Loop (French Literature) by Jacques Roubaud

Loop (French Literature) Reviews

• 
  Geoff

  ”All these particularities of the text present obstacles to reading, and they cause the eye to stumble, I know. They do not, however, affect the comprehension (rarely is a word deformed). And I leave them here most especially because they are signs, persistent signs, that I do not want to omit, of the circumstances of composition.
  And of the fact that every vision of the past is a vision of the blind.”
  
  ~
  
  The second volume of Roubaud’s Great Fire of London series begins with the elucidation of an image, a “memory-image” that allows the author to establish a precedent for his theory of memory and also to anticipate the entire structure and content of The Loop: a window pane frosted over, the veins of frost composing tiny vegetal patterns (an “inverse flower”), and a child’s fingernail scraping lines in the frost on the pane, eliminating the “inverse flower” in the process of “writing” pictures- using written symbols to create and destroy simultaneously. The frosted window is placed in a bedroom in a house in Carcassonne, and when the image is extended, when one attempts to reach through the memory-image of the inverse flower into the outside world, one finds (somewhat surprisingly) black, absolute dark. We are told there is a frozen garden beyond this blackened window, but the child, and the adult Roubaud recalling the image (and therefore the Reader) are confronted at first only with this picture of nothingness- a fingernail scraping symbols into icy flowers on a canvas of oblivion. What makes the image an even more complete rendering of the processes of remembrance, and especially of remembering when it takes the form of the written word, follows- it is revealed to be a false dark, the windows are painted black. Behind the false dark of the window pane at which a finger scrapes, the world of memory is a frozen garden, which lies hidden until the rememberer begins his pursuit. In the pursuit a world develops, almost like an exposed polaroid: we find the windows are painted black to block the internal lights, as a passive resistance to air raids. We (Roubaud, the child, the Reader) finally find ourselves situated in the rarity of a snowy garden in the south of France, in the early days of the Occupation during World War II.
  
  ~
  
  As children, we play games with space and time, manipulating our physical beings in space and time, or manipulating the properties of space and time to the warp of our imaginations. We eliminate ourselves and become an inhuman aspect of the landscape (hide & seek); we command armies or grow to gigantic dimensions to lord over an entire navy of toy boats afloat in a fountain or a pond, lifting the boats and terrified crews at our will like gods, orchestrating complex marine battles in miniature; or we become miniatures ourselves, we shrink ourselves to follow mice into holes or fish down rocky currents or float along with seeds and leaves on a breeze; we become princes or princesses in mythical lands, we are both rulers and creators of these lands; we destroy the limits of space on bicycles; we climb trees and scan the conquerable horizons; we find hidden places in closets, thickets, under tables, secret rooms that are then the secret lairs of our secret selves- our kingdoms of secret- where we fortify ourselves against the unknowable world; we invent languages understood by a chosen few, and these languages necessarily are lost; we possess magical objects that allow us to sleep, to travel, to traverse dimensional restrictions, that protect us and accompany us like guardian angels.
  
  As we grow older, it is space and time that end up playing games with us. We are no longer the masters, unless we keep, often only inside ourselves, a number of these magical objects.
  
  ~
  
  It is winter, a fountain is frozen over in the Luxembourg Gardens, the sky is gray and close, like the lid of a coffin.
  
  ~
  
  Last night, or a few nights ago (it doesn’t matter), I saw part of a program on television called Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. It was titled “Can We Resurrect the Dead?” (A quick search finds that some other titles in the series are “Can We Eliminate Evil?”, “Will Eternity End?”, “What Makes Us Who We Are?”, “What Is Nothing?”, “Does Time Exist?”) Anyway, in this particular episode a professor had developed a small camera worn around the neck like a necklace, hung about the level of the heart, that he and a number of grad students wore daily, and which snapped around 3,000 diurnal images. An algorithm determined (somehow) significance among these captured moments and whittled them down to about 30 per day, which were then stored in a giant hard drive (“giant” in capability of memory, that is) with the intention of archiving 3,000 moments, reduced to 30 “significant moments” occurring in each day of the participants entire lives. The purpose of this experiment, it was revealed, was to obtain the possibility of eternal life- with each day chronicled in images, and with the mass of these images trimmed down to those determined “significant”, one could reconstruct essentially (so it was proposed), a human being’s personality- their likes, their habits, the way they spent their time, who they knew, what they saw, where they chose to unfold their days. The program went further, and proposed that after death, a robotic body, made to resemble in every way the body of the deceased, could be constructed, given a voice modeled on the voice of the dead, and uploaded with all of these “significant” moments, the robot then being instilled (so it was proposed) with the personality of one who had died. Thus eternal life.
  
