I Goldfarb
BlazeVox Books ($22)

by Michael Boughn

I Goldfarb’s K: A 21st Century Canzoniere is a marvel, with all the deep roots of that word (“to wonder at, be astonished”) still living there, squirming around. For one thing, there hasn’t been a book like this in quite a while—it contains 590 love poems, many of them classic Petrarchan sonnets dedicated to a student a good fifty years younger than the poet. Modeled on Petrarch’s Canzoniere, which was written almost 700 years ago, Goldfarb’s 21st Century update is an epic spiritual love poem in the age of online dating and televised courting, an age in which the cynicism about love grows exponentially in relation to its commodification and use. It is “a chocolate paradise of two” that leaves us marveling at its extraordinary accomplishment.

Petrarch’s book was unique. Often identified as the “father of Humanism,” Petrarch approached his relation to Laura, the object of his poetry, as a man in love caught between carnal desire and awe at her purity. No divine vision, a la his predecessor Dante, flowed from that. Instead Petrarch gave us the anxiety of mortal love and desire, the human drive/capacity that was first seen as ennobling and defining and has gone on to become a major, if not the major, commodity in late capitalism, the stuff of every pop song ever written as well as the most powerful marketing tool ever invented.

But there has always been more to it. Commenting on Dante, Giorgio Agamben proposed that “Beatrice is the name of the amorous experience of the event of language at play in the poetic text itself.” That is exactly what Goldfarb gives us; written at the other end of that 700 year run of humanism, K: A 21st Century Canzoniere introduces a different order of thinking/music to an old order of poetry and thought. It is the difference, say, between a world that accepts a poet’s erotic dedication to a thirteen-year-old and a world that would throw him in jail for it. Goldfarb’s Canzoniere implicates us in its measure of that difference through the continuous production of modulating sound, prosodic compositions which soar from the banal to the sublime. The poems vary between iambic pentameter, iambic tetrameter, common measure, fourteeners, and occasional eruptions of free verse. Canto 14 is an example of the strangeness of the tetrameter which ought to be trite but manages to propel us through a consideration of Agamben’s “poetic text” to an experience of “paradise”:

I’ve no brief for their quality
or their publishability
or for their readability
or minimal utility

if you should come to question them
you’d likely find expressed in them
laments of lost virility
harbingers of senility

yet an imperative divine
bids me extol the tender soul
your body helps me to divine

more than for Platonists of old
the earthly beauty that I see
embodies paradise to be

Goldfarb gives himself over to the energy of this unlikely relation, which leads to a kaleidoscopic “language event” formed out of successive arrangements of moods arising from the formal provocation of the tradition and the impetus of the emotional rollercoaster as it catapults toward its inevitable end through laughter, awe, and tears.

Through it all, Goldfarb maintains a constant recognition of the complexity of the mystery of writing that goes hand in hand with the complexity and mystery of this unlikely love, even in the midst of his reclamation of forms that are no longer active in most poets’ toolbox. But it is 2015, and sublimity is catch as catch can these days, a fact Goldfarb notes in often self-deprecating humor, at once both ruthless and tender in its seeming naiveté. Canto 21 begins, “If I had my druthers / I’d write for no others / writing in adoration / is my Bronxian vocation.” Rhyming “druthers” and “others,” and shifting from two six-syllable lines to a seven-syllable line to an eight-syllable line creates an experience at once awkward and honest. “Druthers,” drawn from comic strip dialogue, locates us a world of the common that ought to be the antithesis of love’s kingdom, but turns out to be our genuine measure. To then go on to rhyme “Petrarch” with “ballpark” is above and beyond the call of any poem, but Goldfarb does it with panache, as he weaves his marvelous love poem to its conclusion.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

Edited by Thomas A. Easton
and Judith K. Dial
Pink Narcissus ($15)

by Kelsey Irving Beson

In their feisty introduction to the short story collection Deco Punk: The Spirit of the Age, editors Thomas A. Easton and Judith K. Dial outline their vision for a new literary movement of science-driven fiction chronologically situated between the two World Wars. While the editors cite steampunk as an influence, they ultimately frame deco punk as opposed to the popular genre, which is “past its prime . . . static and antiprogressive.” They assert that deco punk, with its focus on technological rather than fantastic elements, is “more in tune with the 21st century.” To support this claim, they cite steampunk’s improbable and ahistorical conventions, both the funny (such as top hats worn while piloting dirigibles) and the not-so-funny (such as the glossing over of the Victorian era’s oppressive gender roles and marginalization of the poor). As the first story in the collection serendipitously states, “The age of steam is done, however strong it now appears.”

