Lost Luggage by Jordi Puntí
Short Books, paperback,
368 pages, 12.99,
ISBN: 978-1-78072-044-9

Albert Pellicer

I have always been intrigued at hearing my first name in its variations: either Albert (Catalan – t barely pronounced) or Alberto (Castilian – ending with a serious o) both calling for a part of my childhood to step forward.  And even now when I am called by my name in transit, I still do not know who is to respond. Along the years this feeling has grown, moving on to other ‘Alberts’:  Albert in its British and American sounds; the French Albert with its stressed rolled ending sound, the Italian Alberto with its long middle force or even the short forms Al, Albie and Bert; all departures from the same person but of quite different backgrounds and mind sets. So it comes as no surprise, then, that I have read Jordi Puntí’s first novel Lost Luggage with a personal sonic interest. Familiar sounds and noise stemming from the Barcelona of the early 70s reveal a nomadic search for a place to settle both in language and geography.  In that sense Jordi Puntí shows a talent for recreating time and space; for goodbyes as opening lines that unexpectedly welcome the reader into the everyday unknown.

Lost Luggage is Puntí’s first novel translated into English. The book, whose original title in Catalan is Maletes Perdudes, moved onto the Castilian readership as Maletas Perdidas and has now reached the Anglophone world. It would be wrong to merely consider this as one more step towards publishing success. Rather, the book’s translation history follows a transition that it itself portrays. Within such a frame, we, the readers, share the same search for a lost identity or, rather, a lost piece of baggage. But unlike treasured memories of the past, Puntí opens the pieces of lost baggage without nostalgia.

The novel is set in post-civil war Spain.  Franco had seen generations pass under his dictatorial domain, but he was unable to control his worst enemy – ‘chance’.  Leaving nothing to chance was Franco’s last stand. He was defeated badly.  Hidden cards were brought into play and these became a tool in people’s quest for identity and happiness. Opportunities happening outside the system meant, at that time, ways of surviving by ‘cheating’, breaking the rules of the imposed game. And it is precisely the way words move through borders apparently objectively that allows accident to unfold the plot of Lost Luggage.  Accidental events produce incredible discoveries in ‘a new world’, in contrast with the emptiness felt at home in Franco’s Barcelona. The force of the story is in the tension of its vectors, where lines meet up in the distant horizon. This is a technique used to constantly confront the questions that keep us searching for lost answers; to find out what really happened until each thread is woven together, uncovering the text’s truth.

The first ‘discovery’ is that Cristòfol (Catalan for Cristobal- in Spanish) has three brothers: Christof, Christophe and Christopher. They are sons of the same father but different mothers, and live in Frankfurt, Paris, London and Barcelona. Their father, Gabriel Delacruz – a truck driver who worked for a Spanish international removals company– disappeared from their lives when they were little. Two decades later, Cristòfol is contacted by the police to be informed that his father is officially a missing person.  It is then that he discovers that he has three half-brothers. The four ‘Christophers’ come together for the first time. Although they have only vague memories of what their father looked like, they decide to find him and solve the puzzle. Why did he abandon them? Why do all four have the same name? Is he still alive and does he want them to meet up? Do they have other relatives beyond their respective mothers: Sigrun, Mireille, Sarah and Rita?

A quest back into history, then forwards into geography, becomes a search for a living memory and eventually produces the first thread: Gabriel had himself also been abandoned.  His public life began in a market place as a newborn baby and was given the name Delacruz (‘Of The Cross’, or it could have been Delacroix, o Delacreu, names that were often given to children in orphanages). La Casa De La Caritat, a place where the children of the Franco repressed were taken, had been his childhood home. Gabriel was found at ‘Mercat del Born’, and again this is an interesting assimilation. ‘Born’ coincides with birth but the name born is an old Catalan word for the site where medieval jousting took place, and it is from here that our mysterious character becomes real by means of place, language and history. Puntí cleverly makes use of a local landmark which was inspired by London’s Covent Garden, and which was Barcelona’s principal wholesale market until the mid-1970s. Recent excavation work inside the building has revealed a grid of streets with homes dating back to the 18th century.  Now the discovery of these ruins has turned the edifice into a new museum and interpretative centre, in the same way that the ‘Mercat del Born’ allows the story to fill in the absence of Gabriel’s ancestors.

The cardinal points represented by the four ‘Christophers’ operate as a compass, directing us through a maze of adventures that Gabriel shares with his travel mates Petroli and Bundó. Gabriel is the central character of a story narrated by the ‘Christophers’ at the different stages of their encounters, organised to investigate their father’s life. Gabriel possesses the gift of chance, but we soon discover how the constraints of his upbringing weigh him down and, when his nomadic life no longer makes sense to him, he plays with the idea of suicide, plans to jump off the statue of another Christopher – Christopher Columbus - to put an end to it all.  But once again he is saved by the persistence of chance. Gabriel (like the author) is a keen card player; eventually the full house of Lost Luggage’s design is revealed, but not without risks and tricks.

The Museum of Loneliness LP Launch
The Whitechapel Gallery
Thursday 2nd May 2013

Scott Morris

“I first met Chris in Purgatory,” recalls Iain Sinclair, “otherwise the 1980s”. He is referring to Chris Petit, his friend, sometime collaborator, sitting in the front row. During those early days of friendship, Sinclair remembers above all how compelling he found Petit’s voice: “He should be doing voiceovers, he should be doing adverts”, he was constantly told. Only now, Sinclair muses, has that voice found its “appropriate place”.

That place is the Museum of Loneliness, Petit’s spoken-word 12” LP, scored and produced by Mordant Music. It’s the latest release from new publishing venture Test Centre, officially launched at tonight’s gathering in the Whitechapel Gallery. The record forges innovation out of regurgitation, consisting largely of readings from Petit’s past novels (his breakthrough Robinson, The Hard Shoulder and The Passenger), underscored by field recordings and samples from his films (Content and the earlier Asylum, a collaboration with Sinclair which is shown tonight in its entirety). “In the grand curvature of my career, I never thought I’d do an LP,” Petit admits, but insists that this is no attempt to get on Book at Bedtime. In his own words – which are vastly, reliably, eloquent – the LP is part of, and takes its name from, a larger project of “infiltrations”, to include:

“installations from the memory bank; non-radio exercises for radio and i-players. Sound montages for the electronic age, the audio equivalent to channel-hopping, sound quilts, alternative programming. Cubist radio. Post-DJ. Cut-ups. Audio junk. Electromagnetic slums. Music played in another room. Lonely songs for lonely places.”

The record plays as tonight’s audience shuffles into the auditorium, throwing everyone off balance. We take our seats, but hear Petit’s recorded voice seeping out, indistinguishably, from the walls behind us, like dystopian muzak, played in a lift we hadn’t realised we had just left. What is the ostensible star of the show doing loitering in the doorway, almost out of earshot?

‘Ostensible’, because tonight isn’t really celebrating anything quite as specific or straightforward as the launch of an album. More accurately, it’s a triumphant overview of the progress and productive ethic of Test Centre, and an appreciation of the central position that Petit and Sinclair have come to assume in its output. Its first release, in March 2012, was Sinclair’s own spoken-word LP, Stone Tape Shuffle; to date, all three issues of the Test Centre magazine have featured poetry and fiction from the two writers; they have also published Austerlitz and After: Tracking Sebald, a chapter omitted from Sinclair’s forthcoming book, American Smoke. Future projects include a radio broadcast by Petit from a container at the Tilbury Docks, as well as the publication of his pamphlet, Google Me God. The creators of Test Centre, Jess Chandler and Will Shutes, see the pair as integral to the development of the press: “Through the process of making their LPs, lots of new ideas have been generated, and, as big fans of both of their work, we’ve been very keen to continue working together. The range of projects we’ve developed with them has also allowed us to expand our operation, as publishers of the printed, as well as spoken, word.”

It’s wholly appropriate, then, that Petit and Sinclair dominate the stage at tonight’s proceedings. There is something strikingly similar about them; they are half-doppelgängers, edits of one another. They take turns to introduce and read extracts from their work. Sinclair muses on the formative impact of the unseen American landscape on his early writing, while Petit delivers an excerpt from his project Requiem for Monsters, which he brands “deep topography… the futile retrieval of a past that deserves to remain hidden” – that is, an exploration of the deeply entrenched bureaucracy of Auschwitz.