  They didn’t confront the issue of perception, of a body moving and feeling in space and time, and how disembodied images are not what makes a human being (or if they confronted this it was while I was checking in on the Nats/Mets game), nor did they confront the fact that this robotic entity could no longer develop new preferences, learn new associations, meet new people with new ideas that propose new future pathways. They were essentially creating a memory-machine, a statue imbued with static data.
  
  I wondered what Roubaud, sitting down each morning and evening, in the either gathering or waning light, and assembling his memories, would make of this episode of Through The Wormhole with Morgan Freeman. Roubaud himself has a term for these external artifacts of our lives, these gathered images and documents that make up our “external memory”. He calls them “pictions”. A piction does not contain memory, it only fundamentally alters it, defaces it by externalizing it, commands its autonomy over memory, asserts its authority over what is remembered (which is in fact a wholly organic thing), and potentially supplants it. An external memory-effector is a fiction, its colors and shapes are essentially rooted to the format, the process, the material properties of the piece- it speaks of what it documents only at a great distance, in vague terms. It is a referent, a companion object, a refraction, nothing more. It is certainly not “personality”.
  
  ~
  
  The structure of The Loop is interestingly similar to how the arrow of time is lived internally, in our minds. There is the straight line of the story, but at each insertion the arrow of time flies sideways, up and down, forward and then suddenly back, and then with each bifurcation, which are by definition longer “moments”, disparate points within the line of the story are connected through memory-associations, and one can either move ahead again at the linear, chronological stopping place of the story, or find themselves starting over a section previously read, but with a new perspective, with new associations. The book brilliantly mimics a living, working mind.
  
  ~
  
  A fig tree grows up against the walls of a house, its roots have invaded the house, its roots push up through the tiles of the kitchen, cracking them, displacing them. Its weight against the house is felt most severely in strong storms, when Mediterranean gusts abuse it. It creaks and bows against the walls, threatening them with collapse. They don’t collapse, but they threaten to.
  
  ~
  
  The Loop, among all the other things that it is (a treatise on memory, a theory of literature, poetry criticism, a language-game, Oulipian textual mischief) is primarily a World War II memoir, a memoir of the Occupation of France, a memoir of childhood. Roubaud’s techniques for recalling these years are similar to the processes of a phenomenologist like Gaston Bachelard (The Loop, at times, very closely resembles and echoes Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space), searching out the storehouses of the past by analyzing in great detail the physical places where the memories were formed and deposited, the “loci of memory”. The years covered are basically the years of the war, with some digressions farther back, explorations into the fore-lives of Roubaud’s ancestors, and some leaps forward to his present life at the time of composition of this book. But the great majority of The Loop is about the experiences of a child in the strange mirror-world of the Occupation, and the deprivations, alterations to daily life, vague murmurings of far off battles, obscure threats of air raids and marching armies, arrests, masses of people on the move, abandoned and ruined landscapes. His parents and his grandparents were active members of the Resistance, hiding not only Jews from deportation but housing Resistance fighters who fled to the relative safety of the south (Carcassonne and environs). As the book goes on, the Reader finds out just how involved his father actually was, and he becomes something of a heroic figure, but his grandparents no less, living in Occupied Lyon, providing shelter and sustenance to those resisting the Nazis. But all of this, seen through a child’s eyes, possesses very little of the gravity of those fully involved in the situations and aware of their consequences. This is a child’s ambiguous view of the era. We follow him to his secret and sacred childhood places- gardens, parks, roads, mountains, fields, squares- the places where he first reached out and perceived the world. The last years of Roubaud’s childhood (and his entry into the weird territory we label “adolescence”) coincided with the Liberation (he was born in 1932, and so was entering into the lycee in Paris, where his family was obliged to move when the war ended). Thus the celebratory months after the Liberation were slightly tainted by the pains and confusion that result from the natural restrictions on our youthful freedom and upsets to our known order that inevitably come with our exit from the Garden, from Paradise.
  
