and modified quotations that index a host of meanings. In addition, the narrator's verbal texture mingles flowing passages of sensuous lyricism, didactic essays, pornographic slang, and prose poems with dislocated syntax -with the consequence that rhythms, tones, syntax, registers, and styles constantly shift, vol.147
, Representation in Contemporary French Fiction, pp.153-157
, The text, as always one of transformation, led Cixous to another phase in her consideration of women's issues. For the next few years Cixous espoused the cause of women in a more militant language, which also entailed a gradual shift in medium -and Cixous' output from the early-1980s onward is predominantly theatrical and aimed at collaboration with directors (such as Ariane Mnouchkine or Simone Benmussa) rather than literary and based on critical engagement with writers. Still, however, Cixous' theatre work is one which challenges gender roles, subverts patriarchal rule, continuing in her life-long project, 43 one which was crucially informed by her early exposure to, and extended engagement with, Joyce's literary experiment, Cixous both accepts and appropriates Freud by showing how the tools of psychoanalysis can be made to deconstruct rather than promote the masculine forces that oppress the narrator and women in general
, author of the first book-length study on Sollers in English, just as Barthes, Sollers too begins his literary career by opposing his chief concerns from those of Jean-Paul Sartre's purported Marxism
, The events of May 1968 in France, in which university students and workers in Paris cooperated in social revolt without the leadership of the PCF, were pulls in the direction of revolutionary history and the Maoism advocated by Sollers for Tel Quel during most of the 1970s, seeking new directions for French Communism in China where Mao was leading what he called his Cultural Revolution. Sollers' vehemence and despotism in his advocating of Mao were what ultimately brought about, Sollers' early nouveau-roman stage was did not last long, nor did Sollers' affiliation with the PCF, p.45, 1980.
, 46 It is essential to add to these interests the biographical connection between the two: Joyce's and Sollers' shared Catholicism. 47 The inception of Sollers' literary career predates the founding of Tel Quel by two years: in 1958, with the psychological novel Une curieuse solitude, applauded by François Mauriac or Louis Aragon, whose praise launched his literary career. At the time of its publication, the name "Sollers" was a nom de plume, a mask behind which to hide his real name Philippe Joyaux. Une curieuse solitude addresses the issues of masculinity and secrecy surrounding erotism-combined with the fascination for pornography as a means to desacralise sexuality-that will continue to inform Sollers, Joyce is not only a source of creative inspiration, but an object of critical and theoretical investigation
, writing attempts to break away from cultural stereotypes, essentializing concepts and their attributes such as man/woman, masculine/feminine, active/passive. She tries to displace the conceptual opposition in the couple man/woman through the very notion of writing and bring about a new inscription of the feminine, vol.6
, he began that journal by aligning it with the poet Francis Ponge and his ahistorical literary poetics which soon led Sollers and his colleagues toward the nouveau roman, structuralism, Derrida's deconstructive poetics as an affirmation of the text's integrity, and other intellectual positions that diverted the Tel Quel group away from history and into formalist exercises subverting the ideologies of bourgeois and capitalist ways of thinking, Sollers proposed a type of Communism that would clearly be an alternative to either Fascism or colonialism and would be dedicated through Tel Quel to inspiring the French Communist Party, pp.21-23, 1960.
, , p.22
, Both educated by Jesuits, Joyce and Sollers have strong ties to Catholicism. As Sollers indicates in Paradis, Joycean Christianity, like Sollers' Catholicism, participates in the comic and the pathetic. Christian ritual, symbolism, and especially theology play a large part in Joyce's narrative stances. Sollers especially appreciates the comic subversion of Catholic seriousness, vol.16
, Book I, Sollers informs, is dominated by "cosmo-theogony" (Hesiodic prehistory). Book II insists on Greece-christianity. Books III-VI deal with the epoch of modern capitalism, marked by the "accentuation transversale de la réalité révolutionnaire (Chine), As is explained in Sollers' own pedantic back-cover blurb
, Sollers' examination of the various discursive strata whose superposition comes to form the official historical accounts is the taboo of incest, its "prohibition or rather subtilized recommendation" regarded as the inaugural moment of civilisation and its organising principle: Soit : la prohibition ou plutôt la recommandation subtilisée de l'inceste, à savoir les rapports cochons et cachés mère-filspère-fille ou plutôt mère-fille-père-fils
, En réalité, elles vont chercher plus loin leurs effets, elles n'oublient jamais l'antiquité réglée" (L I.3, 12). So Lois is staging the text's own search for a form appropriate to the struggle for social renewal, as incomplete and transitory as so many of Lois's contestations of the laws of conventional literary discourse. From Nombres, p.54
, 89]), but most explicitly at the beginning of book III, where the beginning of FW I.1 and FW IV.1 are conjoined in translation-cum-pastiche: en rune et rivière pour roulant courant, ravage battant dans le rebaignant, passée la douadouane du vieux de la vielle, de mèrève-adam se repomnifiant, recyclons d'abord, foutrement commode, circulés viciés ou gesticulant, le château-comment sous périphérant, là où ça méthode, où ça joue croulant? Il y va-repique au volant? Sandhyas! Sandyas! Sandyas! dourmourant le bas, does Lois rewrite Finnegans Wake? There are, chiefly, two strategies. One is an homage-cumtranslation of selected sections of the Wake (the opening of FW I.1 and IV.1)
, Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. [?] Sandhyas ! Sandhyas ! Sandhyas ! Calling all downs. Calling all downs to dayne. Array! Surrection! Eireweeker to the wohld bludyn world. O rally, O rally, O rally! Phlenxty, O rally! To what lifelike thyne of the bird can be. Seek you somany matters. Haze sea east to Osseania
, Sacer esto? Semus sumus" from the end of FW I.6 [L III.1, 51]), but the above excerpt will suffice. The emphasised parts in the Sollers, This passage runs for three pages total (and includes parts of the Wake other than the two crucial ones
, Sollers' strategies of pastiche concern rhythmical/associative properties of language (reduplication in, douadouane
, Comme dans Finnegans Wake-et souvent selon des procédés similaires-la langue éclate pour se reconstruire et se faire entendre en une musicalité étrange et violente. Une épopée inédite s'invente à la mesure de l'histoire et de ses rêves, vol.548
, There is also a tendency toward expansion, "unpacking" of the Joycean portmanteau into its multiple components ("recyclons d'abord, foutrement commode, circulés viciés ou gesticulant" for "commodious vicus of recirculation"). Several of Sollers' punning neologisms have a poetic potential equal to that of their Joycean counterparts
, Apart from translation and incorporation of a fragment of the Wake into its own textual body
, Like the Wake, Lois relies on a series of mythical narratives and allusions that provide the narrative framework for the text, and engages in a similar kind of parodic appropriation of their styles and discourses, and a similar deformation on the level of the signifier that brings them into mutual interaction, so much so that the critical element entailed in parody gives way to the undifferentiated blend of the pastiche. The minimal reference, the elementary particle out of which Lois is construed, and the most common target of its playful variations, is the proper name: Buongorno giordano ! Guten tag friedrich ! A nous la transmute, l'éternieretour par le sous détour. C'est pas tous les jours, Joyce's Wakean signature in a far more relevant manner -by borrowing and re-using its compositional strategies, its project of writing by which the text is constructed and reproduced
, Il s'y dore. Conte, chante ça, horreur, mâle, dehors! L'autre est en amont si je suis en aval" (L V.2, 92), proof of Sollers' familiarity with Saussure's Anagrammes. A second-type reference is formed by Sollers' rewritings of famous quotations, oftentimes with a parodic oppositional twist, functioning as both homage and ridicule; cf, vol.9, p.54
, Then there are the many passages in which the textual flow breaks up into isolated exclamations, as in the following passage from the age of the dinosaurs to the Neolithic age, Débuts rageurs cavernés caveurs. Chimie-tic! Anthropo!