We are then treated to a screening of Asylum (2000), which is a complete delight. In many ways, it’s a cyberpunk update of Peter Greenaway’s The Falls: a nightmarish, ‘post-viral’ documentary, the catalogue of a catastrophe. Sound recordist ‘Agent’ Emma Matthews (Petit’s partner, and the artist behind The Museum of Loneliness’ eerie cover) investigates the mysterious death of photographer Francoise Lacroix through obsessively listening to collected field recordings. She tracks down such countercultural literary figures as Ed Dorn, James Sallis, Michael Moorcock (accompanied by a cat on a leash) and David Seabrook, whose “estuarine patois” she struggles to interpret. Footage of these investigations is in turn sifted, sorted, examined by a mysterious researcher known as Kaporal, voiced by Petit. It’s a dizzying examination of the ways in which we curate and reorganise ourselves, an exercise in self-stacking, you could say. “Live long enough, and you have a thing called an archive,” Iain Sinclair says by way of an introduction, something that could just as equally be applied to The Museum of Loneliness. Both are projects of obsessive sorting, of reworking; like the clownish figure in Krapp’s Last Tape, we see Petit and Sinclair revisit, time and again, their own records, their own traces, relentlessly, ceaselessly editing ‘versions’ of their work, tentatively proposing some kind of continuum at the same time as radically undermining the prospect. Essentially, they are building upon the legacy of another subversive double-act: William Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s tape experiments from the 1960’s pioneered the use of recorded voice as a disruptive weapon. “You are a programmed tape recorder set to record and play back,” Burroughs concedes in The Ticket that Exploded, but “you don’t have to listen to that sound… you can program your own playback”.

Recently, the publishing world has been gifted with a frankly surprising swell in innovative, bold new presses – Test Centre is possibly the bravest of the lot. Shutes and Chandler explain that their project “grew out of a determination to stop writing about things and start doing things”. As a result, the work they endorse defiantly leaks across genres: a primary interest in literature is combined with an involvement in contemporary music and editing techniques, “recognising the interdisciplinary nature of modern avant-garde writing”. We can look forward to a third LP later this year, recorded by arch-experimentalist Stewart Home and showcasing his famous ‘headstand and book-shredding routines’. A fourth LP will feature Tom McCarthy: a fitting complement to his more recent obsessions with notions of transmission and recording. Aside from the vinyl, there is talk of a pop-up shop, with all manner of readings, launches and film screenings.

“Nothing here now but the recordings” (in the words of Burroughs) – but in the case of Test Centre, perhaps not even those. Their pressings and publications are strictly limited in number: only 200 or so copies of the first three magazines exist; only 400 copies of Stone Tape Shuffle, 600 of The Museum of Loneliness. The seeming permanence of the digital download is resisted; durability is not a given. This point is made most poignantly in a throwaway comment by Iain Sinclair, reflecting on the unused chapter from American Smoke. A stroll through the streets of East London in the shadow of Sebald, his editor found it all a bit incongruous. So, out it came, into the hands of Test Centre, who printed it in a limited run of 300 copies – now all sold. Coolly, almost dismissively, Sinclair remarks that it has “been and gone”.

‘The Museum of Loneliness’ LP is available to purchase from the Test Centre website, alongside remaining copies of the first three magazines.

Exodus
Lars Iyer
Melville House, Paperback
289 pages, 978-1612191827, £10.99

Nikolai Duffy

Exodus: the second book of the Old Testament, which recounts the departure of the Israelites out of Egypt; shemot (‘names’) in the Pentateuch; literally a ‘going out’: ex, meaning ‘out’, and hodos, way. Also, from the Greek, exodus, ‘a military expedition; a solemn procession; departure; death.’

***

In a short essay on Derrida’s notion of différance, translated as ‘Elliptical Sense,’ Jean-Luc Nancy invokes the phrase ‘the lightening of meaning’ which, Nancy writes, refers to the ‘knowledge of a condition of possibility that gives nothing to know.’ In such a situation, he suggests, ‘meaning lightens itself […] as meaning, at the cutting edge of its appeal and its repeated demand for meaning.’ [1]

***

Exodus is the third instalment of Lars Iyer’s much celebrated trilogy (after Spurious, 2011, and Dogma, 2012) cataloguing the existential, professional, political, and economic ruination of Lars, W., philosophy, universities, academia, life, and everything else. Lars and W. are a classic double act: acerbic, perplexed, frustrated, bound. And they are extremely funny, tragically funny. Think Beckett, think Laurel and Hardy, Little and Large. Across the wastes of Britain, academia, one playing off the other, each reprising roles laid out before any of this began, sticking to them, by and large, for lack of any clear sense of any other way to behave. This is the stuff of intimacy: W.’s abuse of Lars; Lars’ acquiescence. Lars: the half-Danish, half-Indian, used to work in a warehouse; W., the academic with great leanings towards what he describes as ‘the majesty of thinking’, contemplation, the big questions, and who claims Irish and Jewish heritage.

***

‘Critical discourse has this peculiar characteristic: the more it exerts, develops, and establishes itself, the more it must obliterate itself; in the end it disintegrates. Not only does it not impose itself – attentive to not taking the place of its object of discussion – it only concludes and fulfils its purpose when it drifts into transparency.’ [2]

***

This time, Lars and W. go on one last lecture tour of Britain to assess the ‘ruins of the humanities’ and the conditions for W.’s sacking.

Not much happens. They come and go; they drink gin; they talk, a lot, not necessarily about anything in particular. They have a sense of the ridiculous. They go on and on, relentlessly.

***

Surfaces can be difficult to read and the slate is never wiped clean, really, no matter the scourer used. Lines of reference are tangled, an entire condensed pattern of connection. Driven to entertainment. Besides, it is not always easy to be what one says; matter lost in grammar and convention, and convergence, too, the edge of letting go.

To move in the spaces language opens.

A place where life and writing come together; an engagement with history, ground, that is also a way of thinking the rifts of life, its relative strangeness, the stuff of things, some of it choppier than the rest; a whole made up of pieces, fragments: the gaps, the inconsistencies, the blindsights. Most often, contradictions are restless and ambiguity pulls in more than one direction.

***

Lars and W. are great refuseniks, even of refusing. Idealism figures as cynicism; certainty is a fine example of irony; and thinking about what irony might mean is just another reason for apathy.

And no wonder: as Paul de Man comments in ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality,’ irony is duplicitous and undecidable; it doesn’t say what it says, but neither then does it say what it doesn’t say, such that the duplicity of irony necessarily also extends to any discourse on irony.

‘Curiously enough,’ de Man writes, ‘it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.’ [3] The ‘not-itself’ of irony does not mean that irony is negative but simply that irony establishes a way of speaking that undoes what is said.

***

‘The moment’s come, W. says on the phone. They’re closing the philosophy department at Middlesex.

W. imagines them like giant crabs, the destroyers of philosophy. As giant crabs with great metallic claws. But in the end, they’ll only be managers. Manager-murderers, with profit-and-loss spreadsheets.

‘It’ll be our turn next,’ W. says. ‘They’re coming to get us.’ The cursor, on someone’s monitor, is already hovering over our names.’ [4]

***

In The Writing of the Disaster Maurice Blanchot, about whom Iyer has written two books, writes that the grand irony is apathy: ‘not Socratic, not feigned ignorance – but saturation by impropriety (when nothing whatsoever suits anymore), the grand dissimulation where all is said, all is said again and finally silenced.’ [5]

And then, as Blanchot goes on, ‘if the “possibility” of writing is linked to the “possibility” of irony, then we understand why one and the other are always disappointing: it is impossible to lay claim to either; both exclude all mastery.’ [6]

This disappointment is everywhere in Exodus, and joyously so. Iyer makes exuberance out of folly. As he puts it in interview, ‘For me, the art of exaggeration is the literary art of our times. It is only through exaggeration that we can express ourselves in this sentimental age; that we can break through to the truth. Exaggeration and wild despair: that’s the remedy. Hyperbole is all you have left when you’re being backed into a corner.’ [7]

***

‘It occurred to me as I made my way here and there along these paths of history that there is a joy in independence, in the risk of independence in one’s thinking and making, and there is joy even in contemplating the works of the independent thinker. But what also occurred to me is that there is safety, reassurance, in being an uncritical follower, especially of an independent thinker, a revolutionary […] and that the challenge to the follower […] is to remain independent in turn – even of those we admire, of those who are themselves independent. That is, to continue to look with clear eyes, with the eyes of the “critical scholar” […] For fear that otherwise we have eyes but do not look. Or maybe it should be: we look but do not see.’ [8]

***

In interview, the poet Rosmarie Waldrop comments how continuities, smooth transitions, tend to be false. The sense that one thing follows on from another is bluff, an illusion of order. ‘There is always,’ she says, ‘the feeling that I never have enough information. The process is not so much “telling” as questioning. This implies interruption. And in the gaps we might get hints of much that has to be left unsaid – but should be thought about.’ [9]

***

‘There’s a fundamental difference in our philosophy of walking, W. says. He is a Jewish walker, for whom every walk is an exodus, a leaving behind of the house of bondage. For the Jew, every walk is a political act, a determined effort to found a new community, to journey together away from the captivity of Egypt.