  ~
  
  Watching clouds as they move across a mountain and out along the horizon at a steady pace, never the same cloud twice, never a repeated form, as the sky changes behind them, as the color spectrum shifts with the draining or filling of light, as the screen on which they are laid slightly shifts, one is apt to think of the moments of one’s life, as they unfolded on altering backdrops.
  
  ~
  
  It is an ancient belief that one of the jobs of our guardian angels is to wipe our memories clean. This is done firstly when we are born, and our guardian angel gives us a smack across the face, eliminating all traces of our former lives. This is considered an act of generosity- if we recalled everything we had experienced in our previous lives, we would never commit to taking that first breath, we would never choose to live again. This first wiping clear of our memories is far from the last, though. It is also the job of our guardian angel to travel along side us throughout our new lives, guiding us, intervening at crucial situations, but also quietly pressing their lips to our ears now and again, blowing softly, their divine breath eliminating all those memories that, without the grace of forgetting, would render us incapable of carrying on.
  
  ~
  
  Snow falls on a garden. Clouds move across the sky, always in motion. What is it about these crystalline forms, these forms of accumulated crystals, snow and clouds, that are so much like our memories? Why does the snow, almost silently falling, mounting layer by layer, and the silent clouds, never presented to us in the same arrangements, always in a state of change, provoke in us so much thought, cause us to reminisce?
• 
  MJ Nicholls

  The second in Roubaud’s exhaustive and exhausting series, “the great fire of London” (lower case and quotes the author’s), is almost twice as long as Branch One: Destruction, and focuses on the task of painstaking childhood recall. Roubaud spends his time here extracting his earliest memories (most which are of the sepia photo kind and so to be treated with scepticism), and as usual indulges in small-font Insertions and long-winded Bifurcations, some of which are fascinating and some of which are tedious. Tedium is an inevitable component of this series (his constraint is to write and not edit what has been written each day), however, following Roubaud on his complex and super-intellectual digressions is a worthwhile enterprise, and his likeable humorous and anal narrative voice is almost always endearing.
• 
  Heronimo Gieronymus

