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| Not really. Just playing. |
“The dream which occupies the
tortuous mind of every palindromist is that somewhere within the confines of
the language lurks the Great Palindrome, a nutshell which not only fulfills the
intricate demands of the art, flowing sweetly in both directions, but which
also contains the Final Truth of Things.”
Alistair Reid
Anyone who has ever tinkered with a word search or an anagram has played
with palindromes. The ability to see words backwards and forwards (or upside
down, inside out or diagonally) predisposes one to the Oulipean constraint of
the palindrome. George Perec, never one
to shy away from lexographic challenges, penned his “Le Grand Palindrome” using
more than 1000 words. Even readers
proficient in French find it challenging, despite Perec’s noble effort at
including some sense of a story intertwined with the word games. The first and final paragraphs are about as
deep into the text as most people manage. Fellow Oulipean Harry Matthews and
Perec friend translated them as follows (from Cornell University professor
Stephen Saperstein Frug’s blog):
Trace the unequal palindrome. Snow. A trifle,
Hercules would say. Rough penitence, this writing born as Perec. The read arch
is too heavy: read vice-versa....
Reading it backwards, to complete the palindrome, it is translated by
Matthews as:
Desire this dreamed-of decease: Here goes! If
he carries, entombed, this penitence, this writing will disturb no lucre: Old
witch, your treachery will bite into neither the shore nor the space between,
Frug included, on his palindromic blog post of 11-02-2011, an interesting
perspective on the massive palindrome from Perec’s biographer. It points out
what many encounter with some of the more obtuse Oulipean constraints:
...it is undeniably difficult to read.
Knowledge of the constraint disarms critical faculties; when you know that it
is a monster palindrome, you tend to see nothing but its palindromic design. At
Manchester, in 1989, doctored photocopies and unsigned handwritten versions
were given to students and teachers of French who were asked, respectively, to
use it for the exercise of explication de texte and to mark it as an
essay. Perec's palindrome barely made sense to the readers. Some teachers took
it for the work of an incompetent student, while others suspected that they had
been treated to a surrealist text produced by "automatic writing".
Those with psychiatric interests identified the author as an adolescent in a
dangerously paranoid state; those who had not forgotten the swinging sixties
wondered whether it was LSD or marijuana that had generated the disconnected
images of the text. Readers seem to project their won positive and negative
fantasies onto Perec's palindrome, as they do onto other difficult, obscure and
unattributed works.
-- David Bellos, Georges
Perec: a Life in Words, p. 429
The fact that Perec himself called the work penitence casts an uneasy eye
on the literary merits of the exercise. Does the use of a constraint enhance or
inhibit both the writer and the reader? One could certainly argue both points,
but the unreadable realities of Perec’s text points to the latter.
Another extreme Oulipo creator of palindromes was Luc Etienne Perin. He
loved ludic linguistics, including Spoonerisms and the poetic game of Bouts-Rimés
(rhyming ends). He particularly loved puns, publishing his own patapèteries
(patapuns) in the notebooks for the “College de Pataphysique.” He defined some
parameters for the Oulipian palindrome, and created further variations in the
genre, including the phonetic palindrome and the Moebius strip palindrome. The
first half of the poem is written on one side of a narrow strip of paper, the
second half is written on the backside upside down, and then the paper is
twisted, the ends joined, and one continuous poem is created.
Here is one of Luc Etienne’s Moebius Strip poems:
Trimer, trimer sans cesse L'amour toujours l'amour,
Pour moi c'est la sagesse est d'un faible secours.
Je ne puis flemmarder La pire absurdité :
Car j'aime mon métier chercher
la volupté.
Il faut faire ici-bas c'est vraiment éreintant
le devoir, sans faux-pas, de gaspiller son temps,
subsister sans folie et grande est ma souffrance,
est le but de ma vie. quand je suis en vacances.
(my bad-French translation is:)
To slave away, slave away unceasingly The
love always the love,
For me it is wiser is
one feeble help.
I then loaf about The
worst nonsense
Because I like my trade to
seek pleasure:
It is necessary to work while here below it
is always exhausting
An obligation, without falsity, and
a waste of my time,
To remain without madness and large is my suffering,
Is the goal of my life. when I am on holiday.
I tried to generate this on a Moebius strip without much success. I did
have a lot of fun playing, and ended up making some lovely cat toys for my
writing companions. Quite the ludic experience both poetically and physically,
but in the end I was much like the students in the Manchester experiment –
unsure of what I was reading. I ended up reading the two verses of the poem
across the lines, so that it now reads like this:
To slave away, slave away unceasingly – the love, always the love,
For me it is wiser, is one feeble help,
I then loaf about - the worst nonsense -
because I like my trade. To seek
pleasure,
it is necessary to work while here below - it is always exhausting,
an obligation, without falsity, and a waste of my time,
To remain without madness, and large is my suffering,
Is the goal of my life when I am on holiday.
Not bad, I guess, but as to its literary merit, I remain somewhat
unconvinced. The Oulipo constraints range/d from mildly amusing to
mathematically exotic, and writing within them was/is both challenging and
cathartic. Released from the obligation of unbound, kismet-ic inspiration,
creativity becomes a matter of coloring within the lines. It is both a release
and an imprisonment, finding words and stories to fit within the blocks of the
crossword puzzle while still creating works with something to say beyond “oh,
look, it fits!”
There is certainly merit in word games and cranial challenges. At the
very least it is fun to play. Luc Etienne’s take on Adam and Eve is entertaining:
extrait d'Adam et Eve en palindromes
Un nu né de l'Eden
Noble bel, bon ...
...
Eve rêve
Rose verte et rêves or
Eté ta lèvre serpent ne préserve la tête
Ni l'âme le malin
Emu serpent ne presume
Eve
Tate l'état
Si ne plieras pareil pénis ...
...
sexe vêtu tu te vexes
Born of a naked Eden
Noble nice, good ...
Eve dreams
Pink, green and golden dreams
In summer her head is not protected from the lipped snake
Or from the evil soul
The emoting snake cannot presume that
Eve Feels the state
If no equally plying penis ...
Sex dressed in you is highly vexing.
But does it add to the canon of creation stories? One could certainly
argue against it. Does Italo Calvino’s “If on a winter’s night a traveller”
have literary merit? One could certainly argue for it. I would.
Perhaps the answer lies beyond the constraints just as the readers in “traveller”
lie together reading outside the stories. It is not so much a matter of “do the
constraints make good literature;” it is instead a matter of “is it good
literature” – with or without awareness of the constraints. The literary merit
stands on its on (or doesn’t), and the constraints are puzzles one can choose
to play with (or not). And the authors can come just to play or leave a lasting
impression.
We all get to play the way we want to, and make up our own rules of the
game.
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