Robert Pinget, Graal Flibuste, Trans. by Anna
Fitzgerald, Dalkey Archive Press, 2015.
This early work by the landmark Swiss author Robert Pinget is unlike any other he produced over his long career; indeed, there are few books by any writer with which it bears comparison—aside perhaps from the novels of Raymond Roussel or Denis Diderot. Graal Flibuste follows the progress of its narrator and his impudent coachman, Brindon, through a fantastical land peopled by strange creatures and stranger potentates, and filled with tall tales, mysteries, crimes, dilemmas, and deities … not least among whom is the terrible god Graal Flibuste himself.
When Robert Pinget died in 1997, I discovered that he had been living, unbeknownst to me, in my hometown, Tours. This tells you how discreet this writer was. Of course, sadly, there had just been a retrospective and a round of conferences organized about him, precisely in Tours, just a few months before his death, but I hadn’t made the connection. To me, at the time, Robert Pinget, one of the most underrated French writers, was a mysterious figure hovering between existence and myth, like Beckett, his long-time friend, had been.
If I mention Beckett, it is because the two are like a cold sun (Beckett – visible) and a dark moon (Pinget – obscure) revolving around the same planet (literature). Both share a passion for the absurd and for language, but where Beckett strips meaning bare, Pinget wraps it in silk and baroque clothing. In one of his most famous novels, ‘The Inquisitory’, for example, an old butler, forced to answer during an obscure police interrogation (the reader never gets to know why the servant is auditioned), creates a whole world through his answers, albeit a very unstable one. Language with Pinget is always at the source of creation, as it is the vector of imagination. As he said himself in an interview with Madeleine Renouard in 1993: “It would never occur to me to describe an object that I am looking at. My descriptions are purely imaginary.”
‘Graal-Flibuste’ presents itself as a travel novel. Two characters, the narrator and his servant/coachman Brindon, explore strange and fabulous regions, dedicated to the ominously sterile god, Graal-Flibuste. From the start, the reader embarks on a mind-altering journey which may just be the alcohol-induced dreams of a drunkard met in the introductory chapter. Nothing makes sense, and yet everything sounds familiar — Das Unheimliche, as Freud would say, the uncanny at its best. But if ‘Graal Flibuste’ is indeed a voyage into unknown territory, it is also a resonant one: the French reader will immediately think of medieval, baroque and 18th-century literature, according to the the style of the chapter. A bizarre collage of extremely refined vocabulary and the most vulgar expressions of pseudo-realistic descriptions to Surrealist evocations (in the original sense of the term “Surrealist”), ‘Graal Flibuste’ is impossible to define as a “novel” in the classical sense of the term, above all when it has no real beginning, nor end.
What makes Pinget a formidable writer is that it doesn’t matter. The interest is not in the form, it is precisely everything but. Literature happens somewhere else than in the formatted conventions, because this is how fiction springs from language. Fiction is the possibility of everything else than “reality”. In this, Pinget reminds us of Beckett. The main difference is that Pinget is even more radical: meaning itself is a fiction provoked by language.
And here, the role of the translator becomes crucial. Pinget can only work with an Anglo-Saxon reader if the incredible variety of French styles and registers are made available to him — as they indeed are in Anna Fitzgerald’s magnificent translation. Mrs Fitzgerald manages to give the English version a sonority which matches the French and enables the reader to understand the importance of the style used by Pinget. The following excerpt will show how the novelist uses Balzacian 19th-century prose to slowly drift towards a completely Surrealist setting:
“Mademoiselle Ducreux is eighteen. She is not pretty, but her naïve smile lends her a passing charm. She has her father’s forehead, slightly bulging, and her mother’s noble nose; her skin is that of a redhead and her body like that of a child. ‘The engagement will last three years,’ decided her mother when Lieutenant Duchemin came around to ask for Gladys’s hand in marriage. Madame Ducreux is a Lapive and they have their principles. Originally from Limousin, her family has an exemplary history: until the Revolution, all the men were gamekeepers in their province; after 1789, they became part of the rural peacekeeping force. A certain Honorin Lapive moved to Paris in 1816, finding work as an archivist for the Keeper of the Seals; his descendents remained in the ministry’s employ until the death of Juste Lapive, father of Madame Ducreux.
‘Yes, three years,’ continued Madame Ducreux. ‘After that we’ll have the wedding. In Saint-Firmin or in Limoges, we’ll see. Pierre will be working for Father, the two of you will have enough to live on. You’ll stay with us for two years, then maybe we’ll build something above the warehouses; I’ve asked Sureau to draw up the plans—four rooms, kitchen, and bathroom. You’ll need space for the children.’
The day of her engagement, Mademoiselle Ducreux was pensive, gazing at a pitcher. Her mother remarked: ‘Come now, Gladys, a pitcher is a pitcher.’ But the mystery of young women is a delicate matter. What was Mademoiselle Ducreux thinking about?”
‘Graal Flibuste’ is a never-ending journey about the infinite possibilities of language, not perceived as a provider of sense, but as a provider of pure freedom. - Sébastien Doubinsky
http://journal.themissingslate.com/2016/04/03/the-never-ending-journey-a-review-of/
by Alan Sheridan-Smith, Dalkey Archive Press,
2005.
In the tradition of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew, and Raymond Queneau's The Flight of Icarus, Robert Pinget's Mahu or The Material tells the story of Mahu, a lazy man who may be a character in his friend Latirail's failing novel, which is taken over by characters invented by Sinture, yet another writer. The latter half of the novel consists of Mahu's strange and hilarious musings on everything from belly dancers to how he catches ideas from other people in the same way he catches germs. Mahu is Pinget's funniest novel, featuring a mix of dark humor and manic word-games, and is as inventive and energetic now as when it was first published.
(H)ello Gentle Reader
Pardon me for the large picture of the "H," I just wanted to try something new for this blog. Which may or may not be the second last blog of the 2010. I hope all my wonderful and Gentle Readers had themselves a magical and Merry Christmas. Hopefully Santa had been good to everyone. Unless of course you were naughty. Alright so it had been a while since I had read, a book and reviewed a book I think. Well here is the first review of a book since the book review hiatus. Well the chosen novel is: "Mahu or The Material," by Robert Pinget.
First things are first though. A quick background story or sketch before the review. It should be noted first and foremost that "Mahu or: The Material," is a difficult book or novel to review, because of the surreal nature and absurd(ity) of the world that Robert Pinget had created, for this novel.
Robert Pinget was a writer and author (imagine that) who was born in 1919 and died in 1997. Robert Pinget was often classified or labeled as a writer under the literary movement called "Nouveau Roman," or "New Novel," which much like the Modernist predecessors spoke of taking the novel -- literature in general; to different heights and extremes and places that they had never been to before. This explains why Robert Pinget's work often grew comparison to Samuel Beckett and his work.
How does one try to explain what "Mahu or: The Material," is about? According to the back of the book "Mahu or The Material," is described (word for word) as the following:
""Robert Pinget's Mahu or The Material tells the story of Mahu, who, unlike his ambitious, successful brothers, is a lazy man who approaches the world around him with a defiant spirit and a witty outlook on life. Part of the reason for Mahu's laziness is that he may be nothing more than a character in a failing novel by his friend Latirail, a novel that is being overrun by characters invented by yet a different author" The second half of this book consists of Mahu's strange and hilarious musings on everything from belly dancers to how he catches ideas from other people in the same way he catches germs."