But I am a Hindu walker, W. says, for whom walking is not political, but only ever cosmological – ‘You set out to come back again! You go forth only to return!’ [10]

***

essay, n. from the French, essai, to weigh, try,

measure, inquire into; a rough copy; first draft. 

***

‘We were to learn about our transferable skills, I’ve told W. We were to learn about personal branding. We were to learn about time management and planning and organisation. We were to learn about working well with others, and forming good working relationships. We were to learn about motivation and enthusiasm, about showing initiative and being self-starting. We were to learn about sharing a firm’s mission…’ [11]

***

Absurd, from the Latin, absurdus, meaning: 

out-of-tune, discordant, awkward, uncouth, uncivilized,

preposterous, ridiculous, inappropriate.

***

‘We need novels forged in the black fire of despair. Personal despair, political despair, even cosmic despair. Novels shot through with a sense that the end is nigh, that all our efforts are in vain, but that we might at least laugh at our predicament. Laugh — but with a laughter as black as the forces that we laugh at.’ [12]

***

Exodus; lights out… and then the very fact of tomorrow.

***

It brings to mind Blanchot’s essay on ‘The Laughter of the Gods’, particularly the part where he quotes Pierre Klossowski: ‘And thus it appears that the doctrine of eternal return is conceived yet again as a simulacrum of doctrine whose very parodic character gives account of hilarity as an attribute of existence sufficient unto itself, when laughter rings out from the depths of truth itself, either because truth bursts forth in the laughter of the gods, or because the gods themselves die laughing uncontrollably: when a god wanted to be the only God, all of the other gods were seized with uncontrollable laughter, until they laughed to death.’ [13]

***

It’s rare to read a book, let alone a trilogy, that makes you laugh out loud this often, especially given the very pressing questions it raises but refuses to answer about the value of the humanities, economics, thinking, the way of things, books. And it’s even more rare, I think, to read a book that does all this while also being this smart, and biting, and entertaining.

[1] Nancy, ‘Elliptical Sense’, in Derrida: A Critical Reader, ed. David Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp.41-42.

[2] Maurice Blanchot, ‘What is the Purpose of Criticism?’ in Lautréamont and Sade, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004) p. 2.

[3] Paul de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’ in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (London: Methuen, 1983) p. 211.

[4] Lars Iyer, Exodus (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2013), p.252.

[5] Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 45.

[6] Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, p. 35.

[7] Jonathan McAloon, ‘Interview with a writer: Lars Iyer,’ The New Statesman, 6 March 2013.

[8] Lydia Davis, ‘Pairing off the Amphibologisms: Jesus Recovered by the Jesus Seminar’ in Joyful Noise: The New Testament Revisited, ed. Rick Moody and Darcey Steinke (Boston: Little Brown, 1997), pp. 201-2.

[9] Joan Retallack, ‘A Conversation with Rosmarie Waldrop,’ Contemporary Literature, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Autumn, 1999), p.341.

[10] Iyer, Exodus, p.160.

[11] Iyer, Exodus, pp.166-167.

[12] Lars Iyer, ‘Interview,’ Full Stop, 22 June 2011.

[13] Pierre Klossowski, quoted in Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Laughter of the Gods,’ Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p.181.

J.S. MacLean
 

A million dollar lotto ticket
resembles her; prodigal autumn
as orchard pout of wisdom apples
selected by the choice of outcomes.
The numbers drop; a look, a second,
the graze, a reach of hollow wanting
in earth of bones, and coiling tresses
that fall from eyes as figures fitting .
Desire is seed in bruise of fruit;
a fortune seized by will of root.

 
____
Photo credit: Selma90

The Childhood of Jesus
J. M. Coetzee
Harvill Secker, Hardback
277 pages, 978-1846557262, £16.99

Stephen Pringle

This novel takes place in a strange world. It’s a precise but elusive kind of strangeness, which some reviewers have found off-putting. It isn’t a strangeness of plot (a man and a boy search for the boy’s true mother), setting (the Spanish-speaking town of Novilla) or style (the novel is conveyed in Coetzee’s plainly elegant present tense), but a strangeness kindred to the uncanny, which itches at the reader’s mind as events play out.

At the outset of The Childhood of Jesus, a man presents himself and a small boy at a resettlement office in a town called Novilla. He is given the Spanish name Simón, the boy, David, though these are only ever used in dialogue. To the narrator they remain ‘he’ and ‘the boy’. As the man states to various inquiring parties, the boy is ‘Not my grandson, not my son. We are not related’ but ‘The boy happens to be in my care’. The two are treated with much politeness but scant friendliness at the repatriation centre;  ‘slight hitch’ atop slight hitch results in a bit of darkish comedy where Ana (who works at the centre) offers to put them up for the night, only for the man and boy to be cast out into her garden, and told to construct a shelter from an old bit of corrugated iron.

Novilla is missing, as The Simpsons puts it, that little bit of spice which makes existence extra nice. The man is able to find honest, well-paid work as a stevedore, but there’s nothing really to spend the money on. His fellow stevedores discuss the nature of their work, and of the world, during lunchtimes and at free philosophy classes, but everyone argues perfectly synthetically, and the classes focus on the ontology of tables and chairs. We learn of the man’s purpose in Novilla: to find the boy’s ‘true mother’. He doesn’t go about this scientifically, feeling that he’ll know her as soon as he sees her.

Duly he does, and Inés, a childless woman in her thirties who lives in the gated, seemingly wealthier La Residencia, becomes the boy’s mother. I say ‘becomes’ because I don’t know a better word for what happens; Inés moves into the man’s old flat and starts acting as the boy’s mother. The boy himself oscillates quite smoothly between brattish five year old (the age he is assigned at Novilla, we don’t know his exact age) and visionary iconoclast. To the novel’s great credit, the iconoclasm is just about plausible for his age  (especially with the man’s exegesis). The story concludes as the man, Inés and the boy abscond from Novilla’s authorities, who want to consign the boy (often disruptive to his class) to Punto Arenas, a vaguely threatening reform school-type institution. In the final pages, the boy, decked out in an adult-sized magician’s cape and prescription sunglasses after partially blinding himself, invites strangers to join him in a new life.

Sometimes the biblical correspondences are this heavy, but they’re usually lighter, and always formulated with a delicate ambiguity that pushes us to question the exact nature of the novel’s setting. The title is artfully chosen; in an age of global publishing conglomerates, titles are often assigned on the basis of brevity and marketability, but The Childhood of Jesus at once makes us question where we’re headed. It continues to provide creative tension as we work through the possible connections between what happens in the novel and its announced context.

Nietzsche questioned the way we see Socrates as the central pivot in Western philosophy, offering Jesus Christ as an alternative. Sure enough, a number of philosophical viewpoints are brought to the agora (almost literally), and their merits and demerits are thrashed out by Novilla’s denizens. During lunchtimes at the docks, the man tries to argue that the stevedores should aspire to more than unloading grain from ships. He ties himself in knots under the implacable questioning of his comrades, until Álvaro (the foreman) leaves himself wide open: ‘There is no place for cleverness here, only the thing itself’. The man replies:

‘Listen to yourself, Álvaro,’ he says. ‘The thing itself. Do you think the thing remains forever itself, unchanging? No. Everything flows. Did you forget that when you crossed the ocean to come here? The waters of the ocean flow and in flowing they change. You cannot step twice into the same waters.

This is as explicit a reference as you can make to Heraclitus without naming him; it even contains  the exact river analogy which Plato uses to describe his philosophy in the Cratylus. Earlier, as the man eats a picnic with Ana and thinks about trying to touch her, there are strong echoes of the Symposium.

I’m not entirely sure why Coetzee has the man deliver a riposte informed by Heraclitus, but it breaks up the staid, inexorable way in which the man’s comrades proceed with their arguments; the same way they carry their grain, essentially. If we do take Socratic reasoning as the pivotal point of Western philosophy, the pre-Socratic Heraclitus is a bit off the main road (though he was a Modernist favourite: Four Quartets uses him as an epigram, and Pound quotes him in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley). He symbolises, perhaps, the man’s dissatisfaction with the way everyone argues from tributaries of the same river. 2003’s Elizabeth Costello features extensive correspondence with a range of philosophers, but here that correspondence is woven into the fabric of the story.