  “He who remembers is at once Argos, the giant with a hundred eyes, and an octopus, a creature with a hundred arms.” THE LOOP, Jacques Roubaud’s follow-up to THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON, second of the three branches thus far translated into English of the mathematician-poet’s series of experimental Oulipo autofictions, once again consists of a main body and two sections of “insertions,” these the “interpolations” and “bifurcations” to which the reader is regularly directed by typographic prompts in the main body. THE LOOP conceives of itself, in complement to its predecessor’s configuration of the PROJECT of which it is but one branch as a work in which remembering becomes orderly destruction, as centrally concerned with the Fore-Project, or the prehistory of the Project, its dormancy and slumber, and therefore the phenomenology of its emanation. That memory and the poetic imagination are routinely grounded in the physical spaces of the childhood home and a childhood topography, ahem, branching out from that home—a literal memoryscape, rigorously schematized and yet “webbed with imprecision”—means that it is difficult not to reflect on Gaston Bachelard’s topoanalysis of the soul, setting out as it does in THE POETICS OF SPACE to catalogue the many ways physical spaces come to constellate the imaginations of poets. As in THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON, Roubaud again approaches these matters from the standpoint of three distinct temporalities, those of main body (“the story”), and of both regimes of insertion (interpolations and bifurcations). The tendency toward digression and a nearly pathological predisposition toward compound associative accretion mean that this is not only a single literary branch of a PROJECT with many, nor that this branch itself branches off into the parallel regimes of its two distinct genera of insertion, but that the lexicography and syntax themselves manifests these tendencies in sometimes ungainly fashion (charmingly so), such as with one astonishing sentence in fragment 118, belonging as said fragment does to the interpolations corresponding to the sixth and final chapter of the story, which concludes with the simultaneous closing of six embedded parentheses. If that sounds like a little more than you can handle, consider yourself forewarned. If THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON is a book that conceives of itself as the fire of a committed remembering that leaves nothing left standing in the pursuit of its campaign, that was largely attributable to its somewhat muted concern with grief, the principal structuring absence—even when she is directly considered—being the death of Roubaud’s wife Alix of a pulmonary embolism in January of 1983. If the absence of Alix is all the more complete in THE LOOP, here again we might consider her absence the enabling precondition for the greater PROJECT and the deflection of grief the motor of the (daily) work. The PROJECT is, again, a way through, a way of getting on. And actively setting out to pursue a literature of memory retains the traces of its original destructive impetus; Roubaud is quick to remind us of the general neurological consensus on memory vis-à-vis our not recurrently recalling original memories but rather recalling our recollections such that what we end up dealing with are, over time, the equivalent of thousandth generation photocopies. “But as soon and one breathes on any image, any memory, it too becomes covered with mist…” For the purposes of his specific variety of autofiction, Roubaud, in one of his regular interpolated autotheorizations, conceptualizes the work he is doing here as a matter of supplanting “memory-images” with “pictions,” a Wittgenstein-esque neologism combining “picture” and “fiction.” If Hollywood movies can be said to be documentaries about actors acting, as a former CAHIERS DU CINÉMA critic once insisted, this is altogether not a status equivalent to the “pictions” of a literary performance, and Roubaud suggests that readers may be doing themselves a disservice if they take much of anything here at face value. That it is a novel and a fiction is not a matter of calculated invention, necessarily, but rather of the irreducibly “invented” nature of any formalized schematic of remembrance. This is not only a matter of the fallibility of the author, a human being like any other, but of what Werner Heisenberg caused us to apprehend concerning the double-movement of the observer and the observed (which early autofiction master Gregor von Rezzori argued threw down the gauntlet for postwar literature). Near the very beginning of the first chapter proper, detailing an early wartime memory of frost on a blacked-out bedroom window—which is to say in fragment number 1 of THE LOOP—Roubaud presents an introductory conception of memory, its ontology, its epistemics, its terrain: “And it is precisely here that error, if there is any error, lies in wait for me at every turn: because in memories, in my memories (I am speaking only for myself), there is only seeing. Even touch is ‘colorless,’ anesthetized. I have no other adjectives to identify this apprehension of material things by thought alone, without form, without sensuous qualities, as they arise gray and pasty, made of some kind of conceptual clay (according to some of the first theories of memory from Antiquity). In the process of remembering, I do not feel that my finger is cold, nor do I feel the mild and already fading sharpness of the frozen dust scraped under my nail. I know—because it is universal and common knowledge that frost exists and that this mode of the physical existence of water is cold—I know, then, that the night was cold, and therefore know everything that follows from this. And I can recall this knowledge from experience, as one says. But the image that I reconstitute at this moment is numb to this knowledge—it is indifferent.” There is something characteristically photochemical here, and there can be no doubt that the twin forces of light and dark in monochromatic still images are a huge element in what we might go ahead and simply call Roubaud’s metaphysics. We will also note that there are times later in the text when Roubaud will more or less contradict himself respective of his assertion that the images of memory (or pictions) are "anesthetized" independent of the visual dimension. From Bifurcation C, “On Clouds”: “The lemonade left a delicious sting on our tongues and sometimes—mysteriously rising up into our foreheads—between our eyes, produced a prickling sensation in our brains, a fake ‘head cold,’ as occasionally also happened when we kept our heads under water in the river and accidentally let some liquid enter our noses.” This is not properly contradictory, as Roubaud has regularly insisted that one of the principal constraints of his PROJECT has always involved the unregulated expression of a truth germane only to the moment of composition (which in THE LOOP occurs on a Macintosh computer in counterpoint to the series of typewriters named after Henry James’s secretary repeatedly mentioned in THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON). Clouds too speak to this theme evident in numerous ways throughout the PROJECT, in that the