This describes the book to a "T," for sure -- word for word, what the book is about. However it is about a man named Mahu, who may or may not be a character in a novel that a friend of his is writing. However, this does not do the way the book is written any justice. Mahu is a lazy man. His life is absurd and odd, all at the same time. Nothing makes sense, and nothing is as it first appears or what is first heard. The novel is very absurd. The first part; which properly titled "The Novelist," is about the novel that Mahu's friend is writing. This part appears strange and bizzare, characters are often introduced and then disappear and sometimes they come back and sometimes they do not come back. There is the Louse and the Policeman, who were drinking in a bar and got emotional and were kicked out of the bar, among other events. There was also the odd art model who stayed with Mahu in the warehouse and often claimed that he loved Mahu, and was yet never seen again throughout the novel. Mahu apparently has 14 siblings (including him I think) who we never meet. It’s hard to even say if "Mahu: Or the Material," has/had any plot whatsoever. The first part of the book is absurd short story snap shots of the absurdity of people and life. However Pinget's dry and often sardonic humour can be seen.
The second part of the book titled "Part Two: Mahu Speaks," made a bit more sense to me in many ways. That is more sense the first part. In the second part of the book Mahu tells us all about his thoughts and ideas about life et cetera. However Part one of the book and Part two do not evenly match with each other and are disjointed, greatly.
Before I finish up this quick review -- if one could call this review; how can I write a review about something that barely can be summarized or detailed(ly) looked at? I would like to add two passages from the book -- both from Part Two: Mahu Speaks, which both brought me great enjoyment.
"The People in these bistro's on Sunday evenings look very miserable, unless they make an effort not, they're on the look out for the slightest thing to make them laugh, someone with double sight would be horrified to see what icebergs we are hidden in our clothes, trying to warm ourselves up grinning beneath the neon lights."-- The Poet and the Pineapple (all chapters are named as such -- by that I mean are given odd titles)
"No need to lie anymore, I lied a great deal at the beginning of this book in order to get to this point, to arrive at the truth, which proves that truth emerges from an inextricable confusion, I wanted to like that, I don't deny anything not even a difference in speech."-- The Key
Both of these passages show Robert Pinget's use of dialogue and word play, as well as his use of absurd statements that often make no sense but yet they appear profound and stick with you. The first one from the chapter "The Poet and The Pineapple," left a mark on me for sure. For some odd reason or another it just felt right, in some odd way or another. I did enjoy it for sure. Can't say why I enjoyed it but I did.
"Mahu or: The Material," has been an enjoying and yet difficult book to read. It’s difficult to say if it brought any pleasure or enjoyment, to be honest. It is a good book to say the least, but one cannot say that it is what would typically called a "Beach Read," or something someone would read for the sheer enjoyment and pleasure of reading it. No not at all. "Mahu or The Material," by Robert Pinget, is a slim book. Almost one hundred and fity pages long, but it still packed a punch for sure. Each chapter was a brief little sketch to say the least of some form of incident or another, and even though they were small, they also packed in some profound comment or another. However the characters appear to run around freely -- if such a thing is possible, and there is little characterization, and no definite linear plot. But the book is interesting on its own. Certainly a great glimpse in to the world of the French Literary Movement called "Noveau Roman." One thing that I can say for certain is that Robert Pinget, is a master of dialogue. His use of dialogue and the way the characters speak is often noted, to helping the book progress, as well as showing a lot of the absurdity of the world that Robert Pinget had created. In fact the characters kind of spoke more in a way that appeared to resemble reality and everyday conversations made some sense in some form or another.
Well Gentle Reader "Mahu: Or The Material," was a nice read, and I am glad to have been able to review it before the New Year is here. It has been a stupendous read, and a lovely taste of the modernist inspired writers -- much like Tom McCarthy. May Robert Pinget rest in peace if I do say so myself. - M. Mary
https://morose-mary.blogspot.com/2010/12/mahu-or-material.html
The blurb namedrops Mulligan Stew and At Swim-Two-Birds, so already my expectations for Mahu were through the ceiling or that roof area that shields us from inferior books. In fact, Mahu is straight-up comedic absurdism with meta elements and has neither the structural genius of Sorro or Flann. The first section involves multiple narrators and amusing shenanigans in an impossible-to-fathom-but-fun manner, and the second section focuses on Mahu as a comedic character—an obsessive and eccentric bloke who makes observations of the unusual kind that leave the reader (me) baffled but with a serene sense of having tussled with a berserk mind. Can (should?) books offer more than the pleasure of having tussled with Great and Berserk minds? I THINK NOT. - MJ Nicholls
The novel is divided into two parts... PART I: THE NOVELIST, in which the reader follows Mahu and a handful of other characters that surround him; and PART II: MAHU TRIES TO TALK, in which Mahu narrates a series of episodes and anecdotes. Within the first part, there are a few lapses into the anecdotal style that will dominate the second part. And in the second part, there are a few episodes that return to the narrative structure of the first part. They are like weeds, but not the kind you want to pull. More like the two opposing dots in the yin/yang, creating a balance.
The second half of the novel seems to give insights into the disjointed style of the first half. Though the second half is far more disjointed than the first, there are lucid moments in which the narrator makes statements such as "I find it difficult to make myself clear. It's getting worse. This business of talking, that's what the trouble's all about." (pg. 106) and "Children amuse me. Have you noticed how they speak inside out?... It's too difficult to explain." (pg. 102)
It is suggested later in the book that Mahu takes on different forms. One may add that every character is Mahu at a different stage of development. One may even venture to suggest that the author is, himself, Mahu at a different stage of development. The disjointed style therefore follows a continuity started by Mahu in the second half of the novel, in which he tries to talk.
A more comprehensive insight into the style comes from the author himself. Distinguishing himself from Alain Robbe-Grillet, Pinget claims that, whereas Robbe-Grillet emphasizes the eye, he privileges the ear. (John Taylor, Reading Robert Pinget) The novel frequently makes use of information that is overheard or related - rather than experienced by the characters. There are full chapters that consist entirely of dialogue, without the dialogue being attributed to any of the characters (though names may be dropped to hint at the speakers). The reader, like the characters, thereby becomes an eavesdropper.
While I thoroughly enjoyed the form (short chapters), style (unconventional narrative alternating between first and third person), and content (from irregular occurrences to amusing musings), I was irked by the racism in the second half of the novel. Though the second half is entirely in the first person, narrated by Mahu and therefore strictly subjective, I can think of no justification for the narrator's use of derogatory terms such as "Chinaman" and "Red Indian". Though the novel was written in the 1952 and translated in 1966, it wasn't necessary for the narrator to use these terms, nor was necessary for the author to evoke these characters. One could argue that the narrator's use of these terms exemplify the unpleasantness of his character. He is even reprimanded by another character for his unpleasantness: "You don't change, do you? We take you out to an Algerian night-club and you can think of nothing but obscenities." (pg. 112)
But surely there are others ways of demonstrating the ways in which the narrator is unpleasant. In the most offensive of these chapters (titled "The Negro"), the narrator encounters a black man with "thick lips that won't closed." The narrator stresses the thickness and heaviness of his lips. Furthermore, the black man is in love with a white woman with "thin lips that close properly." (pg. 139)
Pinget attempts to reconcile this tasteless joke by suggesting that (view spoiler)
This reconciliation, however, falls short. Even to suggest that the racist narrator will, himself, become a black man is insufficient justification for the ignorant and insensitive content that surrounds the epiphany. This simply isn't the context for such an epiphany. This is the second half of the book, populated with anecdotes and musings, devoid of structure. Such an epiphany would be better suited to a narrative that was structured in such a way that the narrator would have rethink his racist outlook, knowing that he would one day inhabit the body of a black man.
I am so very disappointed with these particular chapters. It wasn't every chapter in the second half of the book, only a handful that demonstrated the author's insensitivity. But it was enough to lower my rating from FOUR STARS to TWO STARS. - Matthew Mousseau
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/779642.Mahu_or_The_Material
Robert Pinget, Trio, Trans. by Barbara Wright,
Dalkey Archive Press, 2005.
Trio marks the first time these three shorter Pinget works are collected in a single volume. From the sublime surrealism of Between Fantoine and Agapa, through the Faulknerian take on rural life in That Voice, to the musical rhythm and flow of Passacaglia, this collection charts the varied career of one of the French New Novel’s true luminaries.