, (L I.5, 15-6) Or, finally, passages in which articulated language breaks down altogether (as e.g. in the famous Wakean "thunderwords"), what Forrest terms Sollersian "glossolalia" 55 : broum schnourf scrontch clong pof pif clonck alala toc toc toc cling skock bing glup burp snif pout pout paf crac pot clic crac tchhhh hé hé guili sluuiirp aaa mhouh mmouhou mouh plouts gnouf snoups tchi tchit chiiiiii ê ê ê ê slam ga hou gnin hop
, becomes an assemblage of deformed quotations, of fragments of displaced discourse -a product of aesthetics of appropriation and détournement, in that it occupies what the Wake refers to as the "trancitive spaces" (FW 594.3) -those textual spaces based on silent quotation and pastiche, through the reworking of mythical narratives and the material deformation of the signifier
, 193. struction, notes Forrest, of habitual forms of language has-in the overriding ideology of the Tel Quel magazine and of Sollers of the period-a value in itself, resisting as it does the alienation entailed in any passive acceptance of a code which determines us from the outside as speaking subject. Still, Lois is no more than a limit-never did Sollers repeat or go beyond the radical degree of its linguistic deformation-and a stage in Sollers' development
, All external punctuation is abandoned, Sollers explains, in order for H to become injected with the gestural rhythm of writing, its melodic effects, and to perform its non-linear movement across themes, allusions, scenes from the present and the past. This foregrounding of the oral and aural aspects of discourse is the result of Sollers' conscious effort to create "the equivalent of a musical act, H (1973) is a text whose most striking visual aspect is its lack of punctuation, capitalisation, or paragraph division, with which the text continues for a whole 185 pages
, This freeing of language is a political undertaking -H's narrative, blending the plethora of voices reportedly overheard by Sollers in the streets of Paris in May 1968, brims with references and allusions to Mao Zedong, Marx & Engels, whilst its literary pantheon contains figures such as Artaud, Montaigne, Nerval, Pascal and of course Joyce. The freeing of language also takes place on a personal level. As Champagne and others have noted, Sollers experimented with drugs for a period of time, H's "illimitable subject" develops a highly mobile and differentiated idiom which touches upon a wide range of issues: literary, political, sexual, and historical
, whose 1588 Figura adorns the cover, its intersecting circles representing the intellect, which sees and distributes everything, corresponding to the structure of H, p.59
, limit of the diaphane why in diaphane adiaphane if you can put your five fingers through if it is a gate if not a door shut your eyes and see" (H, 29)-as its various types of play with sound which foreground the text's aurality. There are units in which sounds are juggled: "faudrait pas confondre les populations laborieuses du cap avec les copulations laborieuses du pape" (H, 111); the repetition of one affix or letter: "nageur travailleur, glandeur rêveur et toucheur menteur et chercheur" (H, 120); verbal skiddings involving the recurrence of one word in a series of words: "la période où nous vivons a un nom bouleversement sans precedent sur la boule qui se met en boule d'où boulon bouloner boulotter chambouler sabouler le camp impérialiste" (H, 121, my italics), etc. Exploiting and foregrounding the various properties and possibilities of language in general, H mimics the phases of linguistic awareness and performance experienced by individuals in their consciousness and unconsciousness. Sollers enjoys puns that play on culture and how culture forms the self, daring to make his texts unreadable, that is, so representative of con-56 "It is the equivalent of a musical act, an act that I perform after having listened to music: Haydn, Monteverdi, Schoenberg, Stockhausen [?] My dream would be to succeed in creating a sort of opera of language [?] Thus since Lois as I draft I use a tape recorder in order to rework different passages according to their sound effects, The crucial Joycean feature of H is not so much its unpunctuated form-even though Ulysses is recalled verbatim and in the original, p.24, 1974.
, It is the upsurge of the subject; or of what I have been calling the subject; the possibility of saying 'I' within, at the heart of language. Language is not neutral, but it needs to be taken over by a subject, a subject I would call illimitable, numberless, rather like in Finnegans Wage. This is not a biographical subject, it is not a 'me, Iowa Review, vol.5, issue.4, p.101, 1974.