The world of the novel  has many handles of real life we can grasp. After the man moves out of his flat, leaving Inés to raise the boy, he pays them a visit and finds himself unblocking their toilet, whilst trying to explain to the boy the notion of ‘the pooness of poo’ and the fact that toilets don’t receive ideas particularly well. The scene sends up, or at least explores the limitations of, philosophical fiction, and insists that the world can quickly chop the grandest ideas down to size. There is a touching scene as the boy and Inés visit the injured man in hospital, following an accident using a mechanical crane at the docks. ‘‘Can’t he walk?’ asks the boy. ‘Can’t you walk, Simón?’’ The particularly explicit biblical resemblance makes us realise that maybe we’ve been searching too hard for them in the story; the strongest link to Jesus is the loving bond between the man and the boy, which strengthens despite the novel’s unfathomable adversities.

Coetzee is a writer who has plenty of experience of gently smudging real-world settings, altering the equation so that it precipitates his ethical concerns more clearly – the Empire in Waiting for the Barbarians, for instance. This novel, though, follows the dictum of letting the reader make sense of the world and the people  presented on their own, quite masterfully so. What is Novilla? Is it a version of the afterlife? Is it the Platonic Form of a society, which, by way of its its quite evident flaws, forces the man, boy and Inés to flee and thereby shows the impossibility of such an ideal society (or at least its incompatibility with a philosophical rebel like Jesus Christ)? What does the boy’s ‘mother’, Inés, who lives a kind of pleasant-but-worthless life in La Residencia, playing tennis with her sullen brothers, say about the immaculate conception? And just what is to be found outside Novilla, if the ‘sort of family’ keeps driving? I can’t answer these questions definitively, but I enjoyed postulating them, and thinking about their possible answers.

Christopher Reid first became well-known in the 1980s as a prominent member of the ‘Martian’ school of poetry, noted for its curious and defamiliarising metaphors. While his name is still associated with that movement, his poetry has progressed through a large variety of styles and tones: from his intricate and dandyish early work, through the stylistically idiosyncratic ‘Memres of Alfred Stoker’, to the Costa Prize-winning  A Scattering, a poetic tribute to his late wife, which finds Reid at both his most emotional and yet most restrained.  Apart from the Costa Prize, Reid has won a Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden Prize and a Cholmondeley Award. He has also been shortlisted twice for the T.S. Eliot Prize and once for the Forward Poetry Prize.

Between 1991 and 1999 he held the powerful post of Poetry Editor at Faber where he worked with Ted Hughes on his last books, which led to his becoming editor of Letters of Ted Hughes (2007). In addition, Reid has worked at Crafts magazine and taught at the University of Hull. He has also worked as a freelance journalist and had illustrations published in Punch and the London Magazine. He runs his own small press, Ondt & Gracehopper, through which he brings out work of his that has been rejected by other publishers, including two books for children, one of which won the Signal Award.

In this interview, we discuss Nonsense, his latest book, which sees Reid in his most playful spirit, with poems that encompass all shades of humour from the effervescently silly to the darkly ironic – sometimes in one poem.

Interview by Kit Toda
Photograph used with kind permission of Jemimah Kuhfeld (www.jemimahkuhfeld.co.uk)

Christopher Reid at home
Photographer: Jemimah Kuhfeld

After a friendly welcome, one of the first things that Christopher Reid says to me as I enter his home is that he will have to pause the interview at some point to feed the two enormous chickens that his partner keeps in their garden. When we eventually do make our way out into the garden, I remark upon several interesting pictures and objets d’art in the corridors. He then offers to show me around his home after the interview, which I accept with enthusiasm. Unlike the sleek modern aesthetic of ‘brushed steel and [...] plexiglass’ which Reid depicts in his poem ‘State of the Art’, the magpie collector’s bent is very much apparent in his remarkable home. Handmade pots are arranged on the kitchen shelves while paintings, sketches, masks and posters adorn the walls. Antique furniture stands sedately next to a large wooden carving of a cockerel posing proudly on a tripod.  Almost every surface brims with curios. He is clearly fond of stuff as well as nonsense, and playfulness is as much evident here as in his poetry: in one room there is a bowl of dried gourds into which Christopher has sneaked a light bulb of almost identical shape and size.  I admire what appears to be (and is craftily presented as) a modernist wooden bust, which turns out to be the corner section from a verandah balcony. (The sockets where the bannisters used to be affixed look like eyes.) He also shows me the surprising origin of his mysterious poem ‘The Ballad of P. BINCE’ but, alas, as to that, I am sworn to silence…

As is obvious from the title and the content of your latest book, you are interested in nonsense verse. But while many, like ‘A Bit of a Tune’, are light-hearted and come close to the genre, none of the poems in Nonsense seem to me to be true nonsense verse in the Lewis Caroll or Spike Milligan vein. So I was wondering if you could talk to me about the relationship between nonsense verse and your own work.

I suppose nonsense verse when skilfully done represents a kind of ideal freedom – a writer can prattle away without the obligation of referring to reality at all obviously. The words themselves play games and keep themselves entertained without any of the conventional responsibility towards normality and good sense. Ever since childhood, I’ve been attracted by nonsense verse and the opportunity it offers to enjoy a brief holiday from reality. All of which is really a long-winded way of saying that it amuses me, diverts me. Spike Milligan is actually one of my deepest influences! No doubt that’s more apparent in my two children’s books, where I’ve indulged my liking for nonsense rather more than I do in my so-called adult work.

Was it a conscious decision not to include many actual nonsense poems in your Nonsense book?

No, well, the poems gathered themselves in the way that they do, long before I thought of a title for a book. The title, I think, applies in other ways than just as generic description.

Yes, ‘nonsense’ is  a thread that runs through all the works isn’t it?… I think what’s interesting about nonsense is that it’s not the absence of sense – it’s more that it has a special relationship to sense. For example, the word ‘galumphing’ [from ‘Jabberwocky’] works because, despite it being a neologism, one has an instinctive understanding of what it means.

Oh yes, ‘The Jumblies’, for instance, would not have any resonance at all if the tale it told didn’t resemble stories you might have come across in ballads and romances and that sort of literature. A degree of parallelism is important.

I suppose it has a great deal to do with defamiliarisation and, for that to happen, you need something to defamiliarise the reader from. That process goes back to some of your earliest work.

Yes, that’s right. One person I learned from when I came across him at school was Wallace Stevens. I think just a few of his poems can be called nonsense pure and simple. But there are a great many others, especially in his earlier books, which present themselves as a species of nonsense but actually they go a long way – a deeper way – towards sense than conventional, rational, argument-stating poems do. Stevens was apt to disguise his good sense as flamboyant nonsense and that seemed to me attractive. Some of the poems in my own first two books are pretending to be more nonsense than they actually are.

I suppose one of the most famous Wallace Stevens poems that is a bit nonsensical is ‘The Emperor of Ice Cream’.

Yes, although that actually makes a lot of sense when you pay attention to it. It seems to me a very profound and true vision of the everyday world of ice cream, dawdling girls, and boys bringing flowers as the only reliable thing we have: ‘Let be be finale of seem.’ When death comes in the second part, all we have then is the makeshift ceremony of mourning, which we must acknowledge as well. Life and death: no more serious subject that that!

I want to ask about syllable sounds and nonsense. I was wondering whether you thought that certain sounds are inherently comic.  ‘A Bit of a Tune’ for instance makes use of the ‘-oon’ sound, which seems to me as if it might be…

Oh yes, certainly, even though it’s also one of the clichés of Tin-Pan Alley*: those commercial love songs that invariably rhyme ‘June’ with ‘moon’ and so forth. I avoid ‘June’ in the poem as that would be just too much Tin-Pan Alley. I’m not sure if there’s an essential comedy in particular syllables, but the obsessive repetition of them can accumulate to comic effect.

There’s certainly something inherently comic about a forced rhyme. Like when in ‘A Bit of a Tune’ you resort to the word ‘alooooooone’.

Yeah, that’s right, that is quite outrageous.

Do you think you can take the idea of a comic sound further? For example I once read about a comedian who said that a ‘canary’ was inherently funnier than, say, a ‘robin’. It was something about the hard ‘c’ sound which made it funnier.

Ye-es, I wonder… Edward Lear found pelicans funny and it might not just have been because they look so ungainly. It’s a slightly absurd combination of vowels and consonants, which you couldn’t really say of ‘lark’, for instance.

Could you tell me something  about the name of ‘Winterthorn’ from ‘Professor Winterthorn’s Journey’? It’s a very evocative name – it’s not like ‘Jones’ or ‘Smith’…

I wanted to invent a name that sounded as if it could be a real one. I don’t know if there is anyone else in the world called ‘Winterthorn’; I should be surprised in a way if there wasn’t.  But it’s certainly not a common name. I wanted it to be distinctive but at the same time perfectly natural-sounding.

It sounds distinguished as well, for a professor. I was wondering too whether, although he isn’t particularly old in the poem, it’s partly to do with how he’s in the ‘winter’ of his life?