The space between the fictional towns of Fantoine and Agapa is akin to Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County: an area where provincialism is neither romanticized nor parodied; where intrigue—often violent intrigue—confronts the bucolic ideal held both by insiders and outsiders; and where reality is shaped not by events, but by talk and gossip, by insinuation and conjecture.
Written over the course of his career, these three novels are by turns hilarious and dark, surreal and painstakingly accurate; together they demonstrate the consistent quality of Pinget’s versatility.
This volume collects three of Pinget's shorter works. I took a break over the holidaze after reading the first one to read Bleeding Edge. Dense French literature in translation tends to weigh me down during air travel.
Between Fantoine and Agapa (1951)
First impression is of a psilocybin-fueled spree somewhat akin to Leonora Carrington's wackier stories of talking horses, squabbling cabbages, etc. Pinget proffers very little context. He says he wrote this first prose work while still in the throes of surrealism and that it contains the kernels of all the forms taken by his subsequent work. It's a collection of vignettes, stories-in-miniature, and other small undefinable prose. Some pieces are hilarious, others oddly banal or simply impenetrable. The last section is a series of journal entries written from the point of view of an outsider living in a strange region of surreal proportions. The entries consists of observations and descriptions of the geographical area and its inhabitants—their peculiarities, bizarre physicality, customs, culture, and livelihoods. It's written in a wide-eyed style laced with medico-scientific jargon.
That Voice (1975)
A mysterious death or deaths. Familial claustrophobia. Repetition of words and phrases, telling and retelling, circuitous unfolding, refolding, cutting up and inserting, narrative builds only to collapse on itself. Viewpoints appear to shift, although Pinget’s preface specifies it’s only one voice throughout, but with different tones, the purpose being to capture the singular voice (and the form to mimic anamnesis).
Say everything again, for fear of having said nothing.
Atmosphere felt similar to reading Beckett’s Molloy trilogy, though it’s merely a vague feeling more than a commonality of any specific elements. Just that sense of grey heaviness permeating the text. An intriguing text, though difficult to parse. Fits in with the Nouveau Roman crew, especially early Robbe-Grillet and early Duras: vagueness of plot (if any), attention paid instead to the words themselves, the way of telling.
Passacaglia (1969)
Title refers to 'a musical form of the 17th and 18th centuries consisting of continuous variations on a ground bass in ¾ time and similar to the chaconne.' (Am. Herit. Dict. 3rd ed.)
Maddening mystery, possibly a dead body, possibly foul play, all amid a general air of menace. Could be an old man writing his memoirs at the end of his life, struggling to recall what really happened. Small town gossip—like a game of telephone—maybe this happened, maybe that, no, wait I saw her over here, no, but he was with her, no, no, that's not it, it was the mechanic, or it was the poultry man, yes, it was the goatherd, the tourist in a red sports car, near the swamp, near the barn, on the dunghill.
Distant, mostly speakerless narration that occasionally sprouts a speaker. Towards end, abruptly switches to first person narration by the old man, telling about his life with his 'idiot' adopted son, whom he molests in the bath.
Some elements are reflected in the later novel That Voice: a death under questionable circumstances; murky family history; rural locale; repetition of words and phrases; constant reconfiguring of scenes. Both books were published after the Robbe-Grillet novels they resemble in form (Jealousy, The Voyeur, In the Labyrinth). Not sure if I prefer the R-G novels only because I read them first, or if he just does this plotless, constant reconfiguring style better than Pinget. Inclined to think the latter.
Overall
Of the three I enjoyed Between Fantoine and Agapa the most. The surreal and unexpected nature of those little prose pieces felt more unique and pleasurable to read than the two others, both of which honestly were a slog at times, a struggle ultimately yielding little reward. The humor, too, of the earlier text seems to have fallen away or perhaps moved beyond appeal. I'd place the strength of these two in their depiction of rural life, both through natural description and dialogue, internal and external. The language is at times sublime, though not powerful enough on its own to satisfy this reader.
John Updike's introduction basically consists of him saying (in more elegant terms than these) that he has no idea what Pinget is doing. Following Passacaglia are also a few notes from various critics, all of which indicate a general confoundedness at what lurks behind Pinget's veil (or unwillingness to offer much conjecture, at least). As for Pinget himself, here are two comments of his made to the translator regarding the text: 'the object of Passacaglia is to exorcise death by magical operations with words' (which does make a strange sort of sense) and 'don't bother too much about logic; everything in Passacaglia is directed against it' (also an astute observation). Finally, Updike quotes him as saying, 'It is not what can be said or meant that interests me, but the way in which it is said.' All of which I have no issue with, except the 'way in which it is said' has to be compelling enough in some way for me to enjoy a text that has no logic to it (not even its own). The compelling factor here largely falls short, but I'm still intrigued enough by Pinget to probably one day take a shot at The Inquisitory, his most acclaimed work. - Sean
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/779617.Trio
Robert Pinget, Inquisitory, Trans. by Donald
Watson, Dalkey Archive Press, 2003.
The Inquisitory consists entirely of the interrogation of an old, deaf servant regarding unspecified crimes that may or may not have taken place at his master's French chateau. The servant's replies - which are by turns comic, straightforward, angry, nostalgic, and disingenuous - hint at a variety of seedy events, including murder, orgies, tax fraud, and drug deals. Of course, the servant wasn't involved with any of these activities - if the reader chooses to believe him. In trying to convince the inquisitor of his innocence, the servant creates a web of half-truths, vague references, and glaring inconsistencies amid "forgotten" details, indicating that he may know more than he's letting on.
“Declare your interest!” they shout in the House of Commons when an MP who owns a chain of hock shops omits to say so when orating hotly in favor of a bill to lower the tax on hock shops. So, book reviewers who also write books ought to declare their interest when reviewing books with resemblances to ones which they have written themselves. Particularly if they are going to voice a dislike of the book under review, they should feel obliged to warn the reader that their deep sense of duty may be only a mask for a most malicious prejudice.
So, having just written a novel of which one-third consists of question-and-answer interrogation of a prisoner, I must declare an indignant interest in Robert Pinget’s The Inquisitory, a novel which consists entirely of just such an interrogation. I begin, naturally enough, with the strong prejudice that my own one-third way is a good thing and that M. Pinget’s three-third’s way is too much of a good thing. M. Pinget also brings out all my insular prejudice against Continentals who have never heard of common sense and, on taking up a theory or chasing a technique, ride the damned thing so hard that it has dropped dead before it is halfway round the course.
THE INTERROGATION GAME was not invented by me or M. Pinget. Too much indulgence in it (it has been suggested) by Socrates was the real reason why the Athenians decided to shut him up with hemlock. On the more vulgar level of life, we all know that there’s nothing to beat interrogation in a play or a movie. Devote your last act or reel to an adulteress in a dock with a paid monster of the judiciary barking filthy questions at her, and you can put your feet up for life.
But can anyone imagine a whole movie so composed? Or a whole novel such as M. Pinget’s? Three hundred and ninety-nine pages long at that (what failure of stamina obliged a halt short of 400?). Think of the technical problem involved—the endless rigging of both the questions and the answers, the long struggle to give an appearance of naturalness to what can only seem to be artificial! The photograph of M. Pinget on the back of his book shows a head of immense firmness with powerful eyes staring obliguely at the world, and one is bound to feel that he needed every atom of this striking equipment to push through his remorseless project. It is made the more remorseless by the fact that M. Pinget uses no inverted commas, no question marks, no punctuation at all except the comma. God knows why he clung to this.