, , p.47
, many satellites with their own centers are copresent, forming a polygon. H's structure is precisely that" (Sherzer, Representation in Contemporary French Fiction, 67). temporary life as to be reflective on the nature of the self as it is produced and directed by mores and language. As Sherzer argues, succesions of sounds like "flouc floc" and "noum toum atoum" are like the babble of an infant; successions of words like "oui melissa dorée le miel des abeilles la paillettes ruche cueillie dans les fleurs abeille abeille" (H, 105) are similar to the ludic glossolalia of children. Further, the play with sounds, free associations, constant disjunctions, puns, and anagrams found in H are "characteristic of dreams and hallucinatory states
, Sollers' project in H together with Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (published in 1972) and reading H's opening, "qui dit salut la machine" as reference to their concept of
, For 185 pages there are no paragraphs, no punctuation marks, no capital letters; the only diacritical elements utilized are accent marks. In addition to the lack of punctuation and paragraph structure, there are never any quotation marks to identify someone else's spoken or written words. The book is a large intertext in which the surfaces are ingeniously tied together to create an ironic commentary on the madness of modern culture -a madness without beginning or end, a point brought home by the fact that the text does not open with a capital letter, nor does it end with a full stop. The text finishes with the questions "que crierai-je" (H, 185), a question answered by an intimate who says
, This surface slippage ("déraper") of meaning is one of the strengths of Joyce that Sollers continually admires and seeks to follow. David Hayman was correct when guessing, in 1978, that "H is not a passing phase in Sollers' development" since "his current work-in-progress, Paradis, points toward more radical departures in post-Wake fiction" -that is, toward important modifications in the method of his novels. Significantly, he also suggested that the movement generated by Tel Quel, and now called the "new-new novel
, Paradis can be regarded as consummation of the Tel Quel era of Sollers' writing as well as the beginning of a new one
, Houdebine has pointed to this difference: Sollers: là encore, stratégie très différente; pour m'en tenir à ce seul aspect de la question: non pas tant des récits, que leurs thèmes, ou séquences, repris essentiellement au niveau de leurs charges discursives, et donc articulés -notamment par le rythme (cf. le rôle de la syllabe comme lieu nodal des scansions) qui est en l'occurrence l'opérateur de différenciationintégration privilégié -sur d'autres discours, à statut scientifique ou philosophique, par exemple, lesquels impliquent le jugement rationnel comme « moment » obligé de la lecture aussi bien que de l'écriture ; ce qui n'est pas vraiment le cas chez Joyce, me semble-t-il, Marking the inception of Sollers' post-Tel Quel phase, Paradis is also a turning point in the direction away from Joyce's materialist textuality toward further exploration of orality and aurality of the spoken word
, THE LANGUAGE OF THE TEXT IS A BASE OVER WHICH SOMETHING SLIDES
, Representation in Contemporary French Fiction, p.69
, , p.49
, Some Writers in the Wake of the Wake, p.25
, Marcelin Pleynet, and François Wahl) of Peking to see for himself the results of Mao's revolution. Although fascinated by the exposure to such a radically different language and culture, the social problems of the workers and the women and the Maoist hegemonic political purges brought a certain sober tone from the returning group to the Tel Quel agenda, attenuating the harsh cries for Maoist revolution. Then, in 1979, Sollers converted to Catholicism, and started working on his Dantesque/Joycean Christian epic, Paradis. It was the installments of Paradis I and Paradis II in the last Tel Quel issues and the negative feedback from Sollers' editors at Seuil that led, in October 1982, to discontinuation of Tel Quel's publication. Sollers realised that there was another way to attain his goal of social reform, and the opportunity for exploring another venue was provided by the journal L'Infini. Sollers directed sixteen issues of the new journal for Denoël until Fall, Two events following the experimentalist/political peak in his fiction (Lois and H) in the course of the 1970s alienated Sollers from his Tel Quel enterprise: the 1974 visit (together with Kristeva, Barthes, 1986.
, Infini offers the possibility for an open forum of selected writers who share a vision for an infinity of affirmation even if it involves contestation and Sollers appears to be less involved in ideological control with L'Infini than he was with Tel Quel, concerned instead with a humanism that is tolerant in the spirit of the pamphleteer Voltaire and the Montesquieu of Lettres persanes. L'Infini has continued the work of Tel Quel in publishing texts by incisive young writers (e.g. the work of Bernard-Henri Lévy and his group of "new philosophers"), encouraging the blending of philosophy, history, and politics: a vision endorsed by Sollers from the beginning of Tel Quel without, however, continuing its political and literary radicalism. The two interviews with Jean-Louis Houdebine from, 1980.
, Analysis of the opening pages of Ulysses and the strained exchange between Dedalus and Mulligan show, for Sollers, how le catholicisme de Joyce [?] c'est bel et bien le refus de tout ce qui se ramène au paganisme dans le catholicisme. L'intégration du substantialisme maternel païen par le catholicisme est une de ces ruses par où il s, offer much insight into the gradually transformed importance of Joyce for Sollers, 1980.
, ce qui revient sous une forme particulièrement bizarre, ça n'est ni plus ni moins que le bric-à-brac théologique" (TQ 84: 66). Moving on to the Wake, Sollers identifies its main theological problem in the concept of felix culpa: how does guilt become a happy one? Joyce's method of solving this problem in the Wake-unlike in Ulysses where he juxtaposed and combined the various heresies and orthodoxies, TQ 83: 47), vol.83, pp.42-45
, See more in Ffrench, Time of Theory, pp.22-25
, In Sollers' understanding, the voice-in the Catholic dogma as well as for Joyce-is that by which the paternal body manifests itself in the son. After his conversion to Catholicism in 1979, TQ 84: 73), 1981.
, 65 Its textual material is composed of a series of catalogues about life in Florence and in Paris, based on Sollers' extensive research-undertaken while travelling between the two cities for an extended period of time-about the nature of "culture" in these two capitals of Western civilization. The work reads like a computerised database of the most banal to the most sophisticated details -an encyclopaedic parody of Christianity in Joyce's mode, which is counterpointed with Dante's work, on whose command of language and erudition Sollers based his portrayal of the pathos of modern Christianity. The text is an "artificial paradise" of messages embedded in sequences of ideas gleaned from throughout literary and philosophical history, one with a particular flavour because the narrator is similar to a troubadour singing the story of modern times: il faut être non seulment chanteur mais aussi d'abord écrimeur où vois entendez crime rime escrime mais aussi crème et crieur écriveur, their epic visions. The title Paradis is derived from Dante's Paradiso
, To read my texts you should be in a state something like a drug high. You're in no condition to decipher, to perform hermeneutic operations [?] The language of the text is a base over which something slides, That Sollers' gradual distancing from the Joycean model-begun in H-is furthered in Paradis, p.66
, a sensitivity to literary texture, to the lapping and overlapping of phrases, stymying interpretation by a seemingly endless sameness, an impenetrable verbal surface. 67 A standard Paradis passage reads as follows: que la cause trébuche d'effet en effet toboggan lapsus décalé et plue elle se prend pour l'effet et plus elle s'y fait et plus elle y tient et s'y entretient et plus qu'elle y colle et y caracole felix culpa péristole péristoire chlorant l'oxydé tourbillon d'éveurs d'adamnées parmi lesquels j'ai aussi mon compte gobé mouche arachné toile or donc au commencement il était une fois un commencement hors-commencement vol essaim chanté sans rien voir forêt d'ondes nuée grimémoire comme c'est vrai le vrai du ça veut dire vrai vérité du vrai dérivé comme c'est dur d'y entrer béni d'arriver au vrai ça m'a dit lequel vous prend largo des pieds à la tête in illo tempore périplum et péripétie? (P, 146) Self-reflexively, the above passage comments upon the formal consequences of freeing the text from punctuation, calling it a "toboggan effect
, An Interview with Philippe Sollers, TriQuarterly, vol.38, pp.129-159, 1977.
, Paradis thus presents two very different faces to the reader: the eye perceives the cryptic, crabbed surface of the page, whose unpunctuated mass recalls the Hebrew of the Old Testament, and with difficulty penetrates it and divides it into units of significance; on the other hand, the ear picks up the rhythms and intonations of speech, familiar patterns against which the verbal flow is perceived, measured, and invested with sense, The Fictional Encyclopaedia -Joyce, pp.129-159, 1990.