He’s sixty and I suppose that makes him middle-aged these days, doesn’t it? But he’s lost his wife, so there’s a spiritual winter there that he has to endure.

Yes, and also the lack of interest he shows in the conference despite having flown half way across the world to go to it does suggest that there’s something going on – well, we know there’s something going on – but it does suggest that things are not quite right.

Oh yes, he’s in a state of great turbulence. Totally unsettled, can’t relax, can’t do anything straight. All his thoughts are daft ones. He makes some attempt towards the end to get his thoughts and feelings in order. It’s arguable how successfully he does that but up to that point he’s been in total disarray.  

I feel that the closest genre to ‘Professor Winterthorn’s Journey’ might be the short story.

Yes, fair enough.

It’s a short story in verse, really, so I was wondering whether you write much prose.

I can’t write narrative prose. I’ve tried it and I can’t do it. Whenever I’ve had an idea that for other writers could have been a short story or something of that kind, it’s had to be held together by verse, for me. Can’t get the narrative momentum without verse to push it along.

Without the rhythmic momentum?

Exactly. The rhythm is part of the story.

I was also wondering – considering you have two sort of scripts in there; well, one, plus a kind of monologue – have you written much in the way of plays or librettos?

I tried writing plays at one period – I actually completed a couple but they’re no good at all! I’d love to be able to write a play; perhaps I may one day be able to write one in verse – the movement of verse to keep the dramatic action going.

But poetry has always been your genre?

Yes, from early childhood.

Do you read a lot more poetry than prose?

I read a lot of poetry, a lot of novels and a lot of plays; actually I read a lot more plays than I go to see in the theatre. I learn, I think, from those who can write in those genres. But what I haven’t learnt is how to write an actual play or a novel. I think I have learnt about characterisation and narrative, maybe; but the construction of a story out of paragraphs of prose, the accumulation of sentences without prosodic underpinning – I just don’t know how to do that.

That’s very interesting. It seems instinctively that, if you can write both narrative and poetry, it shouldn’t be such a hard thing to do,  but that’s not really the case.

It could well be that I see more difficulties in the job of writing a prose narrative than are actually there, but I can say that when I’ve tried it and read back what I’ve written it just seems preposterous.

Preposterous: that should be the next title.

I think I‘ve taken enough risks with Nonsense.

I was wanting to ask a bit more in detail about ‘Professor Winterthorn’. You end sections with one hanging isolated line…

I do that in every section, yes.

And sometimes it seems logical in that it ends on a line that seems particularly significant,  whereas other times it doesn’t seem like that but rather it lends a significance that’s really quite mysterious. I was wondering if you could talk about that.

Could you give me an example? Of the second kind.

Well, here’s the first kind: ‘Too much like a mass grave’, but…[an example of the first kind would be,] ‘No problem: the airport rack // will yield some nice, fat, sedative paperback’.

Ah, I see what you’re getting at; that there’s a sort of gently implied climax to the ending of a section. But the same device can also give you anti-climax as well. That’s a comic possibility that I exploit a little, yes. There are certain arbitrary decisions that you make as you begin a piece of work, especially something as long as ‘Professor Winterthorn’. I knew from the start it was going to be long; in fact I knew that it was going to be in 77 sections, that was part of the design.

Is there a particular significance to that?

No, no, just that it’s a pleasing number: one prime multiplied by another. A similar consideration applied to The Song of Lunch where I’d decided there’d be 64 sections because that’s a nice number too, though in a different way. Once I’d settled on 77 for this one, everything fell pat into that pattern, so it was the right decision at the outset. And there are other hidden patterns within the poem which it would be laborious to try and explain because the point is they are hidden, and they were useful only to me as I constructed the piece. But that idea of having a dangling line at the end of every section, and often in the middle of a section as well, was really for narrative convenience. Aside from sometimes lending a significance to the section, ending it on a meaningful cadence, they can also serve to point to the next section – another device for achieving forward motion. Beyond such technical calculations, of course, they say something about my hero’s habits of mind, his tendency to leave all problems dangling and unresolved.

Talking about the content – I found  ‘Professor Winterthorn’ very funny, because  it’s such an uncomfortably close satire on the academic world (which, as I was saying, I know quite well!). I was thinking that the funniness of the poem is that the world you’re writing about – particularly academic conferences –  is so po-faced. It can often be ‘dry and dutiful’ and also there’s the nonsensical jargon as well which feeds into the nonsense theme.

Well, it’s very close to nonsensical.

I was wondering : you were a Professor of Creative Writing at one point – was that partly an inspiration?

Well, I suppose if I hadn’t had hands-on experience of the academic world, I wouldn’t have been able to get some of those shafts as accurately delivered as I hope I did.

Yes, the title of the conference [‘Nonsense and the Pursuit of Futility as Strategies of Modernist, Postmodernist and Postpostmodernist Literature and Art’] is indistinguishable in tone from some of the calls for papers that get sent around – it’s really not out of the realms of reality!

I do my best to sound authentic.

And that’s why it’s funny. Because it’s a very close line, isn’t it? If it’s too nonsensical then it’s not funny anymore –

There’s also ‘Some Thanatological Themes in The Third Policeman’:  close to a tongue-twister and tongue-twisters are inclined to be comic.

Apart from being a Creative Writing Professor, did you ever think of going down the academic route when you were at Oxford?

Oh no, I was not a bright student and I would never have qualified. So it was a big surprise to me when I was, as it were, press-ganged into joining the academic world rather late in life.

How did you find it? Did you enjoy it?

No, I ran away from it. As fast as I possibly could. I was at Hull for two years, and it’s nothing to do with Hull itself and nothing to do with my very likable and admirable colleagues, I just thought this is a world that’s totally crazy, thanks in the main to the tyranny of administration – the awful way that universities are run these days. I just thought ‘No no no, I can’t learn how to do this at my late age’.

Do you think you can teach poetry?

You can teach about poetry. I very much doubt whether creative writing is the thing we should be teaching undergraduate students: graduate students, okay – but I think undergraduates need to know a bit more about the world and a bit more about literature before they go through the discipline of being educated in something like ‘Creative Writing’.

I think Creative Writing degrees are probably valuable largely because of the space and time they give you to write. I mean, I’ve never done one, but that’s what I would…

But undergraduates don’t need space and time; they need those three years to repair all the bad education that they’ve received at school. And once that job is done, then they can have space and time. But really it should be regarded as an emergency – putting education right at that university level.

Yes, that’s true… You’ve also satirised the literary world as opposed to the academic world in ‘Neddy and the Night Noises’ (another great alliterative title), and of course you’ve experienced the poetry world as both editor and poet, so you have seen both sides.

Yes.

Do you think that helps you look at the world in a more humorous way?

No, I think anyone can see the follies and vanities of the literary world clearly enough, whichever side of the fence they’re on.

I guess there’s a pomposity about both academics and the literati?

I suppose so, but I think… I don’t mean to be unkind to my hero Neddy, I’m actually quite sympathetic to his plight.

Yes, even in ‘Winterthorn’ it seems like an affectionate satire, rather than a vicious one.

Yes, vicious satire has its place, but that was not what I was interested  in doing here – in either of those cases. I wanted the reader to have access to the human predicament that’s at the heart of both ‘Winterthorn’ and ‘Neddy’. Poor Neddy.

Neddy seems like the majority of poets.

No, he’s a very particular case. There’s no one else like him – he doesn’t stand for anybody else. Except me, possibly. Neddy Bumwhistle, c’est moi!

I want to talk about ‘Airs and Ditties of No Man’s Land’ – that was originally broadcast on the radio, is that right?

It was – it was the result of a commission. The composer Colin Matthews asked me whether I could write him some words about the First World War as he‘d been offered this commission for the BBC Proms. He knew that the musical forces were to be two singers, tenor and baritone, and a small orchestra. For reasons of his own the First World War was the subject he had in mind. He asked me if I could supply some words, but he gave me no very clear directions, so I was allowed to go off and do my own thinking about it and came back a long time afterwards with some pieces of verse that I hoped he would find serviceable.

So you weren’t aware of the kind of music that would be produced?

I knew the kind of music up to a point because I know Colin’s music very well – and admire it, obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered. Of course, he produced some surprises in his score that I never could have imagined in advance. But that was one of the delights of the job: I handed the words over to him and he used them for purposes that were entirely his own and had nothing to do with me – and actually enlarged the writing by doing that.

Did you find it lent a different slant of meaning which you weren’t expecting?

Not that, but he deepened the humanity of it. I mean, when you’ve got an actual tenor and an actual baritone standing there…  It works particularly in live performance. A large part of it came across too in the broadcast  but when you see these fellows standing in front of you doing this strenuous, impassioned thing called singing, you can believe that they are who the text says they are: a Captain and a Sergeant who have suffered and witnessed terrible things in the trenches of the First World War.