Faced with this sort of novel, one is obliged to ask: Was it the only way in which it could have been written? Would it have been as good or better written in a more ordinary way? Does M. Pinget’s way add depth to the subject? Does it bring out the characters more completely? Does it show us aspects of life that would be concealed if the writing were more orthodox? In short, does the experiment justify anything except the right to declare experiment a capital crime? - Nigel Dennis
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1967/03/23/late-again-he-groaned/
The Inquisitory by Robert Pinget is a very idiosyncratic novel which isn’t easy to interpret.
Masters and servants: what does a servant know about his masters, about the surrounding world and society?
Yes or no yes or no for all I know about it you know, I mean I was only in service to them a man of all work you might say and what I can say about it, anyway I don’t know anything people don’t confide in a servant, my work all right my work then but how could I have foreseen, every day the same the daily round no I mean to say you’d better ask my gentlemen not me there must be some mistake, when I think that after ten years of loyal service he never said a word to me worse than a dog, you pack up and go you wash your hands of it let other people get on with it after all I mean to say, man of all work yes but who never knew a thing it’s enough to turn you sour isn’t, me gentlemen didn’t care so long as I did my work, at the start I was sure it couldn’t go on like that let’s at least try to have a little chat from time to time but in the end you get used to it you get used to it and that’s how I’ve been for the last ten years so don’t come asking me, a dog you understand and yet they chat to him there was one they used to take with them on their trips, my gentlemen took him with them on their trips
It’s not about the dog it’s about him, when did he leave
The interrogation is long and scrupulous but it isn’t clear if there was a crime or not. And if there was one then of what nature.
The servant’s answers are thorough and often meticulous but it isn’t clear how precise are they… They may turn out to be just a part of his imagination, wild guesses, misconceptions, wishful thinking, hearsay, gossips or results of his imperfect memory…
Every one of us lives in the world painted with one’s imagination and memory and restricted with one’s cognition of the outside reality. - Vit Babenco
This is something like a masterpiece, but I'm not sure who I could recommend it to. Well, the usual Dalkey aficionados, naturally, but I don't know who else. Composed entirely of a series of questions and answers between an unnamed inquisitor (or inquisitors) and the aged, deaf servant of a country chateau, The Inquisitory is...well...it's something else, alright.
Okay, so something's happened, but we don't know what. Something nefarious, assumedly. This servant of the chateau is being interrogated about what he knows (if he actually does know anything) about supposed misdoings centering around the chateau and the surrounding provincial area. Something about the secretary of the chateau leaving. So what is the servant asked about? Anything. Everything. If a name is mentioned casually by the servant, know with certainty that the inquisitor is going to ask who they are, where they live, what they do, who they know; usually right away, but sometimes ten or twenty pages later when you've already completely forgotten about them. And if a house, or a road, or a room, or a hallway, or a staircase, or any structure made by man is mentioned, a thorough description will be forthcoming. Amid this seemingly random torrent of information, a chiaroscuro of corruption, perversion, and iniquity of every sort is slowly revealed. Murder, pedophilia, necrophilia, tax scams, and maybe some kind of satanic death cult or maybe I just read too much into things?...you name it. So, if the cops are looking for something, there's plenty to be found. Maybe. Or maybe not. See what I'm getting at?
Pinget courts reader frustration boldly and with audacious glee, and ultimately makes it his bitch. He practically dares you to stop reading, Come on...I dare you, more Robert Conrad than Joseph Conrad, assaultin' batteries. I almost abandoned it somewhere before the halfway mark at the uninterrupted, ten-page description of a drawing room and every piece of furniture and appointments therein. Why does the inquisitor need to know this? Why do I need to know this? Why does anybody need to know this? Fuck if I know. The servant will even get frustrated and start asking "Where is this all going?" or "What's the point of all this?", seemingly just to let you know that yes indeed Pinget is fully aware of what he's doing to you. But I couldn't stop reading. Pinget writes in a breathless, propulsive style, that kineticism aided by the lack of conventional punctuation—no periods, no question marks, and commas used almost haphazardly. It's unconventional, but certainly not unreadable, and it adds to that forward momentum. If you're unsure where to stop, it makes it that much harder to actually do so. So anyway, somewhere around that halfway mark I started to have fun with it. I felt like I was in on the joke. The endless questions, answers and constructions of real or imagined people, places and events forces you to ponder the nature of truth, knowledge, and storytelling. While reading it I felt like my brain chemistry was being rewired, and that's something I think great art should do, right? So...yeah. Masterpiece. - Rod
Dreamscapes and phantasms of Absurdism and Surrealist weirdness, coupled with a rigorous scholastic subversion of the three unities of traditional French theatre; time, place, and character, Robert Pinget brought a relentless methodology to his creative partnerships, as if Descartes had a driving passion for the arts.
With a compositional vision and structure derived from his musicianship which permeates his style of language, and sentences which mimic natural breathing in oral poetry taken directly from his model Walt Whitman, his writing displays a poetic lyricism as unique as a signature.
Among a small group of authors who were also superb musicians, always interesting to me as my side gig is music, his transpositon of music into language reverberates across time and flowers in musician-novelists as diverse as Anthony Burgess in Napoleon Symphony and Robert Coover in Pricksongs and Descants.
Famously a collaborator with Samuel Beckett as fellow playwrights, Robert Pinget was also a painter who had studied with a student of Braque as well as a musician of the Baroque chamber orchestra, and all three of these influences can be observed in his literary works.
It is possible that he achieved Nietzsche's Total Art in his synthesis of disciplines and reinvention of form.
Among his classics of world literature we have The Inquisitory, regularly compared to Perec's Life: a user's manual due to the playfullness and variety of his word games, Passacaglia, a transposition of music into language, and possibly a mystery, Baga, the lives of a mad king across the centuries reminiscent of Jarry's Ubu Roi, Between Fantoine and Agapa, a surrealist notebook of future works and a travel guide to an alternate dimension like that of Akutagawa's marvelous Kappa, Monsieur Levert, referential to both Beckett's Waiting for Godot and , as the play Dead Letter, to Beckett's companion play with which it shared a stage, Krapp's Last Tape.
We have also the absurdist hilarity of Mahu, the mad ravings of a useless nobody who slowly dissociates in soliloquies of imagined superiority to just about everyone. Consumed by dementia, his rotting brain misfires in bundles of hallucinatory and childlike racism, paranoia, rages, twisted desires; anyone who has worked with patients in an Alzheimer's ward will recognize the symptoms.
My response to objectionable content is to consider its context and intent; in this case to describe the mental decline of a character whose function is to provoke and disturb as a tool of social criticism. Reading it gave me impulsive fits of wanting to rewrite the novel as the senile maunderings of a Trump-like American President who was a former clown of grotesque terror and whose art of politics in the white house is the same as in his fabled circus performances; to offend, terrorize, and totally gross out his audience. For then we would have a novel in which transgression is liberating, affirming, and useful. - Jay
Wright, Red Dust Books, 2002.
The Master ruminates on the death of an idiot who lived with him, for which he may or may not be responsible, and on his own death. He rehashes events with his friend, the doctor, and in his notebooks. His ruminations form the "passacaglia' or recurring melody of the book. "Don't bother too much about logic: everything in Passacaille is directed against it." - Pinget in a letter to Barbara Wright
As I read Robert Pinget’s 94-page long Passacaglia (originally published as Passacaille in 1969) I knew I was falling under the spell of one of those works of unsettling originality whose profundity was initially elusive and indescribable. Even as the story became more and more fractured, I found myself succumbing to Pinget’s writing, to his beautiful phrasing and masterful control of voice and pace.
