This reminds me of driving to the busiest turistic area in Spain 2 summers ago, that one in between Gandía and concrete-paradise-Benidorm, and arriving to one of the most calm places i've ever been to. Staring at the sunset from La Lobella and driking Mentiras (1/3 coffee liqueur + 2/3 iced lemon). Nothing to do with the video, just the memory of having listened to this song on they way.
Boris Vian. The blind love.
I
On August 5th at eight o’clock the city started submerging into fog. It was unusually turbid, seemed to be dark-blue colored, and didn’t hamper breathing at all. It was falling with a parallel layers: first, foamy hanging low, went about 5 centimeters up, hid from passersby their own legs. The woman from house №22 in Saint-Bracmar street couldn’t find a key lost in front of the hall-door. Six men, including a suckling, came to the help her – at this moment the second coverlet settled: they found the key, but lost the suckling, who had crawled away under cover of the foggy trail. He couldn’t wait to get rid of a feeding bottle and learn the modest delights of adult life. One thousand three hundreds sixty two keys and fourteen dogs were lost this way in the first morning. Fishermen neglected useless, henceforth, floats, got mad, and went for the hunting.
The fog was tightly choking up the streets in hollows and at the bottom of slope; was clouding rainwater and ventilation pipes with a long strips; was conquering subway’s underpasses, which stopped functioning after the milk stream had gone up to the red traffic light level; in the meanwhile, the third screen fell, and a one upstairs had to make his way knee-deep in the white shroud.
The inhabitants of the upper blocks, believing that they are more lucky, were ridiculing those ones who lived close to the river, but one week later peace and harmony triumphed; beginning from this point everybody was able to hit against furniture in his flat the same way, since the roofs of the highest buildings had been clouded with the fog too. For the longest the top of the bell tower lasted out, but the next turbid tidal wave flooded it too.
II
Orver L’tuil waked up on August 13th. He had been sleeping for no less than three hundreds hours or about; recovering of a mighty drunken feast slowly and initially he thought that he had become blind – evidently, had taken something very strong! It was dark, but darkness seemed to be unusual somehow; such a sensation as if electric light gushes with all its strength out at the closed eyelids. With an unsteady hand he groped for a radio-receiver’s handle. The radio was alive, but the last news reached not fully come Orver with difficulty.
Taking no notice of the chattering newscaster’s comments, Orver L’tuil became thoughtful, picked his navel and, had smelt a finger, decided, that it wouldn't be a bad thing to have a bath. But practicalness of the fog, plunging everything into thick darkness – just like a cloak – Noi, poverty – beggary, Tanit’s sail – Salambo or a fiddle which a cat was put in, - convinced him that there is no need to have a shower. Moreover, this fog exhaled the delicatessen fragrance of consumptive apricots, which must have killed all human odours. Audibility became even better, and sounds, shrouded by this foggy cotton, got a funny echo, clear, but colorless, like a lyric soprano, which owner’s palate punched out during an unfortunate fall upon a plow’s handle was replaced with a hammered iron prosthesis.
Before all Orver dismissed all arising questions; he decided to behave as if nothing had happened before. In the issue, he dressed up without any trouble, since clothes were in their right places: something on chairs, something under the bed, socks in shoes, one shoe in the vase, another one under the pot.
- My God, - he told himself, - what a strange stuff this fog is.
This not very special remark saved him from singing the praises and primitive enthusiasm, on the one hand, from sorrow and deep melancholy – on the other hand, moved up the phenomenon into the category of easily stated facts. He was getting accustomed to the unusual situation, was adapting and soon dared to such an extent, that decided to carry out some psychological tests.
- Will walk down to the landlady with an unzipped fly, - he uttered aloud – Will see, is it actually because of the fog, or I have some problems with my eyes.
The point is, that a Frenchman’s inherent cartesianism casts doubt on the existence of the fog as such, even if deepness is quite enough for corking his french sight; whatever is said by radio, his french opinion would not be changed, and he won’t believe in miracles. They have dolts only at radio.
- I’ll take it out and walk down like this – decided Orver. He took it out and started walking down like this. First time in his life he noticed creaking of the first step, crackling of the second one, rustling of the fourth one, mumbling of the seventh one, slapping of the tenth one, gritting of the fourteenth one, chirring of the seventeenth one, squeaking of the twenty second one and buzzing of the copper handrail felt down from the end bearing.
Someone was walking up the stairs, holding on to the wall.
