Maurice Roche - Compact is one of the most compellingly original works of fiction of the postwar period. Composed—as if a musical score—of six intertwining narratives (each distinguished by its own voice, tense, and typeface), Compact has lost none of its remarkable freshness or groundbreaking innovation since its first appearance in 1966

Maurice Roche, Compact, Trans. by Mark Polizzotti, Dalkey Archive Press, 1988. [1966.]

Sample pages at Typographie & Littérature

Maurice Roche has been called “the most interesting novelist in France” (TriQuarterly), and Compact “one of the classics of our modernity” (Le Figaro). Certainly, Compact is one of the most compellingly original works of fiction of the postwar period. Composed—as if a musical score—of six intertwining narratives (each distinguished by its own voice, tense, and typeface), Compact has lost none of its remarkable freshness or groundbreaking innovation since its first appearance in 1966.

But along with its striking originality, Compact is also a work rich in offbeat humor and great humanity. Compact is the story of a blind man living in a city of his own imagining. Confined to his deathbed, he engages in mental walks through the world’s capitals. These sightless excursions explode in a plethora of musical arrangements, sexual encounters, and mysterious funeral rites. Meanwhile, a Japanese collector and his transvestite assistant watch over the blind man in exchange—upon the latter’s death—for his magnificent tattooed skin. As a further ordeal, the protagonist finds himself prey to the whims of a sadistic French girl in the next apartment.

A novelistic tour de force, Compact fully bears out La Tribune de Geneve‘s judgment of Maurice Roche’s work as “the most important literary upheaval to hit France in the last decade.”

A dying, sightless man lies unmoving on a bed, his body glorious with tattoos. This is the paradigm of the self at the center of Roche's avant-garde novel, published in 1966 and acclaimed by French critics as pointng the way for a post- nouveau roman school. ``Embodied in one's own body, one closes in on oneself.'' Yet the man experiences sounds and smells, translating them into imagined journeys to other cities. The visits of women, an inflatable sex doll, and his own touch afford him erotic sensations, sometimes expressed in musical terms. His Japanese doctor hopes eventually to add the man's skin to his wallpaper collection. Roche's textual experiments result in a linguistic montage of double columns of print, black or blank spaces, and scraps of Greek, Hebrew and Cyrillic; typographic tricks include musical notations, Braille in domino shapes, and a mileage scale. With Roche's method deliberately frustrating the narrative flow, Compact is not for everyone, but should please fanciers of the literary underground. - Publishers Weekly

‘I live death at every moment. I get the feeling I came into this world with death on the brain . . . In our family, ever since the remotest antiquity, we have kept up the custom of passing away so many times, it has become hereditary.’ — Maurice Roche

The text of Compact is visually striking, laid out in small blocks of text with as much empty space as actual writing. At a closer first glance then it can seem as much a work of typography as of fiction, as Roche presents text in bold face, italics, small-cap, and all capitalized (and combinations thereof); beyond that, there are bits in, among other things, Braille, classical Greek, and Hebrew, as well as musical notation and words printed stretched, upside-down, along the length of the page, or strung together without spacing. Punctuation marks are also used beyond their normal applications, and text and space are arranged across the page in a variety of ways -- far beyond the usual neat-paragraph-layout.
       There is no 'typical' page, but you can get some idea from examples such as:

       Or:

       Roche even goes so far as to describe other pages and then also depict a sample:

       And where he can't fully (re)present his vision, he spells it out:

A THREE-DIMENSIONAL BLACK PAGE IN DEPTH-HOLLOWED OUT THROUGH OPTICAL ILLUSIONS-FOR A SPATIAL TYPOGRAPHY OF AN OUTMODED FUTURIST POEM.

       The typography is not solely a visual element, but rather fundamental to the narrative(s), as each variation in how the text is printed corresponds to, as translator Polizzotti notes in his Introduction: "a specific time, place, narrative thread, tense, and coloration", shifting also between first, second, and third person. (The éditions Tristram 1996 re-issue restored Roche's original approach, differentiating the threads by color rather than relying on bold/italics/all-capitals etc.; compare sample pages.) And, while the narrative can be read in the usual continuous way, each of the narrative threads can also be followed individually -- easily identifiable by the distinctive font and format --; indeed, the narrative(s) are probably easier to follow that way, since the back and forth of the text when read as is can be quite dizzying. The narrative-as-a-whole, as is, in many ways resemble a musical score -- and, indeed, there are also frequent references to music in the novel.
       The result is ... polyphonic -- and reflects also the protagonist's own experience, as he describes:

(... shredded tapes of radio broadcasts came back to me in disorder: quotes—discourses—proclamations—advertising slogans—signs—new retrospectives— old news—static,
                                             on bits of exploded narrative. . . .)