, A questioning of such monolithic concepts as truth, cause and effect, thought itself is thus facilitated by the practice of non-punctuation, vol.131
, The humor of Paradis is found in its game of messages embedded in apparently unrelated sequences of spoken text. The messages are inserted by the omniscient voice of the poet/writer for the reader to decipher. These are encoded signals that the poet/writer offers as guides through the text. The poet/writer is basically saying that he is the only one who can find the way through this maze of contemporary culture's language, vol.51
, elle a été révélée par le texte biblique et théorisée par le discours théologique, joue dans Paradis le rôle de ce que l'on nommera du terme largement impropre de « mythologie ». dans un texte célèbre faisant suite à la publication de l'Ulysse de Joyce, T.S. Eliot affirmait que la littérature moderne naîtrait de l'adoption d'une « méthode mythique », qui consisterait pour l'écrivain à emprunter la structure de son oeuvre aux mythologies anciennes. [?] A condition toutefois d'ajouter immédiatement que Paradis ne vise qu'à dissiper toutes les mythologies, en prenant appui-essentiellement sinon exclusivement-sur l'une d'entre elles : la « mythologie » catholique, p.241
, 2 Bessière traces the constant reappearance of Blanchot's concept of literature as "the book to come" and shows how in generalizing this thesis, writers and critics embrace both the minimalism and sparseness of the nouveau roman and the existentialist imperative of a socio-political engagement, thereby, however, losing the pertinence of the avant-garde project: On perd cependant ce qui faisait leur pertinence : la littérature était, en elle-même, Their epic vision is a humorous one, however, because of their positing of a heroic model in the voices of humanity and in the heroic manner in which S continues to insist on publishing subsequent volumes
, Contemporary French fiction is thus marked by an "infidelity to what has been called the tradition of the new," and Bessière postulates the thesis that under these circumstances, neither modernist literature, nor that of the 1960s or 1970s, can be the guarantor of contemporary literature. That part of contemporary literature which returns to the playful representation of 1960s and 1970s fiction in search for exemplars, remains trapped in contradiction. 4 Earlier on, Bessière has formulated this changed set of conditions in which literature exists in the post-2000 situation: On vient à un paradoxe. Il y a des oeuvres que l'on dit littéraires ; il n'y a plus de littérature. La littérature ne peut pl us être pensée comme ce tout qui garantit les oeuvres et que l'on doit supposer pour en rendre compte. Qu'il y ait des oeuvres n'assure pas que la littérature soit saisissable. Ce paradoxe contemporain peut se reformuler dans des termes plus anciens -disparition, That which was constructed as innovative and provocative by the historical avant-gardist project
, Raczymow, a Proust-expert, expresses his belief that Bloom and Bloch are "brothers" in that they are "personnages devenus des personnes," and entertains the idea of writing a novel-to be narrated by him-in which they will be the protagonists. For Raczymow, this is meant to provide an opportunity to discuss the work of Proust and Joyce, to compare "ses deux heros," in terms of the topics of their shared Jewishness, Hebrew history and language, love, the philosophy of art, etc. They resolve to depart for the French countryside in order to write, together, "a great work"; however, their resolution quickly dissipates into a series of procrastinations, broken off by Bloom's decision to return to Dublin and Bloch to Paris. The narrator regrets that he no longer has access to them and must "return to his own world," having failed to "kidnap" Poldy and Bloch. 6 The text, though teeming with allusions to Proust and Joyce, does nothing stylistically experimental in their wake, can be read in precisely these terms proposed by Bessière: as nostalgia for the supposed "disappearance" of literature in which there is no French writer of a status comparable to that of Sartre, 1994.
, Les écrivains et les critiques s'autorisent à se dire modernes et à proposer une telle pensée de la littérature parce qu'ils se reconnaissent comme les explicites héritiers des avantgardes des années 1950, Bessière, Qu'est-il arrive aux écrivains français? D'Alain Robbe-Grillet à Jonathan Littell, 1960.
, est-il arrive aux écrivains français?, p.42
, La part de littérature contemporaine, qui sait, de manière exemplaire, le retournement des jeux de la représentation hérités des années 1960 et 1970, reste prise dans ces contradictions, 1960.
, est-il arrive aux écrivains français, p.4
, Like the nouveau romancier Robert Pinget, Hadengue came to fiction after a long involvement with the fine arts and a career of an artist. When his first fiction, Petite Chronique des gens de la nuit dans un port de l'Atlantique Nord, was brought out in 1988 after two decades of editors' refusals, it immediately won a few prizes and gained him a reputation. It is an anomalous novel, written in extremely long, tortuous prose, a "long prose poem" that tells an oblique story in a painfully halting, sometimes oddly punctuated, sometimes oddly skewed syntax, meant to represent the narrator's manifest suffering. At one point, a character mentions a boat christened the Annalivia Plurabelle -a nod to Joyce's texts which, just as Hadengue's, first and foremost challenge the novel-genre. As Taylor has noted, Hadengue shares with Joyce the ability "to make his reader feel that richly evocative, intricately associated details form a projection, not only of our objective world, World Literature Today, vol.68, issue.2, p.338, 1994.
, Mahout" or "Elephant Driver") who once helped to humiliate him and now cares for him; Jonas the narrator and Clara La Blanche; and above all the mysterious adolescent Dedalus. Hadengue continues to write his tortured first-person narratives of deranged narrators in La Cabane aux écrevisses (1989), a novel in the form of "four blue notebooks" purportedly penned by a young drug addict abused psychologically by his father, a narrative written in a highly suggestive, graphically authentic style, followed in 1993 by La Loi du cachalot, which delved into the psyches of a solitary boy and a self-torturing adult with a guilty conscience. The appearance of two additional novels in 1999, L'Exode and Quelqu'un est mort dans la maison d'en face, brought limited by way of novelty, and so the wave caused by Hadengue's. In terms of the "forcefulness and memorability" of his writing, Hadengue has, in Taylor's estimation, "few rivals in contemporary French literature" -he wrenches classical syntax into perturbing forms
, British experimentalism, with the literary historians, critics, and the reading public, fell into a black hole of silence akin to that of the Wake in 1939. It was with only slight exaggeration that, in the thirtieth-anniversary re-edition of Johnson's The Unfortunates by Picador, Bessière's scepticism regarding the significance of the post-war literary experimentalism for contemporary French fiction, therefore, seems fully justified. GREAT BRITAIN: DAVID MITCHELL & STEVEN HALL It will be recalled that after the 1973 death of both B.S. Johnson and Ann Quin, 1998.