The location is rural France. We have the Master of the farmhouse that serves as the main setting for the book, the local doctor, a plumber, a goat herder, and various other neighbors and villagers. A local idiot has died, a gentle youth of limited mental capacity who had been abandoned by his parents and informally “adopted” by the Master. Like a musical passacaglia, which involves the playing of a series of variations against a bass line, the narrator’s tale is recounted over and over, each time a new variation of the basic story. However, unlike the story of Rashomon, in which each character has a distinct perspective on the central event, the variations in Passacaglia do not represent a search for evidentiary truth. Here, it’s not the characters but the narrator who changes the tale each time, randomly and without fanfare reconfiguring events and relationships. Pinget himself is quoted on the back cover of the book saying “Don’t bother too much about logic: everything in Passacaglia is directed against it.”
Woven through Pinget’s narrative, like a thread of a different color, is a more oracular voice that issues blunt phrases or sentences, gnomic status reports that function almost like a Greek chorus.
Something broken in the mechanism.
Something broken in the engine.
Leave nothing of memory’s suggestions intact.
The time is out of joint.
Source of information deficient.
Turn, return, revert.
As the book stutters forward, the chronology splinters and backtracks, the facts change willy-nilly, the variations contradict each other, and the omniscience of the narrator comes and goes like uncertain cellphone coverage. Passacaglia openly resists closure and yet it plunges the reader inexorably into its own vortex. About three-quarters of the way through, the Master suddenly tells the doctor how the boy came to live with him, and in doing so he reveals his special relationship with the idiot.
There was only one thing I insisted on, that I should soap him myself in his tub every Saturday more or less, with neither calendar nor passion I sometimes made a mistake and I felt less alone at those moments, I have his skin under my hand, I soap him all over without exception from A to Z which naturally took us by way of P, and maybe even concentrating on P, to tell the truth it’s less a chore than a pleasure, or if in my haste to be less alone I soap him twice a week attributing my miscalculation to the absence of a calendar
After this, Passacaglia seems to spin faster and faster toward its endpoint, as the collision of images becomes nearly hallucinatory. Here’s the Master, who has decided to rewrite his will.
I the undersigned in the cold room, hemlock, clock out of action, I the undersigned in the marsh, goat or bird’s carcass, I the undersigned at the bend in the road, in the master’s garden, maleficent old woman, sentry of the dead, satyr, scarecrow, in a van on the route deviated by the evil eye, plaything of that farce that is called conscience, no one, I the undersigned midnight in full daylight, overwhelmed with boredom, old owl or crow…
It’s probably worth noting that Passacaglia got onto my reading list last summer when I read Gabriel Josipovici’s praise for the book in his Whatever Happened to Modernism? Here’s Josipovici:
It leaves one, as one finishes it, with the sense of having lived through a half dozen or more potential novels: Simenon-like novels about murder in the rural hinterlands of France, Mauriac-like novels about petty jealousies behind tightly shut windows, Proust-like novels about authors in search of their subjects; of having lived through them or half-lived through them, and through so much else – child murder, desperate solitude, the system by and for which one has lived collapsing round and perhaps even within one. But more than that, the book leaves one with the sense of having participated in the birth of narrative itself. - Terry Pitts
https://sebald.wordpress.com/category/robert-pinget/
I decided to give this author another chance, and I was able to both understand and somewhat enjoy this story based on what I learned from "reading" the other one: I had to get used to paragraph-long run-on sentences with no dialogue references and an author who's very goal and delight it seems is to disorient you as far a possible. Regarding this disorientation, I would have found it far less obnoxious and annoying if there were spaces between the paragraphs that are taking place in another time and space, or in someone else's head.
Like I suppose a "passacaglia" (though I am not familiar with this musical element) the author uses the "narrative" to bring up and return to various themes, often repeating the same sentences or phrases over and over again, rarely presenting any new perspective, or only after a good amount of pages have passed. 5 or so events are told over and over again but from different vantage points, or these events are subtly or demonstratively altered in the re-telling. I didn't know until halfway through that the story was detailing two deaths, not one (I had to read the book jacket to learn this) but then this becomes more clear in the second half.
The "story" has many aspects of a detective story to it, as the author says on the book jacket "the object of Passacaille is to exorcise death by magical operations with words. As if the pleasure of playing with the vocabulary could delay the fatal issue." This book must have been a bitch to translate, especially with such a flippant author. How very French, how very 60's, how very friend of Samuel Beckett! But I did enjoy it better than Fable, and those two stories (and perhaps all of Pinget's work?) are variations on the same theme and formulaic attempt at writing. It came be very beautiful at times, but more often than not it is trying, and perhaps that is its major fault. The book was very cinematic, but only in the sense that an experimental film of various looping images is cinematic. I think it would make an excellent droning audiobook.
"Pasacaille is an amusing book, but it is also terrible." - Printable Tire
Title refers to 'a musical form of the 17th and 18th centuries consisting of continuous variations on a ground bass in ¾ time and similar to the chaconne.' (Am. Herit. Dict. 3rd ed.)
Maddening mystery, possibly a dead body, possibly foul play, all amid a general air of menace. Could be an old man writing his memoirs at the end of his life, struggling to recall what really happened. Small town gossip—like a game of telephone—maybe this happened, maybe that, no, wait I saw her over here, no, but he was with her, no, no, that's not it, it was the mechanic, or it was the poultry man, yes, it was the goatherd, the tourist in a red sports car, near the swamp, near the barn, on the dunghill.
Distant, mostly speakerless narration that occasionally sprouts a speaker. Towards end, abruptly switches to first person narration by the old man, telling about his life with his 'idiot' adopted son, whom he molests in the bath.
Some elements are reflected in the later novel That Voice: a death under questionable circumstances; murky family history; rural locale; repetition of words and phrases; constant reconfiguring of scenes. Both books were published after the Robbe-Grillet novels they resemble in form (Jealousy, The Voyeur, In the Labyrinth). Not sure if I prefer the R-G novels only because I read them first, or if he just does this plotless, constant reconfiguring style better than Pinget. Inclined to think the latter.
Notes Pinget made to his translator about this novel:
1. 'the object of Passacaglia is to exorcise death by magical operations with words' (which does make a strange sort of sense after reading the book).
2. 'don't bother too much about logic; everything in Passacaglia is directed against it' (also an astute observation). - Sean
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1472542.Passacaglia
Robert Pinget, The Libera Me Domine, Red
Dust, 2002.
A tragedy has occurred. The Ducreux boy has been strangled, drowned, sexually violated in the woods where his family took him on a picnic although they loathed picnics, never went on them. Is old Lorpailleur,the school teacher, responsible or is she herself a victim? From "this network of gossip and absurd remarks" the life of a village emerges.
The anatomy of a French village, revealed through its "network of gossip and absurd remarks."
"At the novel's end, we do not know who killed the Ducreux boy... but we do feel we have lived in a provincial French village... at a bone-deep level no logic-bound tale could have reached." -John Updike, The New Yorker"Robert Pinget is one of the French novels few indisputable glories... now supremely well translated by Barbara Wright." -John Sturrock, The New York Times"This network of gossip and absurd remarks had conditioned our existence to such an extent that no stranger could have resisted it for long. If he had come to follow the trade of baker he would inevitably have branched off into that of child killer, for instance."
ROBERT PINGET, Swiss-barn and a lapsed bar- rister, is one of the current French novel's few Indisputable glories. He has been publishing since 1950 books both singular and fantastic. He is a writer at once hugely diverting and incurably pessimistic. like his obvious muter. Samuel Beckett. He represents what you might call the bucolic element in the anti-novel. His stories are all of them set In his own weirdly eventful corner of the French countryside, In a landscape of the mind to be found “Between Fan- toine and Agape,” as toe title of bis earliest, ground- breaking collection of stories had It. To this continuity of place Mr. Pinget adds a sardonic continuity of per- sons too, since the same characters keep turning up from booK to book. Or If not the same characters ex- actly, then the same names of characters, because there Is nothing so stable or reassuring as an orthodox “character,” of settled habits and biography, In the disturbingly erratic narratives that Mr. Pinget has patented.
