Harry Mathews (1930–2017)

A strange name for a strange and intriguing book.
Oulipo is a contraction of Ouvroir de Littérature potentielle, which roughly translates as ‘ workshop of potential literature’.
Oulipo is a group of French speaking mathematicians and writers who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. One of its founders, Raymond Queneau is the author of Exercises in Style.

The book is a compendium of different techniques and approaches which are described, often with illuminating show more examples. It gives a fascinating glimpse into a host of different ways of thinking and looking at the world.

One of the most fascinating consequences of constraints is that, far from reducing ideas and opportunities, the introduction of constraints serves as the stimulus to new ideas.

Just take a look at the spam arriving with your email to see the creative lengths that spammers will go to, to get past anti-spam software. Or the lengths that car owners in the UK will go to, to construct words from the very limited patterns of letters and digits allowed on a number plate

The book opens with Queneau’s ‘Hundred thousand million poems’ Ten pages each of 14 strips of text, that can be combined to create this immense number of different poems. From there onwards the book is a treasure trove of ideas to change the way you see.

My personal favourite is ‘The Skinhead Hamlet’ by Richard Curtis which uses the technique of substituting a vocabulary drawn from a radically different environment, in this case ‘skinheads’, and applying it to Shakespeare’s play. The language is inevitably strong, but it had me crying with laughter.

This is a book that will enliven parts of your brain that others simply cannot reach. show less

Mathews’ faux-roman-á-clef spy-caper conjuration feels just right at this moment when everyone seems to be running a con, the discourse is tetchy and hollow, and retreat to the shadows feels like an affirmation of resolve.

This is Harry’s last novel. (He died in 2017 at the age of 86). He is at the height of his craft. Good fiction is art/ifice. Harry is pretending. Art provides a kind of paradise, says Harry. The milieu sounds real―Parisian street names, his artist friends. Events in show more the news circa 1973 jangle like an incantation: Le Pen, Baader-Meinhof, Pinochet. Is it dangerous? The stops along your itinerary are arranged in alphabetical order. Harry writes for fun. He says you can never trust a novelist. His mock infiltration is blocked when he is outed as an Oulipian. When Harry’s tryst with the seamstress is almost discovered, he hides in a rolled-up carpet and is accidentally delivered to a dinner party at the home of a notorious fascist thug where he is fingered as a patsy but escapes with the help of a nymphomaniacal dwarf twin who seduces him on the altar of Les Six Saints Jean, but at the last minute the sexton appears, his ultrawhite skin cultivated as a kind of inverse totemic shrine to an unconsummated affair with a dark black boy on Corsica. Perhaps things begin to unravel. Harry is at the height of his craft. He goes on the lam. Nabokov said that a writer’s greatest creation is his readers, and in the end Harry is saved by his. Goodbye, Harry. show less

If a writer’s associations tell us anything, consider that Harry Mathews, along with Kenneth Koch, founded the literary journal Locus Solus, named after the book by Raymond Roussel. Mathews was the first American member of Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle), which at different times also included Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and Italo Calvino.

Written in the form of journal entries over a two-week period by a man recovering from some kind of psychological episode, The show more Journalist is an inside-out rendering of the writing life and a meditation on the web of linkages—both inanimate and intimate—that makes a life.

The recording of daily existence by the narrator/journalist requires ever more precise categories (matters involving people and matters involving things, matters that are outside me, the ideas and feelings of other people, dreams and thoughts about the future) and attention to ‘subcontinuities.’ He contemplates writing in different colors.

Dear journalist, stay boggled.

Descriptions get more and more elaborate, more absurdly detailed (a gray-green suit nurtured to floppiness, a large patchwork-chrome brooch apparently recovered from a plane wreck). He notices that his disgust with those around him grows milder when he writes down his thoughts as they occur. He begins to include entries for “things not done,” bits of dreams (standing on a pile of desert rubble, he hears himself say out loud, “I know it’s not spelled with a p, you fucking bedant”).

He is ashamed of old feelings, obsessed with the signs and warnings from his body: when leg straightened, clicks; right hand: ligaments of 3rd and 4th fingers strained (last week, but how? Pulling at something that wouldn’t give, but what?); right cheek: superficial numbness (when did I first “not notice” this?). He has 27 categories of “body omens” and looks forward to more,

…the relief of hopelessness preferred to boiling uncertainty.

He knows he is no writer; he’s not after profundity, but 'extensiveness.' He is saving each day to live again. The journal gives exceptional alertness of mind and sensibility. What is important is to record everything, including the act of recording. My life has not been wasted. Whatever I lose, I have this.