, Johnson's work has fallen prey, the misconception of Brooke-Rose's work (not to mention the ignorance of Brophy's or Quin's) was still orders of magnitude greater. Chiefly responsible was the cultural and critical climate in which the 1960s and 70s experimentation was received within the U.K. Emblematic of the overall tenor is the criticism of David Lodge, whose widely influential books The Novelist at the Crossroads (1971) and Modes of Modern Writing (1977), set both the scope and the critical apparatus in which the British novel was discussed
, Paths to Contemporary French Literature, p.204
, Paths to Contemporary French Literature, vol.1, p.201, 2004.
, have marked a change for the better 12 in the publication and reception of the writers loosely associated with Johnson's avant-gardist circle who finally began receiving their critical due over the ensuing decade. But still, in an uncanny echo of Lodge's prescriptive pronouncements, when in 2008, another literary practitioner-turned-critic, 2001.
, 15 The contrastive example is Robbe-Grillet who compensates for the lack of linguistic deviation from the norm with his deviations from the narrative norm -however, neither can be said to be present in McCarthy's Remainder, and, consequently, in the argument put forth by Smith. Armand's argument-which pits Smith and McCarthy against the formal and linguistically experimental work of e.g. Philippe Sollers-concludes by metaphorically applying the concluding image from McCarthy's novel to Smith's article: The final image of Remainder is perhaps appropriate here -a plane flying in an endless figure-eight, a recursive loop which will last exactly as long as the fuel in the plane's tank. It's as if McCarthy is adverting here to precisely the trap that Realism in Smith's "Two Path's" represents, in which deviation always feeds back into normalisation: the perverse logic at work in McCarthy's radical materialism remains a depicted logic in which the novel's language never itself partakes
, Society and Literature, 1945-1970: The Context of English Literature, p.254, 1983.
, Dalkey Archive also reprinted Brophy's In Transit, with an Introduction by none other than Brooke-Rose. In the introduction, Brophy is recalled as a woman who "bathed in culture," yet also as an author who "knew deep-down that writers can be forgotten: one of her more iconoclastic non-fictions [?] was Fifty Works of Literature We Could Do Without (1967), the reaction to such a title today being 'what, only fifty?'12 Two years later, perhaps to also prove her wrong, Carcanet re-issued a twentieth-anniversary Brooke-Rose Omnibus. 2010 saw the publication of the excellent book-length study of the Brooke-Rose canon, penned by Karen Lawrence, saw the first book-length critical study on Johnson's work, vol.12, p.33, 1971.
, Two Paths for the Novel, New York Review of Books, 2008.
, Realism's Last Word, The Organ Grinder's Monkey: Culture after the Avant-Garde, p.116, 2013.
, Prior to the publication of his opus magnum, Wallace had gained reputation as critic and theorist who openly rejected the postmodernist/modernist divide, or the critical casting of his work as belonging to either label. Instead, as critic Marshall Boswell has put it, Wallace might best be regarded as a nervous member of some still-unnamed (and perhaps unnameable) third wave of m. he confidently situates himself as the direct heir to a tradition of aesthetic development that began with the modernist overturning of nineteenth-century bourgeois realism and continued with the postwar critique of modernist aesthetics. Yet Wallace proceeds from the assumption that both m and pm are essentially "done, Rather, his work moves resolutely forward while hoisting the baggage of m and pm heavily
, Wallace accuses television as being the primary cause of this shift from a liberating to an isolating anxiety driving the postmodern project. The salient facts about television were its emphasis on surface, and its adoption of self-referring postmodern irony as a form of self-defense. The essay primarily seeks to demonstrate how current trends in television have succeeded in dissolving the subversive power of postmodernist metafiction Wallace distinguishes among three evolutionary stages in the responses of American fiction to this medium since the 1960s: first, the early work of Gaddis, Barth, and Pynchon, which engaged with pop culture; then, in the 1970s and 80s, with the medium's increasing importance, irony became fiction's ground-clearing tool, utilised with the idealist belief that "etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure"; in the third wave, with which Wallace associates himself, fiction does not simply use televisual culture, but attempts to restore the television-flattened world "to threewhole dimension, E Unibus Pluram, p.22
, Infinite Jest, stages Wallace's attempt to prove that cynicism and naïveté are mutually compatible by fictional means, ironising hip irony in such a way that the opposite of hip irony, that is, "gooey sentiment," can emerge as the work's indirectly intended mode, in the service of fiction's primary task of articulating "what it is to be a fucking human being
, And lurking behind them is of course Joyce's encyclopaedic project undertaken in and between Ulysses and the Wake, with which Wallace's Infinite Jest, based on detailed "data-retrieval" (IJ, 332), overlaps. Joyce is an unmistakably important influence on Wallace, acknowledged e.g. in his repetition of Buck Mulligan's adjective "scrotum-tightening" (IJ, 112; 605) and his shared Ulyssean interest in "telemachy" (IJ, 249), but by the same token Wallace is keen on foregrounding the limitations of encyclopaedic impulse. As Burn has noted, Gravity's Rainbow or John Barth's Letters
, , vol.1, 2003.
, Stephen Burn, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest -A Reader's Guide, p.16, 2003.
, The Panic of Influence, New York Review of Books, vol.47, issue.2, p.40, 2000.
, An Interview with David Foster Wallace, Review of Contemporary Fiction, vol.13, p.131, 1993.
, since Infinite Jest, a whole new group of emerging young writers has copied the elusive Wallace 'tone,' that paradoxical blending of cynicism and naïveté, as well as Wallace's use of self-reflexivity for the purposes of moving beyond irony and parody" and his examples include Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections as "the most prestigious confirmation of Wallace's revolution in literary sensibility, pp.19-20
, But as the reader who reaches the end realises, the final pages are not really the climax, the end having been already related a few pages before, but instead an invitation to circle back to the beginning of the narrative disk to review the crucial information from the Year of Glad. Part of Wallace's aim seems to be to break with self-reflexivity and direct the reader, in a quasi-Wakean fashion, outside of the book, to find what has escaped the encyclopaedia and the self-reflexive, autonomous world of fiction. Thus, even though acknowledging Joyce as creator of memorable coinages and a pioneer of the encyclopaedic fictional narrative, Wallace tries to position himself in opposition to Joyce's materialist poetics based on the autonomy of the literary idiom. The last two examples, then, will concern writers Joycean not so much by their nods to or echoes of his work
, Goldsmith's 2000 text Fidget opens as follows: Eyelids open. Tongue runs across upper lip moving from left side of mouth to right following arc of lip. Swallow. Jaws clench. Grind. Stretch. Swallow. Head lifts. Bent right arm brushes pillow into back of head. Arm straightens. Counterclockwise twist thrusts elbow toward ceiling. Tongue leaves interior of mouth passing through teeth. Tongue slides back into mouth, cational resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, 1996.