       Polizzotti sums up the 'story' in his Introduction:

A dying blind man lies bedridden in his Paris garret, inventing for himself voyages around the city -- which is at once Paris, New York, Papeete, and Tokyo -- and around the world. These voyages are a (usually vain) means of escaping his own enforced sedentariness, the recurrent pain of his terminal illness, and the unwanted administrations of a disquieting Japanese doctor, whose interest in his patient stems from the magnificent tattoo covering the latter's back (for the doctor is also a collector of tattooed skins). At the same time, the blind man must contend with the somewhat perverse attentions of the French girl who lives in the room next door, as well as with the haunting memories that populate the nightscape behind his eyes.

       But, of course, the point of Compact, far more even than in most fiction, is what the telling of the story involves (the how, more than the what) and evokes -- not merely descriptions of thoughts and actions, as well as dialogue, but a reflection of that in how it is presented. Among the effective contrasts is the great reliance on the visual in the novel -- how the text actually looks on the page -- even as its protagonist/narrator is a blind man. So also the large areas of white spaces, and the contrasts of black and white -- including blocks of it -- constantly force an awareness of the visual on the reader. Less obviously so, the text is also aural, with that secondary level of trying to present sound (obviously slightly more difficult on the printed page).
       The typography is meant to mirror and reflect on the content, and Roche manages this quite well, from the simplest examples:

     You'll slowly

turn your head

to the left                                                                                      to the right

       The protagonist's situation -- a helplessness, a reality that is often way too up close (not least in the form of the tattoo-obsessed doctor), genuine suffering -- is vividly depicted (including the memorable brief aside: "to help me doze off, I comforted myself by thinking of a means of suicide."), while the limits of even his mind-escapes are also made clear:

     One feels more and more cramped as the world gets larger. you'll literally sink the night into your skull—contracting into yourself contracting—some definitive evening.

       Language, too, is twisted and revised to Roche's purpose, and so there is also a great deal of different wordplay in the novel. Polizzotti notes how he addressed some of this -- notably: "the 'French girl' who haunts the protagonist's sexual nightmares has here undergone a shift in nationality from her original status as an 'Americaine,' in an attempt to preserve the character's parodic foreignness (complete with funny accent)" -- and naturally has to transpose a great deal, though most of this seems to work quite well, e.g.:

     Now, save for her crest of arms, I knew the wench from top to bottom . . . (thus: My nibs nibbling nimbly, in it up to my nuts—knowing that the thing was only a matter of watchamacall or thingamajig).

     Noehctucsereh her escutcheon, I saw red and bawled out: "—Talley-ho! To the stakes and counter-stakes. ... To the head—flanked—to the tail!" (From sinistre to dextre) Cut slice "Give no quarter!" Sliced head (from dextre to sinistre), indeed, headed slice (according to whether I was facing, or facing he who was facing, etc. . . .)

       Roche's typographical play reminds of Arno Schmidt, but whereas Schmidt is very much focused on the word-level, Roche is more concerned with the different lines of narrative -- the different voices -- in his much more musically-oriented (and 'composed') narrative -- as is also clear from the fact that the typography in Compact is, in fact, only a fall-back (made necessary by the limitations of printing in black and white), and the strands of the text were originally differentiated simply by the color of the print (making for a visually very different-looking text -- though of course Roche also plays with other aspects of typography and type-setting throughout the novel).
       Compact is an odd, challenging, playful text. Readers willing to invest some energy -- much, much more than straightforward prose demands -- will find considerable rewards here -- it's wild, and quite funny, and quite powerful emotionally -- but it is certainly a demanding text. - M.A.Orthofer

www.complete-review.com/reviews/modfr/rochem.htm?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Compact (1988) by Maurice Roche was translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti from the original Éditions du Seuil (1966) novel which appeared in the prestigious Tel Quel series edited by Philippe Sollers, and is published by the Dalkey Archive Press. This is a first novel that uses innovative typographic design with alternating type fonts while utilizing the space of the page for an enhanced visuality. In the 1960s when the novel became innovative in design, it also became more sophisticated in narration with a break from the objective descriptions of the Nouveau Roman which verged on scientific or crime writing to become writing In the wake of the Wake, as David Hayman put it, in the TriQuarterly 38 issue dedicated to novelists who were influenced by Finnegans Wake (1938) by James Joyce. The narrator of Compact is recovering from a mysterious health condition called amourosis caused by travel in time and space, and the black humor of the novel implies that the scene of the writing exists as a complex of puns: cranium, body, and pen demonstrating the generative techniques of the Nouveau Roman, yet creating a new genre of avant garde fiction that has become the semiotic novel with the use of visual signs in the graphic design of the page.