Did you find the process was very different to your usual writing?

Yes, that’s really why I took it on. Colin and I had collaborated before, but the opposite way around: he set one of my children’s books, Alphabicycle Order, which is all nonsense derivations of 26 words running from A-Z. So he knew the text before deciding to make music out of it. On this occasion he took the risk of asking me for something he couldn’t conceive, and for a while he must have been in state of high anxiety – especially as it was a long time before I could even get started on the job; I found it very difficult to find the right tone for those poems. Eventually, a slightly slapstick, music-hall style seemed the one.

I was thinking when I read it of [T.S. Eliot’s] Sweeney Agonistes, and that shares the same music-hall influence: is music hall something that you were previously interested in?

Oh, almost all my poetry has some kind of ‘low art’ force behind it. Yes, I’m fascinated by stand-up comics, particularly the older generation. When I was a child, there was a family living down the road – we became very great friends – and the father of the family was a stand-up comic by profession. He was a fascinating figure to me.

I think one has to be incredibly brave to do stand-up comedy: I can’t think of anything more terrifiying in the realm of entertainment.

Quite right. His son has a very poignant story… There are two sons, both humorous, full of jokes and so on, but they’ve never entered the profession. One of them managed to persuade his father to let him have a go, just the once, standing in for him at a quiet Thursday matinée or something at Butlin’s Holiday Camp. Now Ross, who has great self-confidence by nature, suddenly found it deserted him totally as he stepped in front of the lights and failed to make the audience laugh. Worse, his father was in the audience. The way Ross describes it, it was like a particularly nasty attack of vertigo.

It’s also one of the few professions which seems very, almost completely, meritocratic: you either laugh or you don’t; no one’s going to find you funnier just because you happen to be the heir to an enormous fortune, or the brother of a famous comic.

I think there’s something else happening, which has to do with the wielding of power: you’ve got to take command of the audience. Different comics find their own means of doing it, but you have to tell the audience how to respond to you.

One thing it shares with some kinds of poetry: it seems a lot better if it seems effortless.

Even more than that – if the comic appears to be doing nothing. I’ve seen this happen:  I saw Eddie Izzard some years ago at a venue in Kentish Town and it was quite extraordinary. Full house, lots of people, mainly younger than I was, everybody ready to laugh, predisposed. He didn’t need to do a thing: he just had to appear on stage and you could feel everyone relaxing into a chuckle. He hadn’t even opened his mouth, he hadn’t even moved, he had just appeared from the wings and we were already under his spell. That was a magical thing.

I was talking to Hugo Williams  about this when I was interviewing him. The popularity of poetry readings, which seems to have exploded; there have always been poetry readings, but not in the numbers that there are now. And I have a feeling that poets are more inclined to try to be funny, because laughter is the only response that’s really obvious; it’s hard to tell if people are bored or moved because all they do is clap at the very end. I sometimes slightly worry that many poets are becoming sort of stand-up comedians and often not very good ones.

I can’t think of any of them that are that funny. Ah, with one exception: I’ve seen Ian McMillan performing and he comes closer to that sort of irresistible mirth-provoking genius than any other poet I can think of; but that aside, your description is dead accurate – it’s neither one thing nor the other, really. An awkward ambivalence seems the order of the day.

Do you think the increase in poetry readings affected the way that you write?

No.

Do you principally write for the page?

I write for the ear. Hearing is primary.

So the visuality of the words of the page is more like a score
Yes.

Because there are some poets you really have to read on the page – it doesn’t really work otherwise – but for you it’s about the sound?

That’s right.

I think the poem that really flummoxed me in Nonsense, the one I think is closest to nonsense verse, is ‘Academic’.

That comes in the section that I’ve called ‘From a Private Joke Book’; and in each of these cases there’s an element of built-in inaccessibility, which is – I know – naughty of me, but I thought, well, it makes sense to me but it’s going to be nonsense to the reader – that was the rationale.

You explained the story behind one of them, ‘Dr Demon’, at your Dulwich Books reading. [It was a reaction to a hostile review.] While ‘The Ballad of P. BINCE’ is just –

I’ll show you the origin of that if you promise not to tell anyone else!

Okay! Fantastic! …‘high-stepping zebra’. I Iike the ‘high-stepping’ over any other adjective.

Good. Well, you’ll see that and every detail in the poem can be accounted for.

Going back to ‘Academic’, which I think is the most enigmatic….

I don’t mind explaining it at all. For a very short while, about ten years ago, I was poet-in-residence at the University of York, where the campus is built around lakes, so there’s lots of water-fowl there. I was particularly enchanted by the moorhens, which are quite comical birds. They used to come close to the University buildings, the offices and halls of residence, but never so close as to make the automatic doors open. They put me in mind of Jacques Tati and the trouble his characters have with the mechanised modern world. In another way, they made me think of academics. That’s all that’s about.

I also wanted to ask about ‘State of the Art’ [a poem about a designer table ‘on which, of course, lay a big square book (...) celebrating / the very same table’ ]. I can see this table so well in my mind’s eye that I was wondering whether there was a real table that you were envisioning?

No, no. I may have been thinking back to my days at the Crafts Council and the elaborate pieces of furniture that were occasionally put on display in the gallery, and this might have been one of them.

A couple more questions… I was wondering about moonlight. Some of the last section of the book, ‘A Salute to the Moonlight’, naturally has a moonlit quality about it …

It begins with the moon in the early morning and ends at the dead of night. It passes through certain daylight hours.

Is that because of ‘lunatic’ – moon, madness and nonsense?

No, not especially. Some years ago, I produced a little homemade pamphlet of these poems – rather fewer than here, about twelve of them, and I called it ‘A Salute to the Moonlight’, from a line in the final poem. Then, when I came to think of these poems as potentially making a section of the book, I enlarged around them. ‘Neddy and the Night Noises’ wasn’t in the pamphlet but added later. My moon, whom I address in ‘A Bit of a Tune’ and whose light the rabbits salute in ‘Rabbits and Concrete’, is an entirely benign figure.

At the reading at Faber there was some hint you were planning more satires…

Well, I’ve got a new book coming out later this year and it’s called Six Bad Poets, so you can guess what kind of approach it takes.

Can you tell us any more about it?

It’s just a piece of fun.

I look forward to reading it. Great, thank you very much.

You’re welcome. Thank you.

_____

* Tin-Pan Alley: A group of New York music publishers who dominated popular music during the nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Uncollected Poems
R. S. Thomas
Bloodaxe Books, Paperback
192 pages, 978-1852248963, £9.95

Stephen Pringle

Lyric poetry is unkind to completionists. The process of composing poems, revising them, preparing them for publication in journals, magazines, or as occasional pieces, and from this point shaping them into a collection, or book, even– is not one which can be bound neatly. Anthony Thwaite has edited two distinct editions of Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems. In the first, the poems are in the rough order they were composed– as Thwaite says in the introduction to the second, ‘the growth of a major poet, testing, filtering, rejecting, modulating, achieving.’ The second orders the poems the same way that Larkin himself did, in the form of their published books. We gain insights and obfuscations from both means of presentation, and the distinction is worth bearing in mind as we place R. S. Thomas’s Uncollected Poems beside the voluminous Collected Poems 1945-1990, and the Collected Later Poems 1988-2000.

The thing is, Thomas is a poet for whom the Collected Poems format, ordering the pieces as the poet himself did in the published books, seems such a perfect fit. The poems divide, to this reader, at least, quite neatly. The earlier volumes take the everyman Welsh farmer Iago Prytherch as their protagonist, and the articulated tension in Thomas’s description of his toils against the landscape produce some of his most enduring poems. More political, Wales-centric poems follow, then different strands of theological enquiry (rendering religious ideas like via negativa into verse). There is then a phase of poems inspired by paintings, and so on.

What, then, can we glean from the work in Uncollected Poems? There is ‘a rigorous selection’ of Thomas’s poems which ‘have hitherto remained uncollected, and often elusive — poems published in newspapers, magazines and journals (many of them obscure), as well as in private or limited editions.’ The poems are arranged chronologically, and followed by a detailed bibliography, which lists all of the uncollected poems the editors were able to find. The ones not included are marked; these total about 20% of the list. Put bluntly, there is enough here for all but the most rabid completionist.

Perhaps the most striking difference between this book and the two collected editions is that there are occasional standout poems. You could bluntly labour through the Collected Poems like, well, like Prytherch, and yield little that deviates from the poet’s overarching vision, or the local patterns sketched above, or indeed quality: it’s hard to think of a more consistent poet. Since the poet did not make the editorial choices here, though, we get such gems as ‘I never thought’, a sonnet to his wife. Its sestet:

And then about the ending of a day

In early Spring, when the soft western breezes

Had chased the melancholy clouds afar,

As up a little hill I took my way,

I found you all alone upon your knees,

Your face uplifted to the evening star.

