A Void (40 page)

my fixation, my constant fixation, was primarily to concoct an

artifact as original as it was illuminating, an artifact that would,

or just possibly might, act as a stimulant on notions of construc-

tion, of narration, of plotting, of action, a stimulant, in a word,

on fiction-writing today.

Whilst, in my first books, writing principally about my situ-

ation, my psychology, my social background, my capacity (or

incapacity) of adaptation, my mania for commodification (almost

tantamount, as is said on occasion, to what you might call "thing-

ification"), it was my wish, by drawing inspiration from a

(modish) linguistic dogma claiming primacy for what Saussurian

structuralists call a
signifiant -
it was my wish, I say, to polish

up this tool that I had at my disposal, a tool that until now I

would ply without pain or strain; not that it was my ambition

to diminish any contradiction intrinsic to such a constraint nor,

naturally, that I was wholly unconscious of it, but by contrast

that I thought I might fulfil such an ambition by fully assuming

that (as I say) modish structuralist dogma, which was, in my

writing of this book, not a handicap, not a constriction, but, all

in all, a spur to my imagination.

What was my purport in imposing this constraint? Offhand,

with hindsight, I can think of many factors bubbling about in

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my brain, but I ought to admit right away that its origin was

totally haphazard, touch and go, a flip of a coin. It all got out

of hand with a companion calling my bluff (I said I could do it,

this companion said I could not); and I should admit, too, that

so inauspiciously shaky was that launching pad, I had no inkling

at all that, as an acorn contains an oak, anything solid would

grow out of it.

Initially I found such a constraint faintly amusing, if that; but

I stuck to my guns. At which point, finding that it took my

imagination down so many intriguing linguistic highways and

byways, I couldn't stop thinking about it, plunging into it again

and again, at last giving up all my ongoing work, much of which

I was actually about to finish.

So was born, word by word, and paragraph by paragraph, a

book caught within a formalist grid doubly arduous in that it

would risk striking as insignificant anybody ignorant of its sol-

ution, a book that, crankily idiosyncratic as it no doubt is, I

instantly found thoroughly satisfying:

a) I, as an author, having not an iota of inspiration (and, in

addition, placing no faith at all in inspiration as a Platonic form!)

was displaying in this book just as much imagination as a Ponson

or a Paulhan; and (b) I was, most notably, and to my own total

gratification, slaking a thirst as constant as it is callow (not to

say childish): a soft spot on my part - what am I saying? a passion

- for accumulation, saturation, imitation, quotation, translation

and automatisation.

And soon, my faith in my ability to carry it off growing day

by day, I thought I might start giving my plotting a symbolic

turn, so that, by following my book's story hand in hand until

totally coinciding with it, it would point up, without blatantly

divulging, that Law that was its inspiration, that Law from which

it would draw, not without occasional friction, and not without

occasional vulgarity, but also not without occasional humour,

nor, I think, without brio, a rich, fruitful narration, honing my

writing skills in unthought-of ways.

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I was thus to grasp a significant fact: that, just as, say, Frank

Lloyd Wright built his own working and living conditions, so

was I fashioning,
mutatis mutandis
, a prototypical product which

- spurning that paradigm of articulation, organisation and

imagination dominant in today's fiction, abandoning for good

that rampant psychologisation which, along with a bias towards

mawkish moralising (in fact, not so much mawkish as downright

mawk
), is still for most critics a mainspring of our national gift for

(or myth of?) "clarity" and "proportion" and "polish" - sought inspiration in a linguistic avant-gardism virtually unknown in this

country, and for which no critic has a good word in so far as

it's known at all, but which allows of a possibility of imitating,

simulating and honouring a tradition that has brought forth a

Gargantua
and a
Tristram Shandy
and a
Mathias Sandorf
and a
Locus Solus
and (why not?) a
Bijur
or a
Four bis,
books for which I had sworn undying admiration, without daring to harbour any

illusions that I might possibly attain in any of my own works

such jubilation and such fanciful humour, by dint of irony and

wit, paradox and prodigality, by dint, in short, of an imagination

knowing just how far to go too far.

So, as I think, in this work, for all that its origin was chaotic,

I finally did satisfy most of my goals and obligations. Not only

did I spin out a fairly straightforward story but I had a lot of fun

with it (wasn't it Raymond Q. Knowall who said that it was

hardly worth writing if it was simply as a soporific?), fun, princi-

pally (by locating and disclosing that contradiction in which all

syntactic, structural or symbolic signification is bound up), in my

ambition of participating, of collaborating, in a common policy

to adopt a radical, wilfully conflictual position vis-a-vis fiction, a

position that, implicitly critical as it is of a Troyat, a Mauriac, a

Blondin or a Cau, of any Quai Conti,
Figaro
or Prix Goncourt

hack, might still chart a path along which fiction could again find

an inspiration, a charm, a stimulus, in narrational virtuosity of a

sort thought lost for good.

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METAGRAPHS

E SERVEM LEX EST, LEGEMQUE T E N E R E NECESSE EST?

SPES CERTE NEC MENS, ME R E F E R E N T E , DEEST;

SED LEGE, ET ECCE EVEN NENTEMVE GREGEMVE

TENENTEM.

P E R L E G E , NEC ME RES E D E R E R E R E LEVES

LORD HOLLAND

Eve's Legend

The magic alphabet, the mysterious hieroglyph, come to us

only in an incomplete and garbled form, garbled either by

the passage of time or by those with a vested interest in our

ignorance; should we retrieve the letter which has been lost

or the sign which has been effaced, should we reconstruct the

dissonant scale, we shall regain our authority in the world of

the mind.

GERARD DE NERVAL

(quoted by Paul Eluard,
Poesie

invoUmtaire et poesie intentionnelle)

If one had a dictionary of primitive languages, one would

find in it obvious vestiges of an earlier language spoken by

an enlightened people, and even were these not to be found,

it would mean only that the degradation had reached such a

point that they had been wholly eradicated.

DE MAISTRE

Les Soirees de Samt-Petersbourg

(quoted by Flaubert:
Brouillons de Bouvard;

quoted by Genevieve Bolleme)

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The language of the Papuans is very impoverished; each tribe

has its own language, and its vocabulary is ceaselessly dimin-

ished because, after every death, a few words are eliminated

as a sign of mourning.

E. BARON

Geographic

(quoted by Roland Barthes:
Critique et Vcrite)

It is only in that instant when the laws are silent that great

actions erupt.

SADE

Even for a word, we will not waste a vowel.

ANGLO-INDIAN PROVERB

"The unknown vowel". I have studied the phonemes of every

language, past and present, in the world. Being principally

interested in those vowels which are, as it were, the pure

elements, the primitive cells, of language, I have followed

vocalic sounds on their secular journeys, I have hearkened

across the ages to the roar of the A, the whistle of the I, the

bleat of the E, the hoot of the U and the snores of the O.

The innumerable marriages that vowels have contracted with

other sounds no longer hold any secrets for me. And yet, now

almost at the end of my tareer, I realise that I still await,

still anticipate; the unknown Vowel, the Vowel of Vowels that

will contain all others, that will solve all proglems, a Vowel

that is both beginning and end, that will take all of a man's

breath to pronounce, by a monstrous distension of the jaws,

as though combining in a single cry the yawn of boredom, the

howl of hunger, the moan of love and the rattle of death.

When I have found it, creation itself will be shallowed up

and nothing will remain - nothing but the UNKNOWN

NOWEL!

JEAN TARDIEU

Un mot pour un autre