You shall be made sleepless even as you are left sightless. While you're penetrating the darkness, you'll penetrate into the night, getting in deeper and deeper, your already failing memory growing proportionally weaker as—at the end of a long lethargy—you become conscious of your condition. (How will you tell day from night?)

                                                           Compact

                                                           Maurice Roche

The passage from one scene of writing to another often brings us the more advanced in literary style, and we can be thankful that Maurice Roche has written this well crafted novel with a poetic density and visual complexity of thought that places it at the forefront of the avant garde in the 20th Century novel. 

Cardinal Richelieu raises his marshall's baton to bless the armies "A measure for nothing...the father, the son, three, four!—Pacem in terris—God damn them! cries General Custer, charge! with drawn swords!")
     With finger and cod-piece I conducted these paintings in rhythmic figures which became tighter and tighter (in an arithmetic progression) and, by degrees (in the same progression inverted, I forced a slow chromatic ascent, in a gradual increase (on each level a luctual inflection) up to—
                                                              D-sharp
                                                              Compact 

                                                              Maurice Roche

The location of Compact is within the mind of the reader/narrator, where the you refers to an imagined character who will perceive this city from a hallucinatory perspective, where every thought may be incorrect, each idea appearing to be false or illusory, or a variation on a master plot. The wise reader will realize the deception, and not be fooled by an unfair critique which may lead to unusual consequences.
I was "down the drain," completely washed out. Among all the accumulated acts of my life, I looked for one that I could really live by. And I wondered if this present event actually belonged to me. It fermented under the lid; but I had serious fade-outs in the dome! Where had I gotten? I certainly identified with someone. I was elsewhere; in a murder
                            at the center
on either                                                  side

                                                               Compact

                                                               Maurice Roche

When the narrator realizes that he must find "one that he can live by" the novel reaches its second profound moment of realization, because he is trying to chose a direction to follow which involves a literary trend. He foreshadows the novels of Raymond Federman who also writes with innovative typographic design, and whose life was influenced by war.
("—...I was a war-godmother...a son in the war...another war...always war in one's lifetime..."
                                                           his/her shattered laugh whose splinters seemed to chase after each other and fit together badly in the end
                                                            "—I wrote asking him to send me love letters
                                                             Compact
                                                             Maurice Roche
In a war which side should the narrator chose? Without studying closely he seems to be attracted by the black flag of the pirates, with the glamor of the black culture. As the novel progresses the narrator is indecisive in his perceptions, wanting to stay true to his own ideal of a well-managed society, yet perhaps feeling swept along in the momentum of political events as he transcends the reality which is not up to his expectations.
I felt it from left to right, knowing all the same that the firetruck was passing me (going down Boulevard Saint-Michel) from right to left; I mentally strained to re-establish its true direction, but the best I could obtain was a superimposition of two contrary movements irresistibly pulled toward the right
                                                                           at the same time the whole thing, pulling away from itself, formed a precious object in microstructure;
                                                              Compact
                                                              Maurice Roche
When the narrator mentions the Boulevard Saint-Michel one is reminded of the short story Blow Up (1966) by Julio Cortazar in which a photographer is walking along the boulevard while taking photographs of Paris, and later makes a photographic enlargement which suggests a potential story to his mind.
     Compact turns to other themes including the Japanese doctor who collects tattoos, and shows a complexity that is much greater than the average novel creating a masterwork of the avant garde. The narrator considers the transvestite theme developed by the Cuban Severo Sarduy who wrote Cobra (1972), and Christ on the Rue Jacob (2005), when Maurice Roche was hosting dinner parties in Paris for guests Severo Sarduy, Roland Barthes, and Mark Polizzotti. 

"he makes small things on large scale—which doesn't keep them from becoming frightening!