In addition to steampunk, the writing displays the influence of a multitude of other genres, to varying effect. At its strongest, this pastiche feels loving and organic—Golden Age comics characters fit seamlessly into a plot straight out of Edgar Rice Burroughs in Paul Di Filippo’s “Airboy and Vooda Visit the Jungles of the Moon”; William Racicot’s improbably endearing “Berenice Bobs Your Hair” reimagines F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age would-be social climber as a witchy hairdresser. Inevitably, some of the stories are less nimble as they hop across narrative tropes. For example, the initially promising “Quicksilver” goes from Thieves Like Us to The Boys From Brazil fast enough to give the reader whiplash. Similarly, the collection’s first entry, “Silver Passing in Sunlight,” wants to be both an Exorcist-tinged possession tale and a tech-driven, historically-grounded narrative, but the supernatural element feels tacked-on and, ultimately, the most compelling character is a train. While it’s an intriguing conceit, unfortunately, the end result isn’t exactly two great tastes that taste great together. However, even when things don’t quite turn out, Deco Punk’s willingness to explore different tropes and tones works in the book’s favor—each story stands out from the others, no mean feat in genre fiction.

Similarly, several of the stories have both paranormal and scientific overtones, with the former occasionally outweighing the latter. Readers interested in the more fantastic or character-centric elements of genre fiction will find things to like here, in spite of the fact that the collection’s theme is nominally technology-driven. In others, progress and discovery are the true heroes, in all their shiny, Gernsbackesque glory. Optimism isn’t the only thing that these works have in common with early science fiction: like the speculative stories of the between-the-wars milieu that inspired them, occasionally the plots can feel like mere contraptions on which to hang the science. Fortunately, these moments are relatively rare, and the best stories manage to integrate science, character, and narrative in a way that is satisfying, even poignant—such as Shariann Lewitt’s “Symmetry,” whose heroine, living in a Weimar Berlin circumscribed by starvation and sexism, finds comfort in math, which “has shown me the clear, safe place where knowledge is true and eternal.” In addition, many readers will appreciate the fact that the collection prominently features women authors and sympathetic, fully-realized female and gender-bending characters.

Deco Punk’s greatest strength lies in its granularity—in terms of genre, narrative strategy, and tone, each of these stories is distinct and memorable. There’s also enough similarity here for the collection to feel satisfying and cohesive, warts and all. While fans of speculative and fantastic fiction can probably find room on their shelves and in their hearts for both deco and steam, Easton and Dial make a strong case for the relevance of their (ostensibly) more down-to-earth brainchild over its fanciful predecessor.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

Patti Smith
Knopf ($25)

by Christopher Luna

M Train, Patti Smith’s follow-up to the National Book Award-winning Just Kids, is an elegiac exploration of loss, the mystical power of objects that hold sentimental value, the joy to be taken from a good detective story, and the inexorable pull of place. Our narrator travels in an eternal search for good coffee, following clues left behind in the work of cultural elders such as Arthur Rimbaud, Frida Kahlo, Jean Genet, and Paul Bowles. This leads her on a journey that serves as a kind of divination born of the fan’s devotion and the artist’s hunger for answers. While hers is no traditional memoir, we are treated to poetic ruminations on the nature of time and deep knowledge on arcane subject matter such as the exact worth of a hill of beans. At a book launch event at Portland’s Newmark Theater in November, Smith explained that her previous memoir was written because it was her friend Robert Mapplethorpe’s dying wish that she tell their story. Therefore, Just Kids had a design, and she felt a sense of responsibility to New York City, the culture, Mapplethorpe, and the other people in the book. She enjoyed being free of that burden as she worked on the new book, one that she “never planned to write, recording time backwards and forwards.”

When Smith arrived in New York City from New Jersey in 1965 “just to roam around . . . nothing seemed more romantic than just to sit and write poetry in a Greenwich Village café.” She eventually found Caffe Dante, near Bleecker Street, and later, Café ‘Ino on Bedford Street, a daily stop that inspires many of the ruminations in the memoir. Fans will love acquiring a sense of her daily routine and the insight into her thought process. However, those seeking the straightforward trajectory of linear narrative won’t find it here. Smith’s recollections wander back and forth between past and present, and her stories can leap suddenly from one continent to another without warning. How tolerant one is of her many digressions may be a reflection of one’s love for her work; the writing is exquisitely vulnerable and inquisitive, but the story does not follow anything resembling a narrative arc. It is best just to go with it, keeping in mind that our own memories can be similarly disjointed and incomplete.