There could be no finer Introduction to the mind-bog- Joha Sturreek, an editor of The Times (London) Literary Supplement, is the author of “The French New Novel.” gling uncertainties of life in that blighted arcadla be- tween Fantoine and Agapa than “The Libera Me Do- mine,” the longer, wilder and more endearing of these two Pinget novels, now supremely well translated by Barbara Wright. The uncertainties come about be- cause his narrators are men obsessed, with a fear- some urge to reconstruct the past; the one thing they have no tune or mind for is the immediate present. The past, huwevci, won't play the game. It wont be reconstructed; there are plenty of bits of it lying to hand, picturesque shreds of local legend, but they don't fit togethei. Instead of one past in mis novel there are many, all contradictory of one another. What happens on one page is likely to cancel oat what happened on the page before. Events quickly change their nature, people equally quickly change theirs, and the result is a hilarious inability to come to any fixed conclusions at all. Like each of Mr. Pinget's novels, “The Libera Me Domine” Is the record of someone failing lamentably to construct a single coherent story, but that record is so rivetingly, so eloquently told, that this failure has to go down as a thumping success.
It seems that a small boy was once murdered in the village. Little Louis Ducroux was found strangled in the woods one hot July day. Or did he have his throat cut by a sex maniac? Or did he drown accidentally in the lake? But then, wasn't it actually one of the other Ducroux children who died, and wasn't he knocked down by a lorry in the village street? No, surely that wasn't a child but one of the grown‐ups, Mile. Lorpailleur the prissy schoolteacher, who was knocked off her bike. Etc. The novel is like some demented coroner's inquest, where the identity of the victim changes with each new question, until it is doubtful whether there was a
It is the events themselves ‘that are dead: All the many engaging scenes that are first dreamed up, then redreamed and then erased in “The Libera Me Domine” are said to have taken place a statutory 10 years ago, apart from one or two especially signal episodes of local history that can be dated, equally arbitrarily, to 1873. Which is to say that the facts are happily beyond recall, and we are adrift on an ocean of rumor. Nothing that gets said commands any lasting credence at all.
Yet if this is high farce, it is farce with a black lining to it. The unknown killer of little Louis has never been caught, be is still “on the run,” as the novel regularly reminds us. Nor will he be caught, because Mr. Pin. get's killer is the killer who will sooner or later get every man, woman and child of us: death it-self, the ultimate conclusion that haunts this desperately inconclusive novel, as it haunts all of Mr. Pinget's work.
In “The Meru Me Domine,” death migrates with dreadful ease from character to character, changing its form as it goes. And it turns up just as grotesquely in the shorter, more somber novel, “Passacaglia,” in which a troublesome, inexplicable corpse turns up lying where else? — an a dunghill. Unless, that is, it's an overly naterallstic scarecrow renamed from the farmer's field, or the postman in an alcoholic trance, or the village idiot having an attack. Whatever the perfectly unattainable facts of the case may be, the imagination, which is the hero of any Pinget novel, lurches helplessly off into morbid speculation.
Simpletons, inebriates and crackpots frequent the scene so as to show how futile the storyteller's ambitions are, for these wandering, vacuous minds are typical of his sources of information as he strives to make himself the archivist of an unreliable community‐the “deficiency” of his sources is one of many recurring complaints voiced by the narrator of “Passacaglia.” But he keeps at it nonetheless, working at what he poignantly calls his “laborious accumulation of straws in the wind.” He has to keep at it: He is nothing more than a voice trying to make up a story, and to stop — to fall silent — is also a death. Mortality can only be kept at bay for as long as the Mr. Pinget's are spoken novels, written in order to be heard. His chief interest in writing them, he has said, is to impersonate a particular “tone” of voice and to sustain this over many pages. In a book such as “The Libera Me Domine,” the voice is beautifully consistent and rhythmic, and its mono. logue is irresistible. Mr. Pinget composes his books with the rigor and artful variations of a piece of music: The title, “Passacaglia,” is no empty metaphor, the story will certainly have been organized strictly in accordance with that particular musical form. His language is much more artful, more richly inventive than any genuine spoken language: it is the printed word's tribute to the power of the spoken word. Barbara Wright's translation has matched Mr. Finset'. French with wit and skill; she has kept the sense throughout and found the right equivalent sounds. The publication of these two books in the United States was helped by a subsidy; that was money well spent. Robert Pinget deserves. - John Sturrock
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/04/29/archives/pessimistic-diversions-pinget-authors-query.html
From the author’s afterword:
It seems to me that the interest of my work up to the present has been the quest for a tone of voice... It is not what can be said or meant that interests me, but the way in which it is said...
People have spoken of the plots of my books. Rather than plot, I would prefer situation, and this is imposed on me by the chosen tone. If a plot seems to be in the process of being woven, it can only be as a result of the thread of the discourse, which can only unwind in a void. They support each other mutually. This discourse, then, consists of various stories. If I say that the stories don’t interest me, it is because I know that they could have been different. This doesn’t prevent me from accepting and even liking them, as I would have liked the others, the others that I still have to tell, so long as I don’t weary of the search for an initial tone.
The structure of this novel is precise, although not immediately apparent. The different themes are intermingled. One cuts into another point-blank, then the other resumes and cuts into the first, and so on until the end. The first example of this procedure, at the beginning of the book, is the theme of the cemetery, cut into by that of the gossip at the grocery, then resumed shortly afterwards.
Apart from this peculiarity, as from the middle of the book the themes are taken up again in the inverse order of their appearance. The last themes of the first part, that is, become the first of the second part and are thus retold in reverse. A procedure resembling anamnesis. - Robert Pinget (from the Preface)
A mysterious death or deaths. Familial claustrophobia. Repetition of words and phrases, telling and retelling, circuitous unfolding, refolding, cutting up and inserting, narrative builds only to collapse on itself. Viewpoints appear to shift, although Pinget’s preface specifies it’s only one voice throughout, but with different tones, the purpose being to capture the singular voice (and the form to mimic anamnesis).
Say everything again, for fear of having said nothing.
Atmosphere felt similar to reading Beckett’s Molloy trilogy, though it’s merely a vague feeling more than a commonality of any specific elements. Just that sense of grey heaviness permeating the text. An intriguing text, though difficult to parse. Fits in with the Nouveau Roman crew, especially early Robbe-Grillet and early Duras: vagueness of plot (if any), attention paid instead to the words themselves, the way of telling. - Sean
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2199202.That_Voice
A love story or rather the story of a betrayal
Woah, this deceptively short book is making my head spin. I thought it would be a slight diversion from Gormenghast but it's dense and full of bad stream-of-conscious translation jargon, though often the prose is beautiful. Still, it is the sort of book one must pay utmost attention to, and I am often reading while being totally distracted, which I find to be the best way to read. Like Gunslinger, it is poetry and I enjoy some of it but I am having difficulty simply understanding what is going on. And I come here for help and no one's even reviewed it! I may have to dump this one. - Printable Tire
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2199127.Fable
Robert Pinget, Monsieur Songe, Red Dust, 1989.
Robert Pinget, Between Fantoine and Agapa,
Red Dust, 1983.
Robert Pinget's first prose work, published in France in 1951.
First impression is of a psilocybin-fueled spree somewhat akin to Leonora Carrington's wackier stories of talking horses, squabbling cabbages, etc. Pinget proffers very little context. He says he wrote this first prose work while still in the throes of surrealism and that it contains the kernels of all the forms taken by his subsequent work. It's a collection of vignettes, stories-in-miniature, and other small undefinable prose. Some pieces are hilarious, others oddly banal or simply impenetrable. The last section is a series of journal entries written from the point of view of an outsider living in a strange region of surreal proportions. The entries consists of observations and descriptions of the geographical area and its inhabitants—their peculiarities, bizarre physicality, customs, culture, and livelihoods. It's written in a wide-eyed style laced with medico-scientific jargon. - Sean
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/779624.Between_Fantoine_and_Agapa
Robert Pinget, Someone, Red Dust, 1984.
