Vladimir Nabokov, a lover of novels and puzzles, once said that “a great writer’s world” is “a magic democracy where even some very minor character, even the most incidental character…has the right to live and breed.” In the case of Jacques Jouet, we might modify this formula to say that what Jouet’s works form is a magic republic where good actors and bad politicians, good daughters and bad fathers, mysterious mountain climbers and secretive curators all have an inalienable and enlightening right to live and breed.
LELAND DE LA DURANTAYE
About the Author and the Translator
JACQUES JOUET was elected to the Oulipo in 1983. He is the author of more than sixty texts in a variety of genres — novels, poetry, plays, literary criticism, and short fiction — including the novel Mountain R, which is part of his La République roman cycle, and was published by Dalkey Archive in 2004.
LELAND DE LA DURANTAYE is the Gardner Cowles Associate Professor of English at Harvard University. He is the author of Style is Matter: The Moral Art of Vladimir Nabokov (2007) and Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction (2009).
Notes
1 Les mots du corps dans les expressions de la langue française (Paris: Larousse, 1990).
2 Translated by Brian Evenson for Dalkey Archive Press in 2004.
3 Though an illustrious one — that of Boccaccio.
4 For an overview of Oulipo’s activities, see Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature, edited by Warren Motte (Dalkey Archive, 1998) and the more recent State of Constraint: New Work by Oulipo (McSweeney’s, 2006). As concerns Jouet, the reader is encouraged to consult Warren Motte’s writings — particularly his “Jacques Jouet and the Literature of Exhaustion” (SubStance, Issue 96, 2001, 45–63).
5 Translated into English as A Void (1994) by Gilbert Adair.
6 Ponge’s remark concerned classicism, which he called, “la corde la plus tendue du baroque,” the tautest string of the Baroque. In Pour un Malherbe (Paris: Gallimard, 1965, 238).
7 This novel is If on a winter’s night a traveler (1979), whose working title was Incipit.
8 Jacques Jouet. Fins. Paris: P.O.L, 1999, 119. As concerns one of those formal axioms, it bears noting that the sestina has played an important role in a number of Oulipian constraints — seen with special refinement in Jacques Roubaud’s Hortense novels and in Hervé Le Tellier’s The Sextine Chapel.
9 Jacques Jouet. Raymond Queneau. Lyon: La Manufacture, 1988, 14.