, (Bloomsday). I attached a microphone to my body and spoke every movement from 10:00 AM, when I woke up, to 11:00 PM, when I went to sleep. I was alone all day in my apartment and didn't answer the phone, go on errands, etc. I just observed my body and spoke. From the outset the piece was a total work of fiction. As I sit here writing this letter, my body is making thousands of movements; I am only able to observe one at a time. It's impossible to describe every move my body made on a given day. Among the rules for Fidget was that I would never use the first-person "I" to describe movements. Thus every move was an observation of a body in space, As Marjorie Perloff insists in her afterword to the 2000 second-edition of the novel, this is not literary invention or stylisation à la Beckett, this is "poésie vérité, a documentary record of how it actually is when a person wakes up on a given morning, pp.90-91, 1997.
, Typing page upon page, levelling the difference between article, editorial and advertisement, disregarding all typographic and graphical treatments of the word, Goldsmith reduces the newspaper to mere text, producing an 840-page book-object. In so doing, Goldsmith again out-Joyce's Joyce in the ambition of an all-inclusive singleday record of the ephemeral, news transmitted by paper: "a fleeting moment concretized, captured, vol.22, p.91, 2002.
, Teenage spacemen we're all spacemen" (HC, 7) via 673. Are you going to Harvard or Yale. 673.1. Are you going to Scarlet O'Hare. 673.2. Parsley, sage, rosemary and Todd. 673.3. Parsley's age grows merry in time. 673.4. Parsley's angels, Mary and Tom. 673.5. Partly saved, Rosemary and Tom. 673.6. People say it was Mary and Tom
, It appears that writing's response-taking its cues more from photography than painting-could be mimetic and replicative, primarily involving methods of distribution, while proposing new platforms of receivership and readership" (UW, 15). This "mimetic and replicative" writing is then contextualised as part of the development of literary modernity: from Mallarmé via Stein and Ezra Pound to the language-poetry of e.g. Charles Bernstein. An important step in this process has been taken by Joyce's Wake and its original encrypting, through writing, the medium of the voice: James Joyce's thunderclaps are the ten one-hundred-letter words scattered throughout Finnegans Wake, a six-hundredpage book of compound words and neologisms, all of which look to the uniniated like reams of nonsensical code. [?] Spoken aloud, it's the sound of thunder. This, of course, goes for the rest of Finnegans Wake, which, on first sight, is one of the most disorienting books ever written in English. But hearing Joyce read/decode a portion of Finnegans Wake, most famously his own recording of the "ALP" section, is a revelation: it all makes sense, Sleep in heavenly peas, sleep in heavenly peas" (HC, 87), Head Citations brims with punning humour with some highly destabilising effects and memorable phrases. Most recently, p.19, 1974.
, His literary analogue, again, is Joyce and his meditation on the universal properties of water in the "Ithaca" episode: When Joyce writes about the different forms that water can take it reminds me of different forms that digital language can take. Speaking of the way water puddles and collects in "its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs," I am reminded of the process whereby data rains down from the network in small pieces when I use a Bit-Torrent client, pooling in my download folder. When my download is complete, the data finds its "solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes" as a movie or music file. When Joyce speaks of water's mutability from its liquid state into "vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail, Goldsmith observes, has been (and will continue to be) momentous: What we're experiencing for the first time is the ability of language to alter all media, be it images, video, music, or text, something that represents a break with tradition and charts the path for new uses of lang. words are active and affective in concrete ways, p.27
, Goldsmith even enlists Joyce as a precursor to his practice of uncreative writing: Joyce "presages uncreative writing by the act of sorting words, weighing which are 'signal' and which are 'noise,' what's worth keeping and what's worth leaving. Identifying-weighing-language in its various states of 'data' and 'information' is crucial to the health of the ecosystem" (UW, 28) -an official acknowledgment, on Goldsmith's part, of an artistic and ideological connection with Joyce's materialist poetics
, After the early 1970s wax and 1980s-90s wane of textual and typographical experimentation, a similar resuscitation of innovation aiming to expand the visual possibilities of textual organisation and the material properties of book as medium takes place in works like Goldsmith's conceptual works Fidget (1997) and Soliloquy (2001), or, more recently, in Hall's Raw Shark Texts, Danielewski's (*1966) two best-known works to date, House of Leaves (2000) and Only Revolutions (2006) face the similar dilemmas and challenges of the digital age identified by Goldsmith, even though their reactions and proposed solutions are markedly different, p.26, 1990.
, The most concise description of the book's narrative structure, New Statesman, vol.129, issue.4495, p.57, 2000.
, already reveals it as one of multiple remove and framing -and hence also the notion of House of Leaves as textual labyrinth, pervasive throughout its literary criticism, which always, in one way or another, seeks to provide precursors, labyrinthine authors anticipatory of Danielewski's project
, These two (and many other similar) critical identifications of Danielewski's literary ancestry underplay or outright miss that, first of all, what connects Danielewski with writers like Joyce or Borges is their shared preoccupation with the book as material medium participating in the progressive technological condition of modernity-the textual presentation contained therein as endowed with distinct visual properties-with text as hypertext. Second of all, and more important: what makes House of Leaves different from, and visually and typographically more extreme than, both Borges and Joyce is its temporal placement after, and thus in full embrace of, the culture of hypertextuality and the internet medium. A possible synopsis-outline for House of Leaves would run as follows. The novel is composed of an extensive narration of a film by a blind man, Zampano, who dictates his critical commentary about the documentary film "The Navidson Record" shot by photographer Will Navidson. The film details Navidson and his family's terrifying ordeal living in a house whose insides gradually grow larger than its frame; the house's hallway mutates into a labyrinthine black hole that devours sound, light, and eventually human beings. Zampano's ekphrasis of the film is a scholarly one, incorporating analyses and judgments from literary critics and scientists, both real and imagined. After Zampano's mysterious death, his scholarly manuscript, The Navidson Record, Borgesian or Joycean literary ancestry-to some extent acknowledged by himself-is or is not relevant for House of Leaves in the form(s) of direct textual allusion, structural parallel or aesthetic/thematic affinity
, Each of these narrative voices is identified by a different font and is associated with a specific medium: Zampano's academic commentary appears in Times Roman, the font associated with newspapers and the linotype; Truant's footnotes are in Courier, imitating a typewriter's inscription, and, as critics have noted, thematically identifying him as the middleman, the "courier" of the manuscript; the terse notations from the Ed. are appropriately presented in Bookman. Furthermore, House of Leaves forms a central node in a network of multimedia, multi-authored forms that collectively comprise its narrative: the House of Leaves website (www.houseofleaves.com), The Whalestoe Letters (an accompanying book by Danielewski containing a section from the novel's Appendix) containing Pelafina's letters to her son from a mental asylum (in the Dante font), and the musical album Haunted by Danielewski's sister, the recording artist Poe. Before its publication by Random House, House of Leaves was posted online, twice. Indeed, House of Leaves is not only a layered narrative 27 Two examples: "Mark Danielewski's debut novel, House of Leaves, is a work of experimental fiction [? whose] roots can be traced back to familiar themes and important literary predecessors, vol.50, 2008.