Someone, a benign and self accusing presence, "a decent fellow on a rather small scale," "a wet blanket", moves through the rooms, corridors, and garden of a guest house, searching for a ball of paper, notes taken while "herborizing". In the course of the search we come to know the inhabitants and someone, himself; "I shall never be able to talk about their affairs...without scrutinizing myself"
Robert Pinget, Someone, Riverrun Press, 1984.
David Ruffel: PINGET QUEER (pdf)
Reading Robert Pinget by John Taylor, Context N°20
In his playful and candid book-length interview with Madeleine Renouard (Robert Pinget à la letter, 1993), the author of The Inquisitory (1962) and Monsieur Songe (1982) distinguishes his writing from Alain Robbe-Grillet’s. Pinget (1919-1997) claims that, whereas Robbe-Grillet emphasizes the eye, he privileges the ear.
The quip suggests a useful way of approaching a substantial, joyfully prolific, yet meticulously unified oeuvre; and it also points to the delicate problems facing the translator of Pinget’s delightfully idiosyncratic prose based on puns, consonance, assonance, masterfully applied colloquial syntax, and numerous other “musical” qualities. Fortunately, quite a few of Pinget’s novels have been expertly translated during the past three decades, notably by Barbara Wright. First and foremost, they are pleasurable to read, even more so aloud. That Pinget also wrote numerous radio plays and several successful stage plays corroborates this oral and aural predominance.
“Musical” is no gratuitous epithet here. The author of Passacaglia (1969), which is available in the Dalkey Archive trilogy Trio, was an accomplished amateur cellist. His love of Baroque (and especially Bach’s) music surpassed the limits of a mere pastime. His ingrained musicality and acquired musical knowledge arguably affected the oral and aural, as well as monologue-like and dialogue-like orientations of his writing style; he himself admitted that his love of music induced the characteristic “variations” that occur in single novels and indeed link most of his novels together. It is true that, above all, a handful of characters (a maid, a butler, other servants, farmers, a niece, a nephew, an alter ego named “Mortin,” and above all a tyrannical “master” who owns a château, is losing his memory, and also regularly poses as a finicky old writer) reappear in many of his novels, each time in slightly different guises. These not entirely stable characterleitmotivs, as they might be called, give a remarkable and, once again, amusing unity to Pinget’s fiction. Moreover, a likewise slightly shifting geographical unity derives from his frequent use of the place names Agapa and Fantoine, which originate in his first book, Between Fantoine and Agapa (1951/1966), a collection of fantasy and metaphysical stories (also comprised in Trio). But these two dramatic unities which, along with that of time (also essential to his literary vision), reflect and sport with the notoriously constraining “three unities” of seventeenth-century French theater, are also impressively underscored by means of the stylistic “music” audible in every book. Once the reader has been tipped off about Pinget’s musical propensities, allusions to them can be spotted everywhere.
In Plough (1985), for example, which is one of the thin yet self-elucidating sequels to Monsieur Songe, Pinget attributes the following observation on the “art of saying (or telling)” to Songe: “He tried in the past to compose tales according to all sorts of rigorous rules that inspired him.
Among these rules were those concerning number, symmetry, alternation, resonance, and musical repetition.” Presumably, Pinget describes himself here, though he cautions elsewhere that Songe “says lots of truthful things and lots of stupid things.” Several other novels are sprinkled with parenthetical remarks about music. In That Voice (1975; also in Trio), which parodies ghost and graveyard stories, Pinget intermittently introduces comments such as “manque un accord” (a chord is missing), then puns with a “manque un raccord” (a join, as in painting or wallpapering). Beyond this joke can be perceived the author’s deep engagement with the problems of narrative structure, which he indeed often compared to the organization of a musical composition. Above all, he seeks to control his style by means of a carefully conceived solfège in which punctuation mostly determines breathing, not grammatical logic. Sometimes his punctuation (or lack thereof) creates a sort of Cubist prose—that is, when a narrator’s or character’s thoughts are expressed without ordinary rhetorical connecters and transitions; elsewhere, punctuation produces a collage of unfinished thoughts, a syntax of radotage or “rambling.” Commas, and especially the absence of them, create the phrasé, the musical “phrasing” so typical of his prose.
By “ear,” Pinget thus means much more than the phonetically droll words that crop up in his writing, like the olibrius (“odd or bizarre fellow”) used to describe the retired old writer who is growing senile and living with his maid at a sea resort “near Agapa” in Monsieur Songe; or the terms impétrer (a rare legal and ecclesiastical term for “solicit”) and alopécie (“alopecia”) which, in Between Fantoine and Agapa, appear on a billboard as Interdiction d’impétrer l’alopécie (“Soliciting Alopecia Prohibited”). By the way, this billboard humorously announces one of the author’s anxieties; he was growing bald when this book was written. Pinget later avowed that “a reflex of self-analysis” and “a form of veiled confession” was embodied in his writer-characters. Simultaneously, he often emphasized the preponderance of imagination in his literary work, of his rigorous remove from realism and straightforward self-chronicle.
This same dichotomy (and discretion about his personal life) applies to Pinget’s descriptions which, besides the “musical” tonalities accompanying them, can also be conspicuously pictorial, painterly—a quality noticed by more than one critic. Although Pinget had in fact studied painting at the end of the Second World War at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where his teacher was Georges Braque’s student Jean Souverbie, he would thereafter regularly refute contentions that his artistic talents fueled his descriptions. In his interview with Renouard, who also quizzed him on this topic, Pinget replies: “It would never occur to me to describe an object that I am looking at. My descriptions are purely imaginary.” In Be Brave (1990), which provides still another sequel or coda to Monsieur Songe, the narrator-writer accordingly adds in his diary-like notes: “This table, this pen, this sheet of paper. A description. But one describes only what one does not see.” This assertion notwithstanding, Pinget evidently has a painterly talent in words. Whether initially observed in situ, remembered, or—as he insists—imagined, Pinget’s word pictures are distinct and vivid. He similarly explained to Renouard that he had come into little contact with farmers, château owners, and aristocrats during his lifetime—“whence the interest that [his] imagination took in them.” These social archetypes are also sharply, sardonically, and sometimes compassionately depicted. Like the literary tool of realistic on-the-spot observation, memory as a source of inspiration also provoked Pinget’s skepticism. Many of his characters tellingly fear that they are mentally losing the past. In That Voice, he summarily declares: “Imagination for memory.” Yet other leitmotivs, like the place name Agapa, associated with Agay on the French Riviera, and like the recurrent elderly writer figure, suggest the contrary. One of the joys of reading Pinget’s novels one after the other is to perceive, time and again, how consistently and free-spiritedly he maintains inconsistencies in his writing, both in detail and overall literary philosophy. It is a literature that espouses liberty—and practices it. Even as Monsieur Songe “discovers with stupor and a feeling of helplessness that he is never where he actually is,” Pinget similarly slips, literally and literarily, away from where we think he is or want him to be.
He also asserted that literature was “a synonym of poetry.” This equation reflects similar statements made by other contemporary French writers and poets of varying, even mutually antagonistic, aesthetic persuasions. The consequences of this critical position are crucial. In Plough, Pinget (or rather, Monsieur Songe) notes: “How to make them [readers, but more likely academic scholars] understand that a text is well written only when it is dewritten (désécrit).” It is an incisive remark that recalls Maurice Blanchot’s defense of Julien Gracq’s mellifluous yet boldly adjectival early prose, which had been impugned by the influential academic critic, René Étiemble. Blanchot argued that “writing well means writing badly,” an insight immediately situating Gracq’s modernity on the stylistic level, not just on those concerning plot, viewpoint, characterization, and the like. American literary historians looking at French literature, and the New Novel in particular, tend to emphasize formal experimentation, neglecting in the process the stylistic labors that are extremely important for understanding a writer like Pinget. (Claude Simon is obviously another.) His style, in its highly conscious, learned, significant yet not always radical departure from classical stylistic norms, is an essential ingredient in his accomplishment. Questions of colloquial syntax, elision, punctuation, and, once again, “breathing,” are all important. He was a particularly subtle and artful stylist because, for all his delight in creating narrative contradiction and confusion—these cognitive entanglements posited as emblematic of “truth”—his books remain eminently “readable,” to cite the touchstone so often flouted in the faces of “difficult” French authors.
