Kindling
Following Chris’ fix of my feature on Jacques Roubaud’s The Great Fire of London, I was made aware of the coincidence of The Center for Book Culture’s recent casebook on the novel. There are five essays in all. One is by David Bellos, famous for his translations and biography of Georges Perec, a friend and OuLiPo colleague of Roubaud. Straightaway, I warmed to it, even if I think it is a novel:
The Great Fire of London opens with a detailed description of Roubaud writing. It has to begin that way, given the choice of current report as the basic mode of the text. Superficially, this self-referring, self-descriptive opening echoes many other modernist and postmodernist texts which purport to make the conditions of their own creation the primary object of narration. But it would be a mistake to think of The Great Fire of London as a self-referring fiction in the tradition of Gide’s Counterfeiters (1927) or [Nathalie] Sarraute’s Golden Fruit (1964). It is not a novel; even less is it a self-reflexive postmodernist novel; and it certainly does not seek to ‘undermine’ or ’subvert’ conventions of reading, bourgeois hegemony, or anything else. It is a much more serious undertaking.
Other Splinters posts of interest:
