Lipograms that laugh and hide
William Scammell
A VOID by Georges Perec, translated by Gilbert Adair Harvill, £15.99, f7.99, pp. 284 Terminal anarchy breaks out in the Introduction. A country like France falls into Hobbesian brutishness. The insomniac Anton Vowl tries a variety of means to soothe himself to sleep — a whodunnit, a Figaro, a cigar, the radio, pushups, the fig- ure in his Aubusson carpet 'achromatic as a swan in a snowstorm' — all to no avail: His mind runs riot. Lost in thought, scrutinis- ing his rug. Vowl starts imagining ... distinct visual combinations, absorbing but also insubstantial, as though an artist's rough drafts but of what? — that, possibly, which a psychiatrist would call a Jungian slip, an infinity of dark, mythic, anonymous portraits flitting through his brain, as it burrows for a solitary, global signal that might satisfy his natural human lust of signification both instant and lasting, a signal that might corn- mandingly stand out from this chain of dis- continuous links, this miasma of shadowy tracings, all of which, or so you would think, ought to knit up to form a kind of paradig- matic configuration, of which such partial motifs can furnish only anagrams and insipid approximations — all avatars of that vital quiddity which no ocular straining will pull into focus, all ambiguous substitutions for a Grail of wisdom and authority now lost — now and, alas, for always — but which, lost as it is, our protagonist will not abandon.
You can guess much of the rest, but not that the biggest void of all will lie in the author's scrupulous and mad avoidance of the commonest vowel in the language (his and ours, his even more than ours), the let- ter 'e'.
A unit is lacking. An omission, a blank, a void that nobody but him knows about, thinks about, that, flagrantly, nobody wants to know or think about. A missing link.
Not to say 'an imbroglio' that will `hatch a plot but totally avoid giving it away'. The missing link is of course not only the absconded vowel from Vowl's own name but 1' bon Di'u himself, hence of guaran- teed meaning and value, hence of a plot that isn't all omphalos and no oomph. We meet another Ishmael whose quest whim- pers to an end with `Ah, Moby Dick! Ah, moody Bic!' — the sublime and the ridicu- lous fused in that shabby bride of dis- course, the pun. Vowl tells stories, then goes missing. His associates tell stories about, and try to solve the mystery of, his missingness. Stories breed further stories, flashbacks dissolve into fishponds, OuLiPo's 'Ray- mond Q. Knowall' fails to get on to the case, as do the Muppets, Monty Python, Moby Whatsit, Mephistopheles and dozens more, from Kafka to Sherlock Holmes.
It's all very French and reflexive, all twirly-whirly around the still point of the turning word: discourse itself as the dae- mon we're going to have to wrestle with and ultimately bow to as it out-Antaus's our every move. It could have been as awful as this description perhaps makes it sound but in the event it's rather wonder- ful, with virtuoso parodies of Shakespeare, Milton, Thomas Hood (November), Poe (Nevermore') along the way — brilliantly substituted by Adair for the French origi- nals — and a freewheeling set of inventive variations on themes most familiar to us in those polymathic word-drunks across the Irish Sea, Sterne, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Paul Muldoon, et al. We get a Postscript too, about Perec's wilfully conflictual position vis-à-vis fic- tion' as normally conceived:
My ambition, as Author, my point, I would go so far as to say my fixation, my constant fixation, was primarily to concoct an artifact as original as it was illuminating, an artifact that would, or just possibly might, act as a stimulant on notions of construction, of nar- ration, of plotting, of action, a stimulant, in a word, on fiction writing today.
Ludic lucidity, or lucid ludicrousness, as you prefer. You can just see Kingsley Amis reaching for his vomitorium. It's made me go racing off, however, to catch up with his best-known novel Life a User's Manual (Harvill £4.95) and the autobiographical W or The Memory of Childhood (Harvill £5.95). After finishing A Void, by the way, Perec took all his unused e's and devoted them to a short text, Les Revenentes, in which e is the only vowel employed.' Jouissance isn't in it! And the player, alas, was dead at 45. Hats off to Gilbert Adair for his virtuosic fidelity to the amazing lexical labyrinths of the original.
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