Star, a familiar Thomas rhyme word, does not here have its symbolism focussed around the unknowably distant God, but rather around beauty, and warmth. The gentler, slightly more tentative voice is still unmistakably R. S. Thomas, but we can appreciate his usual, heavily declarative one better having heard it. The contextual analysis of this poem in the editors’ short introduction is excellent; it’s a shame they did not do the same for many others, especially given their occasional nature.

The other occasional pieces offer further insights into the poet’s take on more wordly (or mundane) matters. ‘Filming’ from 1996 (so just at the start of the proliferation of photographic equipment) uses the technology of a camera to examine the process of introspection; a somewhat different tack from someone who preached on the evils of refrigerators. It’s also good to have Thomas’s tribute to Ted Hughes, which elegantly brings together their interests ‘looking askance / into nature’s mirror). There are, of course, plenty of poems which deal with more typical material. ‘Converse’ from 1979 uses a very delicate scheme of sound patterning to make one man alone in a church into a polyvocal dramatic piece, and almost manages to invert the concept of absence.

If Thomas’s views on the negative impacts of technology were wide of the mark, then perhaps his legacy in verse is closer to it. Writing about impossibly diverse subjects is never more than a couple of clicks away, most of it not more than a couple of inches deep. It is a rare (and often otherworldly) pleasure to read a poet whose career steadily works towards an understanding he knows he can never actually achieve; the polar opposite of instant gratification. This book reveals new aspects to that career.

La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams
Georges Perec
Translated by Daniel Levin Becker
Melville House, Paperback
224 pages, 978-1612191751, £13.99

Sophie Sexon

Oulipo is a French literary movement founded in 1960, and which Georges Perec joined in 1967. Its premise is to use constraints in order to produce ‘potential literature’. Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito’s book The End of Oulipo offers a brief and engaging summary of the movement which encourages the reader to pursue its experiments further. The text acknowledges that, although the group is in its sixth decade, it is still publishing and expanding, with Daniel Levin Becker being the youngest member of the group. Levin Becker’s new English translation of Georges Perec’s dream journal La Boutique Obscure is an example of the continued interest in Oulipo, although The End of Oulipo asks the question ‘can potential literature outlive its potential?’

Esposito argues that Perec is ‘among the greatest avant-garde writers of the twentieth century’, and does so convincingly in the first section of the book, ‘Eight Glances Past Georges Perec’, which gives a detailed overview of his life and works. The premise of Oulipo is that, by use of artistic constraint, the artist becomes liberated. Esposito argues that Ouilpian restrictions have the ability to depict the world in a different manner from that of drab realism; the dream diary, therefore, is perhaps the ideal form for Perec’s work as it presents a fresh opportunity to order reality via the narrative of the dreaming mind.

Constraint and the notion of ludic experimentation make their way into Perec’s subconscious in La Boutique Obscure. Many of the dreams related contain a variety of games that play with language. Scott Esposito writes that ‘exhaustion is inscribed in everything Georges Perec ever wrote’, be it in his 5000 word palindrome, his novel A Void (which does not contain any words with the letter e in them), or the 60 page index of Life a User’s Manual. From the jubilant and acknowledged childishness of sliding down a bannister, to disturbing reminisces of war, La Boutique Obscure presents a wide array of dreams with different subject matters, attempting to exhaust the endless subject matters of the subconscious while delighting in pastiches such as ‘a Brechtian musical comedy’, ‘a novel in the third person’, ‘an action movie in colour’ or an ‘urban western’.

Perec experiments with typography and graphic representation to strike at a more visual depiction of the dream world. He self-consciously reveals the decisions he makes when linguistically presenting each dream. Describing a nightmare regarding a run in with a policeman, Perec recalls that the officer writes ‘copulate’ on a piece of newspaper. As he describes the incident, this word appears in a different, larger font to evoke its visual impact. Elsewhere, Perec places alternative word choices closely above the words he has used to indicate a struggle with enunciation. In The End of Oulipo, Scott Esposito supports Georg Lukács view that the novel responds to an incomplete modern world: ‘the novel, by contrast, is a product of a hopelessly fragmented world and can only deal with pieces of an incomplete reality.’ This fragmented world is the reality of Perec’s dream journal with its variant omissions. The End of Oulipo mentions Perec’s Je Me Souviens, ‘which, à la Joe Brainard, begins every sentence with the words “Je me souviens” (“I remember”).’ In contrast, La Boutique Obscure can be said to begin each dream entry with ‘I forget’. The book details the process of writing through constraints via its own experimentation with form and appearance. Such experimentation is capable of abolishing the idea of the perfect author, and may delight the reader on the trail of Perec’s authentic voice, before the editing process strips it of its essence. In translator Levin Becker’s afterword, he writes that Perec’s ‘nocturnal biography’ is capable of granting a direct encounter with the writer, one that is perhaps more illuminating than the act of reading a memoir.

Esposito writes that ‘Oulipian literature performs a balancing act between produced and potential work, between what appears on the page and what is suggested beyond it.’  Significant to the reality of the text is the symbol ‘/ /’, which denotes an intentional omission. Alongside this symbol, expansive gaps within the text draw the reader’s eye to the vast blank spaces of the work, where omissions become as important as admissions. Perec’s style shows us the ways in which dreams differ from memories by dint of their mutability and instability. Many proper nouns are replaced within the text by initials or pronouns, or in some instances, full stops. The reader may not always be sure who ‘he’ or ‘she’ is, but ambiguities can be sources of delight as they effectively mimic the sliding representations of people within the dream framework. Frequently, the text concerns itself with knowing and unknowing, with memory and forgetting, the words ‘somewhere, someone, something’ occurring often throughout. Dream entries may start with ellipses, and some both begin and end without beginnings or ends. Dream no. 117 ends with parts two and three listed as ‘(forgotten)’ and the entirety of dream no. 96, entitled ‘The Window’, is an intentional omission denoted by that ‘/ /’.

The End of Oulipo quotes from Tom McCarthy’s ‘Stabbing the Olive’; ‘we don’t want plot, depth or content: we want angles, arcs, and intervals; we want pattern. Structure is content, geometry is everything.’ This is very true of La Boutique Obscure. It would not be recommended to approach the book as one might approach a novel, considering each entry as succeeding the previous. These isolated vignettes work better when taken apart from the whole. The book has moments of humour and moments of horror, but it cannot be said to present a clear picture of Perec’s interiority or to present anything of distinct biographical reference about its author. Except to say that Perec’s dreams undoubtedly share common form with our own: the same fears, the same desires, the same uncertainties.

One of the perils of faithfully relating a collection of disparate dreams is that they can sometimes have little interest or meaning to the reader. Perec thankfully spares us the grizzly details of dream no. 9 in which he has a long conversation with a doctor about his sinus infections. The inclusion of the banal as well as the significant serves to support the depiction of reality, but this banality can lend an occasional tediousness to the text. However, in the section on Edouard Levé in The End of Oulipo, Esposito notes that the writer ‘makes his home within the prosaic in order to show us things we have never seen before… both men have no interest in psychology, they simply give the details, leaving it to the reader to decide what lies beneath.’ The greatest facet of La Boutique Obscure may be Oulipian in nature, the concept being more important than its content and providing a novel manner of approaching the transcription of dreams into language.

The Iraqi Christ
Hassan Blasim
Comma Press, Paperback
176 pages, 978-1905583522, £9.99

Thom Cuell

In his new book The Silence of Animals, John Gray attacks humanist notions of societal progress by searching for examples of the behaviour of populations placed in extreme conditions. In one particularly shocking episode, he recounts the effect of military occupation on the civilian population of Naples in 1943. For Gray, the chaos which followed liberation was evidence of the fragility of civilisation. There was no work, and basic services no longer functioned. In their desperation to survive, humanity began to slip away from the city’s inhabitants: ‘what were left were hungry animals, ready to do anything to go on living’.

In Gray’s book, the eyewitness accounts are provided by Norman Lewis, a British army officer, and Curzio Malaparte, an adventurer with a slippery sense of loyalty and an extremely vivid imagination – at one point he claims to have seen hundreds of frozen horses, their heads picturesquely rising out of a sheet of ice. As far as Gray is concerned, the Neapolitans have no voice – we only hear the reported speech of gangsters and pimps.