"he crushes words until they're reduced to a crackling of dried ink; — ..."onnyuonnthunntrovarrhounnstawn"...
                                                               Compact 
                                                               Maurice Roche
      

This passage is reminiscent of my own monumental Surrealist novel-in-progress Dream the Presence of the Circular Breast Starfish Topopgraphy which uses art imagery and abstraction in a way that is similar to Compact with its ongoing eroticism, its knowledge of contemporary classical music, and its linguistic theory inspired by Julia Kristeva and the Structuralist movement.
first step:  mark the difference of the present THEORETICAL FICTION to come, perverse/pervasive difference, unique principle (to be) followed:
                                                             A Reader's Guide to
                                                             Circus and Codex
                                                             James Leigh
Compact (1988) and the novels of Maurice Roche are the innovative models (to be) followed: by the new generation of innovative novelists. Substance, a review of theory and literary criticism, published the Maurice Roche issue in 1977 which includes articles and texts by David Hayman, Claudia Reeder, Stephen Heath, James Leigh, and others. 
Compact (1988) reads like the first step in the direction of abstract innovative writing that was followed by the C series of novels Circus, CodeX, Camarade, and the M series Memoire, Macabre, and Maladie Melodie, which represent a life's work of innovative writing that explores archeological and musical themes, novels that are deserving of translation into English, and of further critical attention. Compact is a theoretical novel at the forefront of the avant garde along with the novels of Philippe Sollers, Arno Schmidt, Claude Simon, and Ronald Sukenick. Reading Compact today is relevant for those who are considering the unrest caused by rebel movements, and the romance of life in Paris, where the narrator considers classical music theory in the context of fiction writing while foreshadowing the semiotic novel of the 21st Century.
David Detrich lives in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where he has just completed The Convergence of Two Narrative Lines Ascending, an ultramodern Surrealist novel written in minimal squares. He is working on Dream the Presence of the Circular Breast Starfish Topography, a monumental Surrealist novel written with innovative typographical design. His first novel Big Sur Marvels & Wondrous Delights (2001) is available from Amazon. He edits Innovative Fiction Magazine and Surrealist Star Clustered Illuminations. - David Detrich

http://www.innovative-fiction-magazine.com/2014/06/compact-by-maurice-roche_25.html

Mark Polizzotti’s ‘Memento Maurice’
‘Maurice Roche: Paradigm Lost and Found’ by Susan Suleiman

The setting: Maurice Roche’s apartment on Rue Berthollet in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, February 10, 1983.
          The protagonists: Maurice Roche (1924 [though he claimed 1925]-1997), novelist, composer, musicologist, author of a monograph on Monteverdi and of eight of the most challenging novels ever written, even for a period that saw more than its share of them. Maurice was fiftyeight at the time of this interview, an established figure in the world of French experimental literature. His first novel, Compact, which comes up several times in this conversation, had caused a stir when it was published in 1966. It, and most of Maurice’s subsequent books to this point, had been published by Editions du Seuil under the imprint of the Tel Quel movement. By the time of the interview, however, Tel Quel had disbanded and Maurice had moved away from it and its founder, Philippe Sollers—as evidenced here by his outburst when one of us made a joking reference to Maurice’s Tel Quel affiliations. Still, and despite the rather extreme stance he takes in this conversation, Maurice continued to frequent Sollers on and off over the following years, though the two men’s friendship was never lacking in barbs. At the time, Maurice was engaged in writing his new novel, referred to here by its working title, Amouroir, and eventually published as Je ne vais pas bien, mais il faut que j’y aille (1987). The other three participants were Jean-Louis Bouttes, professor of literature at the Université de Paris X (Nanterre), who had recently published his first book, a philosophical treatise on stupidity and intensity; Jean-Luc Giribone, a friend of Maurice and an editor at Editions du Seuil; and finally myself, at a crossroads between the end of university studies and the start of a career (which perhaps explains the tone of self-seriousness). I had met Maurice eight years before, introduced by Bouttes, and had ended up translating Compact (Dalkey Archive Press, 1988), as well as his third novel, CodeX, which translation has mercifully remained on the shelf.
          The excuse: A questionnaire Maurice had received from an American academic, a kind of survey about the notion of decadence in literature. Although the questionnaire itself is now lost, enough of it is quoted in this conversation to give a sense of its overall inanity. Suffice it to say that Maurice was rather annoyed to be lumped in with the other writers solicited (mostly Tel Quel and Structuralists) and with the entire concept of decadence, with which he felt he had no truck. This interview started as an attempt at a collective rebuttal, but most often veered off—through numerous hesitations, self-contradictions, and dead ends—onto entirely different, and altogether more evocative, byways.