Mathews gives the impression of being fully in command of his prose. Pathos and black humor and shades of human thought reveal the nature of the world. Not a sentence is out of place. What seems to be at stake is the meaning of the narrator’s actions and therefore of his existence, and so it is his reasons, not states of mind, that confront each other—not feelings and passions but their logic (ref. Nicola Chiaromonte's Worm of Consciousness).

What you don’t know about the sloughs and bird’s nest inside you takes priority over being speechless when you face a mushroom.

In the last few pages the narration shifts to the third person, and the journal ends allegorically.

Bravo, Harry. show less

"The Conversions" is an object lesson in the dangers of emulation. It is based on Raymond Roussel, and some pages and images are very close to his work -- they could be mistaken for Roussel if they were presented without context -- but at the same time it is very far from him, and even in a certain sense, as far from Roussel as it is possible to get.

In the "Paris Review" interview, Mathews says he "didn’t use [Roussel's] methods specifically, but mine were similar in that they were based show more on relationships between words, often puns" -- which is the method Roussel describes in "How I Wrote Certain of My Books." Mathews also offers this, as a generalization: "The whole thing is based on misunderstanding language." (tinyurl.com/6d2m862)

"The Conversions" is a series of short chapters, each with a story involving a puzzle. Some are descriptions of machines, exactly as in Roussel; others are translations of texts, or stories told by people the narrator visits. Each chapter is different in style, historical references, and in the kind of puzzle. Mathews is closest to Roussel when he describes machines, like the undersea clock that incorporates a miraculous acid held in place by magnets (pp. 164-71), the wasps who "scorch" bacteria, producing a cure for an epidemic (p. 51), or the painter's machine that supposedly produces unusual colors (p. 119-28).

Mathews is more scholarly than Roussel, and he plays with Latin puns (pp. 110-18), German prose (there is a chapter in German, pp. 172-80), and French. He also knows more about some historical questions than Roussel may have -- especially medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music, including a chapter on Orlando di Lasso. But those differences aside, much of the material in "The Conversions" could have been imagined by Roussel 40 years before Mathews's book.

But he is very far from Roussel in two crucial particulars.

First, he presents the solutions to each puzzle, or the impossibility of a solution, in each chapter together with the puzzle. In "Impressions of Africa," all the strange performances and machines are described in the first half of the book, and then "explained" in the second half, but the "explanations" prove to be as enigmatic as the expositions, and the overall "explanation" (that the performers are captives of the African king) doesn't come close to serving the ordinary function of an explanation, which is to dispel any sense of mystery or irrationality in the setting. But in "The Conversions," each chapter concludes with the narrator's summary. Most chapters yield a small insight, and the narrator continues on to the next puzzle, exactly as in a murder mystery. Roussel defers explanation, so that each new episode in "Impressions of Africa," "New Impressions of Africa," and "Locus Solus" accumulates a perverse and increasingly inexplicable--and for some, intolerable--opacity. Mathews writes more like a murder mystery writer, bringing readers along with partial solutions, promising clarity at the end.

Second, Mathews ends by declaring the puzzle is insoluble. He does this abruptly, but there are also clues that the book as a whole will not resolve. For me, the strongest of those is the throwaway comment, toward the end of the chapter on the painter's machine, that the mechanism doesn't actually produce unusual colors for the artist, but was "only a means of supplying him with material for the exercise of his talent" --exactly in the way the puzzles serve the book "The Conversion" rather than the truth of the narrative in "The Conversion" (p. 127). In the "Paris Review" interview, Mathews says:

"The ends of my books are also designed in a way that subverts any illusion that what you have become involved in is anything but the book itself. In The Conversions, as you approach the end of the book, you get to a part where the narrator doesn’t understand the last of three riddles. The whole quest falls apart. What happens next? You turn the page and are greeted with nine pages of German. This infuriated people."

This is very far from Roussel, for whom it would be irrational and misguided to admit, in the book, that the puzzles and mysteries are only there to serve the art of fiction. It's the exact opposite: Roussel writes from the other side of the mirror, as if everything he is saying is in earnest, and the created world he presents is utterly true. That is the crucial move that ensures enigma, as Michel Foucault observed in "Death and the Labyrinth."

So: as an object lesson in the dangers of emulation, "The Conversions" shows that the temptation to copy, or surpass, the effects of a writer can miss the forest for the trees. In Roussel, the trees are fascinating and strange, but nowhere near as strange as the forest, which remains as silent and free of "explanation" as a real forest. In Mathews, the forest is literature, and the rules that produce his text, even if they are "from Mars" as Perec said, are all in the service of compelling writing. Roussel had no idea about writing in that sense, because he was too deeply deluded. show less