Sixty years on from the experiences documented by Gray, the inhabitants of Iraq were subjected to a similar ordeal. The fall of their state was marked by disruption to electricity and water provision, the end of any form of effective bureacracy and the systematic looting of the country’s cultural heritage. As reported by Naomi Klein in The Shock Doctrine, ‘Iraqis went through this unmasking process collectively, as they watched their most important institutions desecrated, their history loaded onto trucks and disappeared’. Klein compares the body politic of the Iraqi state to the body of a waterboarded inmate of a torture cell. If Gray’s thesis on the dehumanising effect of occupation is correct, then surely the Iraqis must have reverted to the atavistic behaviour allegedly displayed by the Neapolitans.

Every word of Hassan Blasim’s collection The Iraqi Christ rejects this notion. Unlike Gray’s essentially solitary view of the struggle for survival, Blasim documents a shared national consciousness, whilst stressing the dignity of the Iraqi people. Unlike the mute denizens of occupied Naples, Blasim’s Iraq is a modern Babel. The first story, ‘The Song of the Goats’, describes a storytelling competition hosted by a radio station. The participants were ‘terrified a terrorist would infiltrate the crowd and turn these stories into a pulp of flesh and fire’, and yet they gather together, determined to make their voices heard.

‘The Song of the Goats’ exemplifies Blasim’s work. This is a world in which horror is normalised – the narrator’s father lost a leg in the Gulf War, his brother drowned in a septic tank, and his uncle is a torturer, who may one day be required to turn his tools against his relatives. In this situation, where life is circumscribed by an oppressive government and life and death is decided by chance, the one asset the individual Iraqis can cling to is the ability to construct their own narrative. As one man says, ‘A story’s a story, whether it’s beautiful or bullshit’.

We are reminded too of the rich cultural heritage of Iraq. Where Gray’s Neapolitans desperately sell off their antiquities (‘a smiling priest sold… ornaments carved from bones stolen from the catacombs’), Blasim appropriates the work of authors such as Italo Calvino and Kafka, whose Metamorphosis is adapted in ‘The Dung Beetle’ to describe the experience of life in exile. The Dung Beetle’s nameless protagonist feels his body has been corrupted by his absence from his homeland (‘bugs of every shape and form trap the air around my head’), but he clings with pride to his culture, the fact that he has read Kafka translated into Arabic.

Other stories such as ‘The Green Zone Rabbit’ demonstrate extremely sophisticated storytelling, with hints of magical realism and deeply unsettling undercurrents. Blasim is always aware that life and death can often be decided by chance. Car bombs will wipe out families, leaving only one survivor who went out to buy cigarettes. Mothers die when their front doors are raked by machine gun bullets. ‘The Killers and the Compass’ displays hints of Bukowski in its low-life narrative style, showing that the arrogant and the immoral can thrive in chaotic times.

Most impressively, the self-referential story ‘Why Don’t You Write Novels?’ sees Blasim questioning his own motivation and ability. We see Blasim’s desire to fit the fragmented stories of the Iraqi diaspora into a coherent, overarching narrative, as if the act of writing a novel would somehow heal the wounds of occupation. As it is, his style reflects the reality of occupation and oppression whilst reflecting the dignity and strength of his culture. As a refugee himself (he has lived in Finland since 2004), Blasim’s writing contains a raw sense of guilt at his departure, whilst also having the distance needed to capture the variety of experience he describes.

The final story, ‘A Thousand and One Knives’, is an allegory of the circle of violence in which Iraq is trapped. Amputations, hostage taking and revenge are rife, but Blasim’s characters are still able to demonstrate love, community spirit and acts of kindness which redeem the people themselves whilst condemning the chaotic state of their existence. This is the message of The Iraqi Christ as a whole. While Nick Cohen argues for the positive impact of invasion, pointing to the removal of Saddam Hussein as justification for a decade of near-anarchy, Blasim paints the post-Occupation years as a mere continuation of oppression in new forms. John Gray, with his anti-progressive mentality, may agree with Blasim here. Where they differ, crucially, is the dignity with which Blasim imbues the occupied people, and the hope he sees in their small acts of kindness and intellectual strength. Most importantly, Blasim’s occupied people have their voices restored to them.

Dear Boy
Emily Berry
Faber and Faber, Paperback.
57 pages, 978-0-571-28405-4, £9.99.

Rebecca Tamás

In a recent interview Emily Berry recounts that ‘A friend who has just read [Dear Boy] said it made him think of Lena Dunham and Sheila Heti, who are obviously not within the genre, but why must we always remain within the genre?’ Berry’s unnamed friend makes an astute comparison. Like Lena Dunham’s zeitgeist-courting HBO series Girls and Sheila Heti’s ‘non-fiction’ novel How Should a Person Be? Berry gives us middle-class twenty something female life in queasy close up, with its heartbreaks, missed trains and self-centred anxiety about the future. In doing this she tackles themes that are perceived not to be the ‘traditional’ terrain of poetry, but of blogs, TV, and conversations over brunch in East London. Despite, or perhaps because of this, Berry has no problem turning these subjects into fresh, original poems, confidently rendering the painful tug of war between innocence and experience that makes up early adulthood. Whilst her narratives have more in common with Girls than that of her poetic contemporaries, it is her use of poetry’s particular intimacy that allows for work that is far more subtle and profound than Dunham’s, admittedly excellent, TV output.

The poems in Dear Boy skewer the point at which adolescent optimism and adult responsibility meet. Berry portrays young people caught in a struggle between self obsession and curiosity about the wider world. So a trip to New York in ‘I Heart NY’ is simultaneously a giddy list of commodified tourist experience and an uneasy look at the price of capitalist pleasure:

In New York their faces light up when you speak.
We bought socks in the gift shop of some big hotel
off Broadway
[...]
And guilt,
where is that sold? How much for eating cupcakes
on my birthday from the famous bakery
and admiring San Franciscan boys in aviators? Oh –
and when we went for mani-pedis, we sat in a row
and Korean ladies kneeled at our feet.

Berry focuses on this fine line between enjoyment and exploitation throughout the book, especially in her narratives of love and sexuality, which manage to be coy and sweet one minute, and dark the next. In ‘A Short Guide to Corseting’ we have a narrator who is complicit in her restraint, seemingly as keen on changing her body as her boyfriend is:

We agreed small waists were more attractive;
we were in a loving and supportive relationship.

Obviously there is an irony to these lines, and yet Berry does not give us a pitiable figure: a woman being exploited who we should judge or feel sorry for. Instead the poem allows us to see the disturbing outcome of a desire for restraint, whilst also suggesting the strange kind of liberation this restraint can provide. The final half-rhyme here, in an otherwise unrhymed poem, conveys the narrator’s experience within its own formal structure: she is reduced to her bare minimum, the poem’s sonic balance exemplifying her pleasure in this reduction, the paradoxical freedom and security of a limiting structure:

I use only the top half of
my lungs; there’s just room to breathe. I’ve still got
more than enough. I’ve realised how little we need.

Again in ‘The Value of Submission’ there is a narrator complicit in an expression of sexuality that she finds both disturbing and appealing. In this case it is a boyfriend’s interest in sadomasochism, and Berry deftly reveals the divisions created in the narrator’s self by her contradictory, complicated desires:

she wondered what her future self
might make of this: the startled phone
giving up his voice; how to answer a betrayal
she had blessed. Why do these things
happen, and what becomes of them,
all the strange disowned moments
standing about like lightning-struck trees.

The startling image of disowned moments as lightning-struck trees illuminates the experience of looking back on decisions one has made as totally unfamiliar, the past self becoming unrecognisable, alien, to the current self. This alienation is brilliantly enacted in the poem through the question ‘Why do these things/happen’ being left in a sentence without a question mark, capturing both the desire to understand oneself and the awareness that full knowledge can never be achieved. In bringing this state of unknowing, of active absence, tangibly to life, Berry can access the moment of transition into adulthood in a way that the inflexible statements of prose would struggle to match. Within the poem’s fluctuating, contradictory language Berry can communicate the jarring, yet hugely significant, realisation that the self is not a fixed, linear entity, but one capable of painful, unpredictable shifts.

It is this revelation of how desire can challenge and transform identity that makes Dear Boy such an original book. Berry is unafraid to represent a version of youthful relationships and experience that is profoundly conflicted and difficult, whilst also being full of a genuine passion for life and its pleasures. As we see in the last poem of the book ‘Bad New Government,’ Berry is also unusually honest about the solipsism that comes with this complicated process of personal discovery, where the vagaries of love, sex, friendship and self can seem as important as world events:

I want to go very fast and email you about the following
happy circumstances:   early rosebuds, a birthday party, a new cake recipe   but
today it’s hot water bottles and austerity breakfast and my toast burns in protest
[...]
I am writing my first political poem which is also (always) about my love for you.

Berry’s exploration of the ugly and the exhilarating qualities of youth makes for an impressive first collection, offering poetry that effectively brings together charming naivety and knowing, pitch black humour.