Smith loves cafes so much that she was preparing to open one when she met Fred “Sonic” Smith, the fellow musician who became her husband and the father of her two children. Soon after they fell in love, the couple moved to Detroit. Despite the lack of coffee shops, Smith describes these years living “in an old stone country house on a canal that emptied into the Saint Clair River” in Michigan as “mystical times. An era of small pleasures.” One inspiring aspect of Smith’s approach to life is her willingness to accept the unexpected detours. Before their children were born, she and Fred traveled, made plans to buy a lighthouse, and he attempted to obtain a pilot’s license. Although they did not complete all the projects they discussed, Smith is quite philosophical about it all:

Not all dreams need to be realized. That was what Fred used to say. We accomplished things that no one would ever know. . . . For a time we considered buying an abandoned lighthouse or a shrimp trawler. But when I found I was pregnant we headed back home to Detroit, trading one set of dreams for another.
Fred finally achieved his pilot’s license but couldn’t afford to fly a plane. I wrote incessantly but published nothing. Through it all we held fast to the concept of the clock with no hands. . . . Looking back, long after his death, our way of living seems a miracle, one that could only be achieved by the silent synchronization of the jewels and gears of a common mind.

Like Just Kids, which contained many stories of time the author spent with artists such as Harry Smith and Sam Shepard, M Train also features many memorable encounters. Smith comments that her opportunity to meet chess champion Bobby Fischer while visiting Iceland was proof “that without a doubt we sometimes eclipse our own dreams with reality.” Fischer asked Smith to sing Buddy Holly for him, and then the two of them sang popular songs together as Fischer’s bodyguards stood nearby.

We are also allowed to sit in on her conversations with writers such as William S. Burroughs and Paul Bowles, and tag along on several trips to the homes and gravesites of thinkers and artists including Bertolt Brecht, Akira Kurosawa, and Sylvia Plath. While many of these stories are brief, they are densely packed with Smith’s insight, wit, and imagination, as in the moment when a chance meeting with actor Robbie Coltrane in London is followed by a brief conversation with the floral bedspread in her hotel room.

Her last visit with Burroughs included a viewing of “a print of William Blake’s miniature of The Ghost of a Flea,” which depicts “a reptilian being with a curved yet powerful spine enhanced with scales of gold.” When Burroughs told her that he identifies with the creature, she failed to ask him to elaborate. Her curiosity lead to the following inspiring passage:

William the exterminator, drawn to a singular insect whose consciousness is so highly concentrated that it conquers his own.
The flea draws blood, depositing it as well. But this is no ordinary blood. What the pathologist calls blood is also a substance of release. A pathologist examines it in a scientific way, but what of the writer, the visualization detective, who sees not only blood but the spattering of words? Oh, the activity in that blood, and the observations lost to God. But what would God do with them? Would they be filed away in some hallowed library? Volumes illustrated with obscure shots taken with a dusty box camera. A revolving system of stills indistinct yet familiar projecting in all directions: a fading drummer boy in white costume, sepia stations, starched shirts, bits of whimsy, rolls of faded scarlet, close-ups of doughboys laid out on the damp earth curling like phosphorescent leaves around the stem of a Chinese pipe.

Another theme of the book is the love of literature. While Smith confesses that there have been times when she has read entire books and been unable to retain anything, what she is able to recall is quite remarkable. We learn of her lifelong obsession with books and the impact that writers such as Haruki Murakami and W.G. Sebald have had on her life and her own work. Writers will be able to relate to a passage in which she makes use of lists, which she compares to “small anchors in the swirl of transmitted waves, reverie, and saxophone solos.”

Along with her obsession with books and coffee, Smith also ascribes spiritual qualities to objects that once belonged to her idols, such as Herman Hesse’s typewriter and Virginia Woolf’s walking stick. Her love of books often led to quests, such as the journey she took to Casa Azul in Mexico in 1971 after reading The Fabulous Life of Diego Rivera. Not only had the book gifted to her by her mother when she turned sixteen captured her imagination, but “William Burroughs had told me the best coffee in the world was grown in the mountains surrounding Veracruz.” While in Casa Azul, Smith visited “the house where Trotsky was murdered,” and not only gained permission to photograph Frida Kahlo’s dresses, but was even invited to “rest in Diego’s bedroom” when she began to feel lightheaded.

An air of nostalgia and mystery pervades the memoir, as when Smith longs for the days when it was tokens rather than MetroCards that one used to gain admission to the New York City subway. She also delves into the emotions evoked by lost possessions. She wonders, “Do our lost possessions mourn us?” She laments the loss of a raggedy black coat, a moth-ridden birthday gift from a poet who had given the garment she had “secretly coveted” to her right off his back. Wearing the coat she “felt like myself.” Misplacing it leads her to this poignant realization: “Lost things. They claw through the membranes, attempting to summon our attention through an indecipherable mayday. Words tumble in endless disorder. The dead speak. We have forgotten how to listen. Have you seen my coat? It is black and absent of detail, with frayed sleeves and a tattered hem. Have you seen my coat? It is the dead speak coat.”