Jean-Luc Giribone: I have a question. Having written Compact, Circus, CodeX, and so on, how does that weigh on you, how does it affect the way you write today? Is your relationship to writing the same as when you wrote CodeX or has it changed?
Maurice Roche: The same. Exactly the same. Except that I don’t… I don’t have to rewrite what I’ve already written. I could have amused myself by doing Compact 1, Compact 2, Compact 3, Compact 4… But each time, I look for something different. As Claude Bonnefoy put it, I’m an inventor of forms. But that doesn’t make me a formalist! When I have a story to tell, I like to find the form that corresponds to that story.
JLG: So you still pay attention to plot, that’s what I find surprising.
MR: Of course! Of course I do! Compact has a plot. Circus has a thousand of them, including the main one, about alcohol. That’s nothing new, just look at Under the Volcano—I even put in some references to a volcano. Circus is the story of an alcoholic who is driven to drink by everything happening around him. And CodeX is the code of illness, the story of a guy who’s waiting for death.read more: An Evening with Maurice Roche


To be born on the Day of the Dead might seem to presage a gloomy future. Maurice Roche, unique among contemporary French writers, who was born on that fatidic date, refused to acknowledge the coincidence as an omen of catastrophe.
He spent much of his life making a mock of mortality. His irreverent spirit took a macabre delight in deriding those who took death seriously. He would quote "The Latest Decalogue" by that disabused Victorian Arthur Hugh Clough, with whom he had much in common:

Thou shalt not kill; but needst not

strive

Officiously to keep alive.

Derision was his only defence against a life he despised.

Roche spent the war as a student in Lyons, then moved to Paris to start work as a journalist on Ce Soir (1946-48). Like almost every young man with literary leanings, he founded a short-lived magazine, Elements, in 1951. He did some reporting for various journals, and contributed to reviews both French and foreign.

His first book, Monteverdi (1960), was the first to be published in French on that divine composer. In the same year he composed music for the poems of Henri Pichette's Epiphanies, the first of Roche's many ventures into song and opera.

He made his mark in 1966 with a very original first novel, Compact, which Philippe Sollers brought to the attention of Seuil. It was published in his "Tel Quel" series. In a preface Sollers praises its liberty of form, its grim humour, its amused indifference to what are usually considered serious matters: disease, pain, loneliness and death itself. Recently, it was sumptuously re-edited by Tristram respecting all Roche's typographical eccentricities, and in seven colours, a different colour for each of the seven voices. Yet Roche never belonged to the "Tel Quel" group or the creators of the nouveau roman. He remained an exception, almost an outsider, unclassifiable.

Circus (1972), Codex (1974) and Opera bouffe (1975) are notable for their witty subversions of language and literary form, and belong to the tradition of Sterne, Rabelais, Jarry, Queneau and Jules Romains. They are composed of almost random fragments and short sequences, aphorisms, paroxysmal phrases and absurd black melodramatic interventions. Roche's gay obsession with death and dying made some readers feel distinctly uncomfortable, as did succeeding titles like Macabre, ou triomphe de la haute intelligence (1979), Testament and Maladie Melodie (both 1980), and especially Je ne vais pas bien mais il faut que j'y aille ("I'm Not Feeling Very Well But I'll Just Have To Get On With It"), which in 1987 won the Grand Prix de l'Humour Noir.

The first section of this grotesque gallimaufry is very topical because it introduces a racing cyclist in the Tour de France who specialises in contre la montre record-breaking and is nicknamed "Le Chrono" by the sporting press. It starts:

He was before his time . . . which was very short, short as eternal oblivion . . . He was cremated and a few grams of his ashes were collected in a sandglass that ran for three minutes only.

In Qui n'a pas vu Dieu n'a rien vu ("He Who Has Not Seen God Has Seen Nothing" - a sarcastic title from 1990), he writes: "I wasn't born in those days, but now I'm catching up with myself." He attacks hospitals and the medical profession with light-hearted bitterness: "In the science of medicine's present state - and given your own - it is possible to estimate (barring accidents) the exact time of your approaching demise" - another topical quote.

In Je ne vais pas bien mais il faut que j'y aille he continues in the same vein:

I live death at every moment. I get the feeling I came into this world with death on the brain . . . In our family, ever since the remotest antiquity, we have kept up the custom of passing away so many times, it has become hereditary.

And:

One should first of all die, then begin to live - but why live anyhow?

Maurice Roche was a prose writer of great ingenuity and charm, with a love of abstruse word-play that makes him almost untranslatable, and despite the lifelong duelling with death, full of sour puckish humour that sometimes makes one wince, then giggle helplessly. Like all true farceurs, he was deadly serious.

In Maladie Melodie he wrote: "Is the pain going away, or am I just getting used to it?" Not a bad joke for the Day of the Dead.

Maurice Roche, writer: born Clermont-Ferrand, France 2 November 1924; died Sevres, France 19 July 1997. - James Kirkup

https://www.independent.co.uk/author/james-kirkup

COMPACT from bruno wagner on Vimeo.