, Such fictional promises to amend the book acknowledge that in a digital age, wherein information can be easily altered and updated, the book is never a discrete and complete object but always a node in an ever-changing network of information, interaction, and potential or "virtual" readings. As must by now be evident, the "fall" of House of Leaves (Poe-not only Danielewski's sister, but also Edgar Allan-is a touchstone intertext) as a narrative comes as an aftereffect of the collapse of text and paratext: Zampano's The Navidson Record is pure paratext, an ekphrasis on a film; Johnny Truant's interaction with Zampano's manuscript provides paratextual commentary in the form of a personal narrative; and the Ed.'s comments on publication serve as a constant reminder of the novel's processual re-shaping by its paratext. And the "fall" of House of Leaves as book comes in the wake of its collapse of text and hypertext, creating a texage. Danielewski's own pronouncements on the subject of the novel display his broad understanding of textuality that, in accordance with the McLuhanesque tetrad of "laws of media," becomes enhanced, rather than displaced or obsolesced, by the digital. Thus, if "the analogue powers of these wonderful bundles of paper" might "have been forgotten" in the internet age, "I'd like to see the book reintroduced for all it really is, Danielewski isn't rejecting narration as much as customizing and turbo-charging it, 2007.
, In Scandinavian mythology, Yggdrasil, the tree whose branches hold together the worlds of the universe, is believed to be ash -the last of the innumerable self-reflective moments, referring to the hyper-walls of the house on Ash Tree Lane. In a final punning moment, this allusion is not only ancient and metaphoric but recent and material: for Yggdrasil was the name of an early, mid-90s, version of the Linux Operating System. This subtle reference thus links a cultural myth explaining the universe as network to a computer operating system structuring our Internet culture, a reference that is further enhanced by the presentation of a large, bold O beneath the stanza describing the Yggdrasil tree as an invisible network, This image text is accompanied, above and below, by two dots, the one full, the other empty
, Danielewski's second novelist text, and the most recent to date, is Only Revolutions (2006), another book-object of the "metatextual," concrete sort, undermining several of the basic conventions underlying the very process of reading. Only Revolutions is printed with both covers appearing to be the front of the book. The side with the green cover is the story as told by character Sam
, Bold Type: Conversation with Mark Danielewski, Bold Type, 2002.
, House of Leaves: Reading the Networked Novel, p.120
, These doubleblock texts create a parallelism, as the plotline and the book as object falls into two equal 180-page halves mirroring one another. To reconstruct the parallelism, one must leaf back and forth between the two page layouts, flipping the book in the process. The book is designed to be read in both directions: beginning at the title page, one reads the top parts of every page; then, rotating the book 180 degrees and flipping it over, one rebegins at a new title page, again reading only the top portions of every page. The two narratives converge in the middle, so that on pages 180-1 the same events are narrated in unison by the two characters, though in passages of opposite orientation, one upside down relative to the other; then they diverge again. As critic Brian McHale notes, Parallelism here is four-fold. Each passage has an equivalent in the other narrative, but it also parallels (with conspicuous variations) another passage in the same narrative. The effect is one of double mirroring
, Their episodic story is told twice, once in Sam's voice and from his point of view, the other in Hailey's and the two versions are often at odds: Only Revolutions is a classic exercise in modernist narrative perspectivism, however, transposed from the conceptual/narrative level to that of the text/book itself. Since it is impossible to read both passages together at once, in McHale's words, Only Revolutions reworks the road-movie genre as its plotline traces the journey of the teenage couple of lovers moving through various places and moments in time as they try to outrace in an effort to outrace history, p.31
, But O what a sting! Now? Me? Over with?" (S322), ends the page abruptly, and the next page starts with the word "Wake?" (S323). The corresponding page in Hailey's part (after her fall, H321) opens with "Hit? / But softly," recalling Anna Livia Plurabelle's moving end on the Wake's last page: "Finn again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormmee!" In Van Hulle's witty commentary, Only Revolutions is a markedly modernist text in that its chiastic structure has the effect of marking a centre of indifference in the middle of the whirlpool of revolutions, If House of Leaves invoked as its media-intertext the internet, then Only Revolutions' circularity and the changes evoked in its reading process recall the medium of the cinema, as is evident from Danielewski's insertion of "periods" in the upper right corner of every 20 pages
, Only Revolutions, or, the Most Typical Poem in World Literature, p.153, 2011.
, The Most Typical Poem in World Literature, p.148
, Only Evolutions: Joyce's and Danielewski's Works in Progress, pp.130-131, 2011.
, But Only Revolutions does not seem to imply the same modernist suggestion that a special meaning could be attached to such moments of "beeing, p.33
, Danielewski's House of Leaves and Only Revolutions present a highly imaginative reconceptualisation of the role and function of the book in the digital age, as well as an innovative project of creating a language capable of responding its many challenges, Taken together
, Whereas in France, this heritage, via the figure of Joyce, is the object of nostalgia (Raczymow), or fetishisation (Hadengue), then in the work of David Foster Wallace, David Mitchell (and to a lesser extent, Tom McCarthy), his materialist poetics become the source of some of their conceptual and thematic innovation, as well as (in Wallace's case) their aesthetic programme. Ultimately, in the work of Steven Hall, Kenneth Goldsmith and Mark Danielewski, the Joycean heritage is not only revisited and acknowledged as important on the conceptual basis, but also reworked to some highly original ends in the language and narrative structuring of the work itself, serving highly variegated
, Joyce's and Danielewski's Works in Progress, p.136
, Yet the dichotomies this table represents remain insecure, equivocal. For differences shift, defer. even collapse; concepts in one vertical column are not all equivalent; and inversions and exceptions, in both modernism and postmodernism, abound, vol.269
, Postmodernist Fiction, p.10, 1987.
, Finnegans Wake and the Postmodern Imagination, p.93, 1984.