The book includes 55 haunting photos by the author, such as an image of the “oval table where Goethe and Schiller once spent hours conversing,” an “innately powerful” object which Smith sees as “a valuable element for comprehending the concept of portal-hopping.” Just as she eventually returned to New York to pick up right where she had left off as a cultural shaman and a punk rock force of nature, she also revisited her dream of opening a coffee shop. Some of the most powerful writing in the book appears in her description of New York during and after Hurricane Sandy, a natural disaster that temporarily prevented her from having access to the small bungalow she purchased on Rockaway Beach in the hopes of fulfilling her youthful dram of opening a café. The chaos and destruction caused by Sandy reminded Smith of her husband’s death, which had occurred many years prior during a “raging thunderstorm” in Detroit: “Fred, fighting for his life, could be felt in the howling wind. A great branch from our oak tree fell across the driveway, a message from him, my quiet man.” Fred died alone in a hospital while her family worked together to get through the storm.

Loss is an inescapable part of life, and one of the major themes that runs through M Train. Smith has endured her share; just one month after losing her husband, her brother died suddenly of a “massive stroke.” Who among us cannot relate to her wish to have it all back: “We want things we cannot have. We seek to reclaim a certain moment, sound, sensation. I want to hear my mother’s voice. I want to see my children as children. Hands small, feet swift. Everything changes. Boy grown, father dead, daughter taller than me, weeping from a bad dream. Please stay forever, I say to the things I know. Don’t go. Don’t grow.” M Train is a raw, witty, melancholy reverie, a collection of memories and wishes that speaks directly to our collective humanity. We are fortunate to have Patti Smith to lead us on this investigation of love, loss, compassion, and wide-eyed wonder.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

Stéphane Mallarmé
Translated by Robert Bononno
and Jeff Clark
Wave Books ($25)

by Richard Henry

Robert Bononno and Jeff Clark's A Roll of the Dice is the latest in a slew of recent translations of Stephane Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard and it brings a different aesthetic approach to this challenging poem. For nearly half a century, Daisy Aldan's 1956 A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance has been the canonical translation into English. It was later reprinted (1992) in a boxed, limited edition with eleven black and white and four color lithographs by minimalist Ellsworth Kelley. Several translations followed, including Brian Coffey’s awkwardly titled Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance (1967, Dufour Editions). Marcel Broodthaers offered a version in 1969 with all of the text blacked out, leaving clear the ideogramic underpinnings of the poem and its layout.

Stéphane Mallarmé's original manuscript was published in 1897 in the journal Cosmopolis. The editors did not honor Mallarmé's fundamental spatial intention, which was to print the poem across two pages; that break in tradition, one that forces different reading behaviors, was one of the revolutionary features of a new aesthetic that opened up any number of experiments through the 20th century. Cosmopolis did honor the expansive white space and different fonts that Mallarmé intended. Page spreads aside, Mallarmé was not satisfied with Un Coup de Dés, and immediately began revising the poem, revisions intended to be published in 1898 with illustrations by Odilon Redon. Mallarmé died in 1898 and the project was abandoned, but not before Redon completed several lithographs. Sixteen years later, the 1898 manuscript was reconstructed and published, sans illustrations, by La Nouvelle Review Française. This 1914 edition followed the poet's intentions with respect to space and to the variations in typeface and size, both of which were used to exploit the poet's interest in subordination, but also to highlight the poet's interested in the poem embracing "subjects of the pure and complex imagination or intellect" (from Mallarmé's preface, variously translated). As such, one can see the subordination of one after another gesture of imagination, set to modify higher-level ideations, and, ultimately, the words and phrases therein of the predicate jamais n'abolira le hasard. Significantly, the subject of the title/sentence, un coup de dés, has no modifications, subordinate or otherwise. Of equal importance to the 1914 publication and subsequent translations have been his extensive notes (see the pdf noted below) as well as his preface to both the Cosmopolis and La Nouvelle Review Française publications.

The past ten years have seen multiple translations into English, all working from differing approaches to what counts as fidelity to the original poem and to Mallarmé's intentions, most taking Mallarmé's prefatory comments to heart, some also informed by his extended notes from 1897-98. All approximate the layout of the 1914 edition; web-published translations honor the size of the page spreads without, obviously, the gutter found in a bound book. Among those published in the past ten years: Basil Cleveland's A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance (2005); E.H. and A.M. Blackmore's A Dice Throw At Any Time Never Will Abolish Chance (2006); A.S. Kline's A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance (2007), with a supplemental translation into a single-page, 'compressed and punctuated,' a rendering that helps readers trace the subordinations; and Robin Mackay's A Throw of Dice Will Never Abolish Chance (2012). We might add to this, Chris Edwards's "mistranslation" A Fluke (2005), with its own sense of fidelity driven by parody and other aesthetics of re-presentation. Clearly, there has been a renewed and growing interest in the work.

