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/
Robert Pinget, Mahu, Or, the Material, Trans.
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.
excerpt
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
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/779622.The_Inquisitory
Robert Pinget, Passacaglia, Trans. by Barbara
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.
Robert Pinget, That Voice, Red Dust, 1983.
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
Robert Pinget, Fable, Calder Publications, 1980.
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):