changing sky mirrors the discontinuous continuity of the human being. The literary schematization of a chain of memories and associations is not properly memory in its natural habitat, and Roubaud is clear that part of what makes his work fiction is the “induction of images” in the linear form of a literary/compositional process, which “masks the combinatory character of memory” while at once establishing a working model for the provisional replication of that “combinatory character.” In the previous book, Roubaud had made clear that the PROJECT is poetry first and mathematics second, even if it becomes a series of novels belonging to a set designated “the great fire of London.” A member of Oulipo since the 1960s, we might understand Roubaud as sublating form to the quantifiable and calculable as something like a self-protective measure, a prophylactic against chaos, and THE LOOP certainly does give us material to support this reading, especially by way of a passage in the first bifurcation which sets us up for a consideration of Poe’s “A Descent into the Maelström” shortly afterward: “that in leaning over the dark spiral of the staircase, my gaze had sunk into a whirlpool, the endless coils of a whirlpool, in which a proliferation of images was the rule. Impossible for me to separate, to distinguish, to organize. The images thus ‘compressed’ together, endlessly, one on top of the other, demonstrated another condition, another modality of past time, to me. I could hardly refuse it.” Except refuse the maelström he ultimately can, and it is mathematical order that is the principal tool of this refusal, as is poetry, but only insofar as poetry submits to rules of meter and calculable distribution. Roubaud’s childhood and much of the Fore-Project are contemporaneous with the Second World War, and though the author spends a great deal of time on the role played in his life by siblings and cousins and so forth, the special primacy of his parents and his maternal grandparents stands out pointedly. The grandparents prove to be of especial interest. Roubaud confesses to not having been terribly fond of his grandmother, whose constant distractedness and shoddy penmanship read as implicitly emblematic of capitulation to maelström, whereas the lionized grandfather is neat, exacting, and ever mathematically adroit. That his grandfather in a moment of uncustomary absentmindedness fails to meet young Jacques at the proper exit to a Paris train terminal itself is a beneficent aberration around which a defining piction assumes its form. I recently came across a reference to a famous scene in one of my favourite Hollywood movies—I cannot at all recall where, but am fairly certain it was not in THE LOOP—this being a moment in Max Ophüls’s 1948 adaptation of Stefan Zweig’s A LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN in which Joan Fontaine’s Lisa Berndle, our narrator on account of being author of the titular letter, insists that a person is born twice, first is the natal sense and then again when awoken to a proper consciousness. The Fore-Project in THE LOOP is very much the tracing of the emergence of a spatialized or topographical wartime consciousness (and the insinuation of a more extensive cosmic anterior), while at the same it exists in relation to the future anterior grammatical sense (so key in the work of scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak). As Roubaud writes with respect to the future anterior tense and the solution to the paradox of the present instant: “The present instant is the one that will have been a given past instant at a given future instant. It is an event (though I don’t mean to imply that it is ‘punctual’) whose memory will have been preserved by a strictly distinct future event.” Part of the birth of proper consciousness for Roubaud involves the years 1944 and 1945, the end of the Second World War, the contribution of his parents and grandparents to the Resistance (opaque to the young boy), and as such both a Fore-Liberation and the Liberation itself, what followed the Liberation having been inherently anticlimactic. The story proper, culminating in fragment 50, involves the a posteriori realization of the horrors of internment and the Nazi final solution, with young Jacques taken by his father to “see” Alberto Picolo, who had been arrested by the Vichy police and subsequently sent to Buchenwald. Earlier, in “Davila Square," the fourth chapter of the story, Roubaud has written about meeting author and Holocaust survivor Primo Levi in Milan in 1987 (or thereabouts), how this triggers a number of associations and memories. “I speak of Primo Levi here because the ‘moment’ of this encounter, and the strong impression it left on me, quite naturally entered my mind when my memory, and then my obedient fingers on the keyboard, abruptly joined these two irreducible visions of death together: one of them concrete and ‘apolitical’—the roofer hurled onto the frozen ground by the inculpable coincidence of his fall—and the other, abstract and political to the highest degree, of the ‘stateless’ and ‘foreign’ anti-Nazi resisters depicted on the poster stuck to the walls of Davila Square.” The PROJECT enters into its branches and loops, forward and backward in time, no past that is not preceded by shrouded ghost worlds, no future that is not the future anterior to more future. The present is a game of snakes and ladders. The title of THE LOOP indicates where it takes us—a point of termination we are even told about at length before we arrive there—something analogous to what happens in FINNEGANS WAKE, the final bifurcation ending by repeating the opening of the story proper, thus sending us back around. The “loop” or “loops” also figure in the sense that we are told they are the binding procedures that hold the various topographies/topologies together, not unlike how “loops” secure shower curtains to shower rods, or the way chains loop together. If the novel loops back on itself, it does so by returning to that childhood bedroom and the sequence of topographies that follow, looped one by one together: the fig tree outside the bedroom window in Carcassonne (which rhymes with another fig tree in Toulon whose roots split the floors of an adjacent domicile, just as “the dead are like roots, and they grow into a life and shatter it”), the Rue d’Assas, the wild park, Davila Square, Hôtel Lutetia. The Fore-Project is not simply a matter of the prosaic, quotidian life that lives before the author’s consciousness properly lives—the life of his parents, their parents, et cetera. We see this clearly in the wild park, a “space-time refuge,” and “entryways into the beyond,” such as one found in a garden equal parts external and internal, taking the form of the mystical well behind the bench. Here we have the Fore-Project and the future anterior from the perspective of the final page of Bifurcation E, "Childhood of Prose," itself branching off the third chapter of the story proper, “Rue d’Assas” (a discontinuity of sequence, for those paying attention): “One is born into this space at the moment when one acquires—at same time as language (sic)—the inner sense of these dimensions, as well as their irreducible distinction. As an adult one forgets it (perhaps never completely).”
• 
  Old Man JP