Bononno and Clark have emphasized the transformative power of their “roll” in the title as opposed to the long standard “throw” of dice, which they mark as more English. “Roll,” however, sets into play a slightly different set of possibilities guiding the translation of the imagination or intellect. Simply put, “roll” invites softer, less aggressive, translations of words, phrases, lines, and spreads.

Among the aesthetic principles informing Bononno and Clark is, in the words of Clark, paying attention to the poem's music; he claims that this is the "first [translation] that is symphonic in its clarity," picking up on a metaphor used by Mallarmé in his preface: "like the symphony compared to the monody." Earlier translations "gave you an idea of what the poem was like but they weren't poems in their own right," says Bononno. Indeed, Bononno and Clark pay acute attention to sound and phrasing, both for their poetic affects as well as to foreground the “clarity” of the poem's metaphor structures. This isn’t to say other translations ignored the poem’s symphonic, structures and thematic patterns. Aldan, for example, invokes the primacy of the symphony in her translator's note: "The four themes, introduced by the title, according to Mallarmé, are equivalent to the four phrase movement of a symphony." Aldan focuses, however, on the multiple thematic variations, their intersections and movement. Bononno and Clark pay extended attention to sound—the symphony as music. For the musical quality of A Roll of the Dice, compare translations of two phrasings taken at random:

Mallarmé: et en berce le vierge indice

Daisy Aldan: and rocks therein the virgin symbol

Basil Cleveland: and thereof cradles the virgin sign

Bononno and Clark: and so soothes the virgin sign

Or Mallarmé's cascading: Choit / la plume / rythmique suspens du sinistre

Aldan: Falls / the plume / rhythmic suspense of the disaster

Cleveland: Falls / the feather / rhythmic foreboding suspense

Bononno and Clark: Falls / the feather / rhythmic suspense of the sinister

This attention to rhythm and sound extends beyond individual lines to the varied themes and the spread-based layout.

Clark's design of the poem itself faithfully follows the 1914 edition. He emphasizes Mallarmé's interest in the material aspect of book and space by creating a nine-page spread for the title pages, with the type at times exceeding the page, moving off the outer margins or into the gutters. This design further extends Mallarmé's intentions manifested in the poem without violating their fidelity to the layout of the poem itself. Finally, and bringing us full bore into the 21st century, Clark offers in the interstices of the book twelve full spreads of "randomly-lit, burst-mode photographs of black-and-white laserprints."

All in all, it is a pleasure reading a new interpretation of Mallarmé's most influential poem, an interpretation which excites both the imagination and the intellect.

Click here to purchase this book at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

Further Reading

Mallarmé's Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard:

Cosmopolis (1897): http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k309916/f119.image

La Nouvelle Review Française / L'Imprimerie Sainte Catherine (1914): https://math.dartmouth.edu/~doyle/docs/coup/scan/coup.pdf, and
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/library/Mallarme-Stephane_Coup_1914_spread.pdf

Mallarmé's 1897-98 draft revisions with his extensive notes, entitled Jamais un Coup de Dés n'abolira le Hazard: http://monoskop.org/images/9/98/Mallarme_Stephane_1897_Jamais_un_Coup_de_Des_nabolira_le_Hasard_manuscript.pdf

• • •

Interview with translators Robert Bononno and Jeff Clark:
http://www.poetrysociety.org/psa/poetry/crossroads/own_words/A_Roll_of_the_Dice/

Daisy Aldan translation:
A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance. Folder 4, Tiber Press. 1956. (New York, NY)

Selected other translations available on-line:

A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance (English, trans. Basil Cleveland, 2005, from UbuWeb): http://www.ubu.com/historical/mallarme/un_coup.pdf/

A Fluke (English, a mistranslation by Chris Edwards, 2005, HTML, from Jacket2):
http://jacketmagazine.com/29/fluke00intro.shtml

One Toss of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance (English, trans. Christopher Mulrooney, undated, HTML, from UbuWeb): http://www.ubu.com/historical/mallarme/dice.html

A Dice Throw At Any Time Never Will Abolish Chance (English, trans. E.H. and A.M. Blackmore, 2006): http://monoskop.org/images/e/e9/Mallarme_Stephane_1897_2006_A_Dice_Thrown_at_Any_Time_Never_Will_Abolish_Chance.pdf/

