Yuriy Tarnawsky

This book is full of misjudgments. First, it misjudges the effect, force, and interest of short sentences. All the sentences in the book are brief. All of them, in all 451 pages. None are sentence fragments. So the book does not experiment with modernist prose. It is apparently intended to emulate Beckett. It is apparently intended to be hypnotic. It is apparently intended to hint at the book's hidden and rule-bound structure. But it is a mannerism. And the mannerism is not connected to the content of the book. As the subjects change the writing remains the same. Tarnawsky could have learned from Stein. Use fragments. Vary. Long and short. Don't just declare again and again.

The book also misjudges its form. It is billed as a novel. It is actually 200 two-page prose poems. There is a deliberate avoidance of the obligation of narrative. That avoidance is not tempered by moments when rules can be guessed. That avoidance is not tempered by the emergence of any new structure. That avoidance is undermined by individual passages that show the author is not a machine. He is a late surrealist, working in a well-known tradition. When he writes pages of successful surrealist prose, he undermines his own attempt to pretend he is entirely rule-bound.

The book misjudges the device of the dream. Many sections begin by announcing they are dreams. That can work well when other sections provide contrasting reality. Here none do. Many dreams could just as well have happened in waking life. Many episodes of waking life would have been dreams. There is no point in declaring some are dreams. It is an annoying tic, a crutch that supports nothing.

The book misjudges affect and emotion. Most of it is meant to be curiously passionless. Sex is described mechanically and carefully. Emotions are simple. Many times sections end with characters being dumbly happy, astonished, pleased. That is intended to convey childlike wonder and purity. It ends up being simpleminded with no clear reason. Then there is one section, near the end, in which the main character rapes someone. The main character's name is Hwbrgdtse. It is meant to be unpronounceable. I will write more on that in a moment. The section is called 'Hwbrgdtse Rapes a Girl.' In it, Hwbrgdtse plans an executes a rape. It is described step by step, along with his thoughts. It is intended to be experimental. It is horrifying. It is like a fragment of 'In Cold Blood.' Perhaps, in another context (I have to be careful not to make my sentences too long, or use anything other than the most schoolbookish grammaer), that could have been interesting. But it makes a reader wonder: am I supposed to be thinking the entirety of this book is written by a psychopath? And the answer to that is clearly No, because many sections are also intended to be childlike, amusing, funny, and many other things. So it means the author has completely failed to imagine the entirety of his own project. And this brings me to a conclusion.

I know why these things are misjudged. It is because the author uses 'a complex mathematical scheme' to determine what he writes about. Even without knowing he used mathematical rules (and I know nothing more: I only read the back cover copy), I would have guessed. Many sections have unexpected transitions of the kind that are impelled by rules. But the authors in Oulipo knew that not all rules result in expressive forms. As an author you also have to look back on your work after the rules have been followed, and read it again as if you did not know the rules. Only then can you see what you have made. This is a very common failure in rule-bound surrealist prose, so let me say it again: not every rule produces an expressive result. Not every unexpected meeting of metaphors is interesting. Tarnawsky could learn a lot from Leiris, who did not follow rules, and he could learn a lot from Perec, who did. The back cover also says Tarnawsky has 'developed... a substitute for the traditional architecture of the novel.' The reason he hasn't is because he does not listen, as a reader, to what he produces, as a mathematician. There is productive psychosis in this book, but Tarnawsky has to see where it appears as psychosis in order to control it as a novelist.

(As a postscript, and an example of the author's lack of awareness of his function as an author: There is a section, late in the book, just before Hwbrgdtse dies, in which goes to a teacher to learn how to pronounce his name. It is whimsical, but disconnected from the rest of the novel, where the issues never arises; and that disconnection is neither supported by half-visible mathematical rules, which might have shown readers why such an intrusion was required, nor contradicted by adjoining sections, which pursue other subjects without every mentioning problems with pronunciation. So the section appears exactly as it is: something enjoined by the author's hidden schemata. It can express only the author's lack of understanding that evidence of a hidden structure is insufficient to sustain interest. Compare that to the fascinating and bizarre effect of the book's final section, in which the author goes in search of a watch repairman, even though he has just died, in the previous section. That is an expressive, surrealist invention. The section in which Hwbrgdtse attempts to pronounce his name is an inexpressive, pointlessly opaque, unaffecting, uninterestingly illegible interpolation in the uninterestingly illegible schema of the book as a whole.)… (plus d'informations)