  This is one of those books I don't know what I'm going to say and how I'm going to review because it is so complex. I read this while on a Mediterranean cruise and so I was able to break it up into numerous reading sessions instead of one continuous reading which worked well because I could digest what I had read while involved in other distractions. This is the second installment of Roubaud's The great fire of London project that, apparently, was taken on to help him deal with the loss of his wife, Alix. In this he is telling, mostly, stories of his early years in a very convoluted and complex way with numerous side digressions that appeared to loop around back to the original story and going from one period of his life to another. He would occasionally digress to explaining why he was writing in a certain way and would involve the reader in his writing process. He is, also, a mathematician as well as a poet and used mathematical principles in some of his writing, of which he would also explain. This is my fourth book by Roubaud and I'm not sure if I'm up to attempting another book by him any time soon. His prose is outstanding and I really like his poetry but he may be too intellectual for me.
• 
  Tuck

  when they say proustian to describe this novel, i think maybe they mean the intense act of thinking about loss, memory and forgetting. the book too DOES loop around and around and one needs at least 3 book marks to keep it straight. i think author is an oulipo dude? but really? this could have been written as a "straight' novel and would have been just fine.
  is it better to remember your love, gone, but also wonderful while it happened, but painful too, very painful. or is it better to forget, the pain could very well go away, but so does memory of love?
  
  
  
  *Been busy building an opac, so just making placeholders for books I’ve read in march and april 2014. This is the opac though.
  
  http://stwr.ent.sirsi.net/client/defa...
• 
  Barbara Duvoisin

  rec'd by HuffPo Nov 10 - seems a bit heavy and French/depressing/philosophical, but could be a good book for a long beach holiday...