A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance (English, trans. A.S. Kline, 2007, multiple formats):
http://www.poetryintranslation.com/klineasmallarmeuncoup.htm/

A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance (English, trans. Robin Mackay, 2012)
http://monoskop.org/images/4/44/Mallarme_Stephane_1897_2012_A_Throw_of_Dice_Will_Never_Abolish_Chance.pdf

Adaptations to other media:

John King's musical opera A Dice Thrown:
http://movingpoems.com/2010/07/a-throw-of-the-dice-un-coup-de-des-by-stephane-mallarme/
Michalis Picheler's adaptations of Broothaer's edition on translucent paper and on glass plates:
http://buypichler.com/un-coup-de-d%C3%A9s-jamais-n%E2%80%98abolira-le-hasard-sculpture

Eric M. Zboya's 'rendition':
http://ubumexico.centro.org.mx/text/vp/003_Zboya_Un_Coup_de_Des_2011.pdf

Salomo Friedlaender (Mynona)
Translated by Peter Wortsman
Wakefield Press ($13.95)

by Jesse Freedman

At once a philosophical study of dreams and a fabulist rendering of free will, The Creator is a novella unlike any I can remember reading. Its author, the German intellectual Salomo Friedlaender, designated it a “grotesque,” intending it as a magical, almost phantasmagorical meditation on the quest for self-determination. The result is a penetrating, often prescient work of fiction, one that unfolds as a parable might, delivering a clear moral message: embrace the human capacity for imagination, or risk a reality defined by a crippling allegiance to objectivity.

Published in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, and reproduced for the first time in English by Wakefield Press, The Creator takes as its subject the intellectual exchange between the philosophizing figure Gumprecht Weiss and Baron von Böckel, the uncle to Weiss’s love interest, Elvira. Friedlaender, whose work appeared under the pseudonym Mynona (the German word for “anonymous,” spelled backwards), positions the relationship between the men as an extended dialogue focused around the idea of action. He returns repeatedly to this idea, insisting in the dialogue between Weiss and von Böckel that “there can be no creation of something out of nothing.” Humanity, he argues, must engage the will to create; it must act with “absolute freedom.”

This will to create—this ability to activate what Weiss calls “true will”—serves for Friedlaender as the bridge between intellectualism and reality; without it, his characters are reduced to a nightmarish state of inactivity, one in which history slows to a crawl. Like Nietzsche (whose influence is evident throughout the novella), Friedlaender identifies action as core to human potential, going so far as to invoke the idea of the “ubermensch,” the Nietzschean superman. In creativity, too, Friedlaender locates a vital impulse: indeed, both Weiss and von Böckel implore Elvira to create, to exercise an “inner omnipotent strength.” Weiss, in particular, is tempted by the desire to grab this omnipotence, to follow the path of his dreams.

Underlying this impulse is the distinction between “creatures” and “creators,” one Friedlaender constructs using the mirror as his guide: in it, he argues, “creatures” identify reflections of themselves; they approach the mirror objectively, with an eye toward a single truth. By contrast, “creators” locate shades of themselves; they process their image aware of subjectivity, mindful of contrasts lurking below the surface. “Whoever lacks the primordial impulse to tear himself free of the world and inhabit his innermost self,” declares von Böckel, “is only a creature, not a creator.” It is in this way that Friedlaender’s book becomes an homage to subjectivity itself, to a world in which free will navigates a path to its own realization. Without action, as Sartre might have had it, we are nothing.

The Creator is about more, however, than individual will. Friedlaender dedicates a considerable portion of his novella to the subconscious—writing, for instance, of the need for a reality “infused with the ether of the imagined.” In his love for Elvira, Weiss manifests this need most, maintaining that dreams provide “a double face, twice the senses.” It is during a dream sequence, after all, that Weiss first encounters Elvira: later, he learns (or imagines?) that she, too, has dreamed of him, raising the very real question about whether two individuals can dream of one another without first having met. No doubt, Elvira serves as a figment of Weiss’s imagination; and yet, in the surreal universe carved by Friedlaender, where Weiss slips from one reality to the next, Elvira is very much alive. We are the masters of our dreams, the proprietors of their content, Friedlaender argues. This ownership is unwavering.

Ultimately, Friedlaender positions the relationship between Weiss and Elvira in such a way that the two become one: they manifest what he calls the “ideal union,” the space between the “waking world and the world of sleep.” It is here, in this fabulist zone, that Weiss makes his final plea for action, reminding von Böckel that death is more than the lack of action; it is an endless dream state, imagined by the living. And thus as Elvira fades away, Weiss proclaims: “I was pregnant with the world. The objects all around me were nothing but the spawn of my fantasy.” From Weiss, however, there is no apology; to create is to act, and to act is to experience “dream-delight.” This, in the end, is the gift bestowed by this forgotten German master. Life itself must be created.