, Finnegans Wake and the Postmodern Imagination, p.95
, Finnegans Wake and the Postmodern Imagination, p.99
, Finnegans Wake and the Postmodern Imagination, pp.100-101
, Finnegans Wake and the Postmodern Imagination, p.105
, Hassan effectively goes on to disprove his construction of a postmodernist Wake by regarding it as aspiring "to the condition of a universal consciousness
, 14 This is due to its being composed of "two differentiable texts placed side by side, one of them the hallmark of High Modernism, the other something else," a something else that has recently been called "postmodernism," the relation between these two, for McHale, being "one of excess and parody: the poetics of the postmodernist chapters exceed the modernist poetics of the 'normal' chapters, and the postmodernist chapters parody modernist poetics, The Case of Ulysses" and commences by observing that in spite of its traditional alignment with High Modernism, p.16
, 17 Instead of finding fault with the oppositionality between the modern and the postmodern and perhaps trying to reconcile them, MacHale resorts to other critics' reconcepualisations of the notion of modernism that would allow him to accommodate its supposed other, although clearly the problem identified here has clearly more to do with critical terminology and reading methods rather than with anything "intrinsic" to Joyce's text. McHale refers to Helmut Lethen's Modernism Cut in Half, which argues against the officially presented High Modernism of the likes of Thomas Mann, which he terms "conservative" in that it excludes its avant-garde and consequently projects it onto postmodernism. In this context, Lyotard's contention that postmodernism presents modernism in its nascent state, and therefore precedes modernism, resonates again: postmodernism "thus precedes the consolidation of modernism-it is modernism with the anomalous avant-garde still left in
,
, Sukenick? The present genealogy has documented the highly sceptical, if not hostile, attitude toward the postmodernist label in many various instances and with the most variegated writers
, Finnegans Wake and the Postmodern Imagination, p.107
, Constructing Postmodernism, p.42, 1992.
, , p.44
, , pp.47-55
, , p.54
, We should all now be writing novels like Finnegans Wake, not necessarily so obscure or so large
, Postmodernism -what is it?", and presenting Brooke-Rose's view. Both the terms, i.e. "modern" and "postmodern," are found "peculiarly unimaginative for a criticism that purports to deal with phenomena of which the most striking feature is imagination," this for three reasons, Some people think Finnegans Wake is the end of modernism, vol.23
, another frequent exemplar of Hassan's or McHale's postmodernist accounts, himself averred in an interview that "I have never found a definition of postmodernism that gives me a distinct idea of it. If the main characteristic is an author who describes himself as a character in his work, then Dante, Chaucer, Langland, and Wordsworth are as postmodern as James Joyce, who is merely modern, p.24
, Its most striking difference is its engagement with critical theorisations of so-called postmodernism, a term which Barth finds useless and subjects to mockery: while some of the writers labeled as postmodernists, myself included, may happen to take the label with some seriousness, 1967.
, 26 This inferiority of postmodernism vis-à-vis modernism, in turn, calls for a (re)definition of modernism itself, for the "post-"ness implies that modernism is over and consummated and, as such, estimable. On the one hand, Barth agrees that the "adversary reaction called modernist art, Barth approaches the modernist/postmodernist relation via a consciously Joycean simile
, Speaking of Writing-VIII, Times, p.13, 1964.
, An Interview with Anthony Burgess, Modern Fiction Studies, vol.27, p.444, 1981.
, A Rhetoric of the Unreal: Studies in Narrative and Structure, p.344, 1981.
, A Rhetoric of the Unreal, pp.344-349
, Later Hassan does give us some more specific 'modern forms' arising, directly or indirectly, out of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, the structure of which is 'both structurally over-determined and semantically under-determined,' but with coincidence as structural principle (identity as accident, recurrence and divergence), as well as the gratuitousness of every creative act, vol.349
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, As such, "it belongs to the first half of our century" and "the present reaction against it is perfectly understandable," both "because the modernist coinages are by now more or less debased common currency and because we really don't need more Finnegans Wake and Pisan Cantos
, Barthelme notes that the consequences of creating literary "objects" as "worlds" in themselves present a "stunning strategic gain for the writer. He has in fact removed himself from the work, just as Joyce instructed him to do, fiction altered its placement in the world in a movement so radical that its consequences have yet to be assimilated
, 29 In many respects Burroughs' heir, Iain Sinclair states (some forty years later) that his use of Watkins' psycho-geographical concept is a means to an aesthetic end steeped in modernist poetics of juxtaposition and collage: All of it to be digested, absorbed, fed into the great work. Wasn't that the essence of the modernist contract? Multi-voiced lyric seizures countered by drifts of unadorned fact, naked source material spliced into domesticated trivia, anecdotes, borrowings, found footage. Redundant. As much use as a whale carved from margarine, unless there is intervention by that other
, To these can be added all three French post-war avant-gardes in their entirety the New Novelist movement's challenge to the accepted, yet highly problematic, division of 20 th -century literature into modernist and postmodernist periods, sometimes seeming to unite them, sometimes seen as standing between them, but mostly simply bypassing the division altogether: the reason why Robbe-Grillet or Butor or Queneau or Sollers left no explicit address of these questions
, If paradox it be, it was done so in order to argue for a lasting importance of these effects, for their continuous reverberation in the post-war experimental fiction well beyond 2000. The chronological approach, to be sure, is not without its pitfalls (the teleological fallacy, for example) and its inelegancies. There were, of course, other possible modes of ordering, across individual chapters, concept-or theme-based. For instance, the triad of the crucial Joyce-effects identified in the Introduction could have yielded the following genealogy: 1) concrete writing
, 2) writing as plagiarism, forgery, parody and pastiche: from William Burroughs to Kathy Acker to Kenneth Goldsmith
,
, The Friday Book, p.202
, Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme, p.4, 1997.
, Robin Lyndenberg, pp.44-49, 1987.
, Landor's Tower: or The Imaginary Conversations, p.31, 2002.
, words as machines generating polyvocal ever-shifting conglomerates of meanings
, one could point out to some of their crucial differences. The Ulysses vs. Finnegans Wake binary would rewrite the genealogy as follows: Johnson vs. Brophy, Pynchon vs. Barthelme, Mathews vs. Sukenick, Robbe-Grillet vs. Butor, Perec vs. Queneau, Roche vs. Sollers, Goldsmith vs. Danielewski, etc. Still other possible categorisations would present themselves if one were to focus on the personality of the authors, for "experiment" is related to "experience" not only in terms of etymology. One could draw lines of development in terms of female fiction (from Sarraute to Cixous; from Brooke-Rose, Brophy and Quin to Carter, Winterson and Acker), Butor and Sollers
, One could zoom in on cross-national ties among these writers and groups (Federman in the U.S., Mathews in the Oulipo, vs. writers recluses
, Queneau and Perec as inspired by their Anglophone predecessors), etc. If one did indeed attempt any of the above, one would easily have eked out meaningful lines of connection that fall by the wayside of a merely chronological arrangement. The rationale, ultimately, behind its deployment is that the chronological arrangement contains, however implicitly or potentially, all of the above, with the additional advantage of allowing for the least amount of distraction (conceptual, biographical, ideological, or other) from what ultimately matters most, i.e. the writing itself, what the Joycean avant-garde was founded upon and what its effects will have resonated through: what was at the beginning and, and Federman as affiliated with the Tel Quel
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