Of course, Pinget also subverted conventional storytelling techniques in a manner similar to that associated, often too narrowly and ahistorically, with the novelists standing in front of the offices of the Éditions de Minuit in a famous photograph: Pinget, Robbe-Grillet, Simon, Nathalie Sarraute, Samuel Beckett, Claude Mauriac, Claude Ollier, and the instigator of this publicity stunt, the publisher Jérôme Lindon. Pinget’s sometimes tongue-in-cheek, sometimes more whimsical assault on narrative logic represents one break from the trappings of the traditional novel. Yet the key term “contradiction” must be kept at hand whenever Pinget’s fiction is “theorized”— a term and a critical activity for which he possessed little patience. Pinget at once relishes and abhors irrationality; he doubts that there can be ultimate meaning or essence, yet he seeks them, at times rejects them, then seeks them again. The narrator of That Voice wonders if there is “anything else to note besides this accumulation of drifting trivialities.” Monsieur Songe is no less than “horrified by anything that creates disorder.” Sometimes Pinget even sidesteps this scuffling of thesis against antithesis and conjures up an emotion that we are not expecting. Plough notably comprises sensitive, lucid, testimony about aging, mixing up things, and losing confidence in one’s memory. Pinget’s humor is not always biting; he can also be tender.
His mentor was Cervantes, who instructed him in the art of telling a story that is essentially about how the story is being put together and told (or written). This narrative circularity can best be studied in The Inquisitory, Pinget’s longest novel and, for this author inclined to brevity, terse concision, and oblique understatement, the weighty outcome of a bet with Lindon that he could write a five-hundred-page novel in six months. The book is composed in such a way that the reader sits in on an interrogation of a servant who is a probable witness to a crime. The questions of the invisible interrogator enable the reader to imagine, through the servant’s replies, the setting, the other characters, and various stories associated with them. But all this information is delivered as a mass of confusing and contradictory realist detail; the details and descriptions are not worked into any plot whatsoever. This is the point. The reader must sift through the facts and assertions, as if he were the writer constructing the novel. What emerges from the reader’s imaginative and creative toiling is a vast Human Comedy that Balzac himself would have appreciated. Yet this Human Comedy of course remains unwritten; it cannot be read, reread; it exists only in the (fading) imagination and memory of the reader. After perusing this novel, Pinget’s close friend, Samuel Beckett, warned him about the necessity of taking off or prying himself away from realism. (“Attention de décoller du réalisme,” Pinget reports him as saying.)
The Inquisitory pokes passing fun at the New Novel. Pinget cites “Lorpailleur’s articles on the New Novel, as she calls it, theories that interest no one.” On the next page, he alludes to Beckett, Beckett’s wife Suzanne, and Lindon: “We arrive almost across the street on the rue des Irlandais which we go up, coming to the rue Sam then the rue Suzanne on the left the rue du Coucou on the right and the short rue du Triet we continue on until we reach the rue Jérôme.”
Beckett adapted Pinget’s radio play La Manivelle (1961) in English as The Old Tune (1963). Pinget had already rendered Beckett’s radio play All that Fall as Tous ceux qui tombent in 1957. He often paid homage to the Irishman, noting how the Molloy / Malone Dies / The Unnamable trilogy and plays such as Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days had impressed him. In Monsieur Songe, which Pinget modestly dismisses in his preface as a “divertissement” (meaning not only “diversion” or “light entertainment,” but also a musical “divertimento”), one senses the possible influence of Watt when the narrator lists ad absurdum all the logical ways of sequencing his habit of drinking coffee, dozing off, and examining bills that he needs to pay. To be sure, in several respects the two writers shared a common literary, philosophical, and indeed musical sensibility. A striking instance is their simultaneous aversion and attraction to metaphysics, even to some aspects of Christian thought that tormented the Protestant Beckett and intrigued the believing Catholic Pinget. Allusions to Beckett’s writings crop up in several places in Pinget’s novels. The famous final words of The Unnamable are paralleled in this phrase from That Voice: “impossible to finish impossible not to finish impossible to continue to stop to start again.” Similarly, Pinget often expresses a desire “to develop,” that is, fill in details and expand his prose, an intention soon offset by the admission that he cannot do so. This struggle of reduction against amplification, which may well have been tensely experienced by the writer as he was writing, obviously relates to Pinget’s affection—yearning?—for poetry. (He recounted that writing the expansive The Inquisitory was a “nightmare.”) The same tense, even paralyzing, focus on concision and amplitude increasingly characterized Beckett after Comment c’est (1961) and its English version, How It Is (1964). The Greco-Roman rhetoricians believed that literary works could be profoundly analyzed by appealing to these two critical touchstones: the intention or need to amplify, the intention or need to reduce. Their vantage point is well worth reconsidering.
The still unanswered question of Beckett’s fundamental pessimism or fundamental optimism leads to a final juxtaposition of the two friends. In another of Pinget’s enlightening sequels to Monsieur Songe, The Harness (1984), the novelist reports on Monsieur Songe’s literary introspections: “Joyously take up once again the hideous harness writes Monsieur Songe. And then he crosses out hideous. And then he crosses out harness. Remains joyously take up.” This is not the only passage or book in which Pinget associates “joy” with both living and writing. The word opens up another possibility of reading him. In Théo or the New Era, which Pinget considered a potential gateway to all his writing, he notably observes: “May this pen be a chisel and engrave the word yes, the word joy, the word elsewhere.” In the same book, the narrator repeatedly enjoins himself to “fonder le temps neuf,” that is to found or set up a “new era” in the sense of a pure, virginal period of personal and perhaps collective history; in other words, to create or imagine a new future. He adds: “As a final task, fill this emptiness (combler ce vide). Found the new era. May misfortune (Malheur) not get a grasp.” Ultimately optimistic? Pessimistic but nonetheless hopeful? Pessimistic because only the imagination can perform this final task and situate it “elsewhere”? In any event, it is a moving affirmation.
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/reading-robert-pinget/
The Talk of the Town: Sexuality in Three Pinget Novels by Michael Lucey
This chapter examines three novels by Robert Pinget, The Inquisitory, Someone, and The Libera Me Domine, demonstrating how these novels can be read as sophisticated sources of implicit theorizing about the way sexuality exists in spoken language. Pinget’s novels study how, when people talk, they not only provide information, or reveal things about themselves; they also expose the structures of the social world as it and they exist in talk; they reveal that within their ability to talk is an ability to produce a representation of the social world that will be calibrated to their own position in it and to the relationship they imagine themselves as having with their interlocutors. Pinget is the most linguistico-anthropological of the writers studied in this book, and perhaps the most technically challenging to read as well. For Pinget, speakers are nodes in a structured world of talk, and their relation to sexuality is revealed through their ways of participating in the world of talk in which they are immersed. By way of his universe of exquisitely calibrated voices, Pinget presents a sophisticated vision of the way talk houses not only sexuality, but also a variety of overlapping social features of a self.
“There were absences in my life which were a comfort, then were was a presence that ruined me.”― Robert Pinget, Fable
“When you're expecting bad news you have to be prepared for it a long time ahead so that when the telegram comes you can already pronounce the syllables in your mouth before opening it.”― Robert Pinget
Spotlight on … Robert Pinget The Inquisitory (1962):
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