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

Roger Gilbert-Lecomte

The Book is a Ghost
Thoughts & Paroxysms for Going Beyond
Roger Gilbert-Lecomte
Translated by Michael Tweed
Solar Luxuriance ($13)

Theory of the Great Game 
Writings from "Le Grand Jeu"
René Daumal & Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, et al.
Edited and translated by Dennis Duncan
Atlas Press ($29.95)

by Garrett Caples

In 1929, during one of the Paris surrealist movement’s periodic crises, André Breton called for a meeting between his group and the various dissident figures working along similar lines to discuss “the possibilities of common action,” as the letter of invitation read. To say that this meeting was a failure is an understatement, and indeed it served as a prelude to the further fragmentation of Breton’s group documented in his “Second Manifesto of Surrealism” (1929). Far from encouraging “common action,” Breton opened the meeting with an extensive list of accusations against Le Grand Jeu, the group behind the magazine of the same name that ran for three issues between 1928 and 1930. Le Grand Jeu was denounced for everything from its use of the reactionary word “god” to one member’s pseudonymous article in Paris-Midi in support of Paris’s right-wing chief of police. This last accusation stuck, however, for it was true, and led to Le Grand Jeu’s eventual splintering. A pyrrhic victory for Breton.

What is curious about this affair is how seriously Breton took Le Grand Jeu, the core of which was three high-school buddies from Reims. At the time of the meeting, René Daumal, already a successful avant-garde poet, was about to turn twenty-one while his friends Roger Gilbert-Lecomte and Roger Vailland (author of the Paris-Midi article) would only turn twenty-two later that year. The members of Le Grand Jeu were admitted admirers of surrealism, and Breton had even unsuccessfully lobbied Daumal and Gilbert-Lecomte to join his group. Some of Breton’s rancor here might be attributed to this rebuff, as well as Le Grand Jeu’s willingness to collaborate with former members of his group, like Robert Desnos, André Masson, and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes.

Of the founders of Le Grand Jeu, Daumal has been the only one with much presence in the Anglophone world, both as the author of two novels, A Night of Serious Drinking (1938) and the unfinished, posthumous Mount Analogue (1952), and as a Sanskrit-translating devotee of Gurdjieff. As far as I know, Vailland, later a Stalinist and a Prix Goncourt-winning novelist, has never been translated. But the most intriguing figure of the entire Grand Jeu remains Roger Gilbert-Lecomte (1907-1943), a poet whose work elicited Antonin Artaud’s only review of a contemporary book of poems. Most of what American readers know about this poet stems from the efforts of Artaud translator David Rattray, whose translation of selected Gilbert-Lecomte poems, Black Mirror, appeared from Station Hill in 1991 and whose book of selected prose How I Became One of the Invisible (Semiotexte, 1993) included the biographical essay “Roger Gilbert-Lecomte.” Thus I’ve taken the simultaneous publication of two books—Theory of the Grand Game: Writings from “Le Grand Jeu” edited and translated by Dennis Duncan from London’s venerable publisher of the European modernist avant-garde, Atlas Press, and The Book Is a Ghost: Thoughts and Paroxysms for Going Beyond by Roger Gilbert-Lecomte edited and translated by Michael Tweed from San Francisco’s ultra-indie Solar Luxuriance—as an opportunity to get acquainted with the wider current of the poet’s work.

Le Grand Jeu was essentially a parasurrealist group influenced by theosophy and mysticism, whose researches focused on such activities as meditation and derangement of the senses through the use of drugs, with the goal of achieving a revolution in human consciousness. If such activities could be considered poles of the group’s spectrum, the future Gurdjieff follower Daumal clearly represents the former, while the morphine-addicted Gilbert-Lecomte—who infamously died from an infection brought on by shooting up through a dirty pantleg—embodies the latter. The reality is of course more complicated, as Daumal only survived Gilbert-Lecomte by a matter of months before dying of tuberculosis, possibly exacerbated by his own youthful experiments with the highly toxic chemical carbon tetrachloride, but you get the idea. From surrealism, in addition to a pantheon of heroes like Rimbaud and Saint-Pol-Roux, Le Grand Jeu borrowed its rejection of the conventional divide between subjective experience and the objective world, between dream and reality, a rejection that in Breton’s work would culminate in the theory of objective chance put forward in Mad Love (1937). In his essay “The Power of Renunciation,” published in Le Grand Jeu 1 and translated in Theory of the Great Game, Gilbert-Lecomte states his position thusly:

The revolt of the individual against himself, by means of any regimen of specific ecstasy (use of intoxicants, auto-hypnotism, paralysis of the nerve centers, vascular disturbances, syphilis, dedifferentiation of the senses, and all the contrivances a superficial mind might adopt out of a simple appetite for destruction), taught him his first lesson. He has perceived that the apparent coherence of the external world—the same world that should, it seems, be differentiated from the world of dreams—collapses at the slightest shock. This coherence is only verifiable by the senses; thus it varies with the state of these senses; it is solely a function of the individual himself and everything happens as if projected from the depths of his consciousness on to the outside world. . . . The first step towards unity is to discover within oneself the same chaos as that which surrounds us all.

This is all well and good, but it brings us up against a certain limitation of Gilbert-Lecomte as psychological theorist. When Breton wants to make such a point, he seldom fails to do so without an extensive briefing of evidence based on his own anecdotal experience, subsequently drawing on the insights of previous thinkers and fellow surrealists in order to argue his position. But Gilbert-Lecomte generally doesn’t mount arguments so much as make declarations of belief, as befitting Le Grand Jeu’s more religious sensibility; he begins with his conclusions and proceeds from there. This is not to complain that his conclusions are less hard-won than Breton’s—though this is undoubtedly the case—but simply that they are less compelling when divorced from the lived experience Breton always brings to bear on his essays.

Gilbert-Lecomte seems strangely aware of his limitations as an essayist. As he writes in “The Evolution of the Human Mind” (in The Book Is a Ghost), “Throughout my life, I have only presented anew, as many times as possible, the same work.” Gilbert-Lecomte has his set of ideas and each essay provides an occasion to mull them over anew. Chief among his tenets is a philosophical and religious monism, a belief in the essential oneness of the universe. His “philosophical system,” as he writes in the “Notes & Fragments” section of The Book Is a Ghost, “can be defined as the monotonous affirmation of unity through the reflections of phenomenal multiplicity.” “Monotonous” is not a label most essayists would willingly self-apply, but Gilbert-Lecomte is superbly indifferent to anything outside of his chosen theme. “Art is not a goal,” he insists in “The Value of Art,” “it cannot be a goal for only one goal exists: the return to primordial unity. Art will be one means among others—for some people—for reaching this goal.” Still later, in “Lizard, Crack,” whose French title is an untranslatable portmanteau of both those words, he laments: “Nothing proceeds from Diversity to Oneness anymore. All primordial sense of Unity has been lost. Reduced to dead ritual, to the utility of moral precepts, religions have even forgotten the mystic passions that they once employed to their own material ends.” But the limitations of his approach make themselves felt whenever he tries to push toward a larger conclusion. Again, from “Lizard, Crack”:

If man wants to account for the era that he is living in, he requires one postulate and only one: the universality of human consciousness. That is, the historical human mind, sum of all individual consciousnesses, possesses a unity, a personality, an essential difference, neither more nor less demonstrable than that of each individual consciousness. Thus the laws governing the evolution of the human mind, according to the vast mirrors bearing countless reflections of the great analogy, are those of the microcosm (individual human consciousness) as well as those of the macrocosm (biological processes, laws of nature).

The trouble with such conclusions is that ordinary experience gives us far more evidence to the contrary, that the macrocosm and the microcosm such as he’s delineated them here are essentially discontinuous, that there is little universality to human consciousness, that different things really are different. In the absence of any demonstration otherwise, such assertions feel much like those of Evangelical Christians claiming they’ve been saved by Jesus. They’re not convincing because they give you no reason to believe.

In any case, let it not be supposed by such a comparison that I’m knocking Gilbert-Lecomte or Le Grand Jeu. Theory of the Great Game and The Book Is a Ghost are both valuable contributions to a fuller understanding of the historical surrealist movement, and there are many splendid contributions by other hands in the former I haven’t addressed here. Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, Gilbert-Lecomte is most engaging in the latter book’s “Notes & Fragments” section, where, freed from discursive pressure, he can give free rein to his poetic facility. “A man is given, and the flickering lookouts of his senses fix themselves upon a sensible world—an extension of himself,” he writes in “Problem and Parabola.” “Containing within himself all that lies beyond he is contained in the closed vessel of the horizon.” While there’s little to distinguish this thematically from the “monotonous affirmation of unity” running through his work, the expression here is far happier; “the closed vessel of the horizon” is a particularly compelling phrase, above and beyond what it might mean, raising the question of whether expressions of pure belief are more suited to poetry than prose.

Click here to purchase Theory of the Great Game at your local independent bookstore

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2015/2016

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Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2015/2016 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2016