- Who is this? – asked Orver, stopping.
- Leron! – the landing neighbor’s voice replied.
- Hello, - said Orver. – This is L’tuil.
He stretched out his hand, wrung something hard and in full perplexity released it immediately. Leron confusedly giggled…
- Pardon, - he said, - but anyway no one can see anything, and moreover this damn fog…
- Yes, sure, - echoed Orver.
Thought a little about his unzipped fly, he even felt insulted: it appears that the same idea had crossed Leron’s mind too.
- Well, see you, - said Leron.
- See you – replied Orver, on the sly loosening a belt by three holes.
He took the lowered pants off and flung it at a stair opening. The fog is sultry, like feverish partridge, and it is the fact, and if Leron is walking with his property revealed, then Orver just cannot keep dressed! All or nothing.
A jacket and a shirt flew away. Only shoes remained.
He walked down and quietly knocked at a concierge’s window.
- Come in, - the housekeeper’s voice reached.
- Do you have any post for me? – asked Orver.
- Oh! Mister L’tuil! – giggle the fat woman. – Still laughing matter… Have had enough sleep, at last?.. I didn’t want to disturb you… But if you saw this fog the first days. Everyone was running like crazy. And now… it’s ok, getting accustomed…
With poignant smell of perfume, breaking through the milk barrier, he understood that she is coming nearer.
- The only thing - it is inconvenient to cook, - shared she. – But it’s even funny, such fog… it, I would say, satiate; you know, I’ve never complained of a bad appetite… so, during three days – a glass of water, a bit of bread, and I don’t need anything else.
- This way you can lose flesh, - remarked Orver.
- Ah! Ah! - stifling her laughter, clucked she, like a bag with nuts, got down from a seventh floor.
- Feel it, mister Orver, I’ve never been in such good shape. Even my paunches have risen… Feel it…
- But… e-e-h… - mumbled Orver.
- Feel it, I’m telling you!
At random, she seized his hand and and pull it up to one of the paunches mentioned above.
- Strikingly! – said Orver.
- And, you know, that I’m forty two years old, - the concierge was going on – So? Now you cannot say that! People like me – slightly big - in some respect are winners…
- But, damn you! – exclaimed dumbfounded Orver. – You are absolutely naked!
- And you? – retorted she.
“Well, - thought Orver, - here I’m original”.
- It was said by radio, - added the concierge, - this is a stimulant aerosol.
The concierge moved up to him and started breathing more frequent.
- Oh! – sighed Orver; it’s even seemed to him, that this fucking fog rejuvenates as well.
- Listen, miss Panush, - begged he, - we cannot do it this way, like animals. Even if it’s true and this fog is really stimulant, we should keep away from an offence, - added he, moving aside.
Miss Panush moaned, exhaled sharply, like chopped off, and unmistakably placed her hands directly on…
- I don’t care, - said Orver with dignity. - You'll be the judge of that, count me out.
- Yeah, - whispered the concierge not being confused in the least, - for instance, mister Leron turned out a more courteous than you. Dealing with you I gotta do everything by myself.
- Look, - started making excuses Orver, - I’ve just got up today. I haven’t got accustomed yet.
- I’ll explain you everything right now, - said the landlady.
After that some incidents took place, which would be better to have hidden, like poor folk are hidden under a cloak, Noi’s poverty, Salambo and Tanit’s sail inside a fiddle.
Out of the concierge Orver rushed exulting. In the street he harkened – that’s what was missing – the noise of cars. In return, everywhere songs were being sung. From everywhere laugh was being heard.
A bit deafened he went into the roadway. His ear haven’t got used to the sound range covering such a long distances; he was getting lost in it.
Orver caught himself at thinking aloud.
- My God, - said he – The stimulant fog! As we can see, the thoughts about that were not very various. But put yourself into place of a man, who is sleeping for eleven days running, wakes up in pitch-darkness at the moment of everyone’s indecent poisoning and states the transformation of his fat shaking concierge into Valkyrie with high, elastic breast, what Circe thirsting for a sea of unpredictable delights.
- Great, - uttered Orver, making his thought more exact.
Just at that moment he realized that is still standing in the middle of the street. Got frightened he moved away to the wall, passed hundred meters and stopped in front of a bakery. Sanitary-hygiene standards recommend to take food after considerable physical activity, and he decided to buy some bun.
There was very noisy inside the bakery.
Orver considers himself as a man without prejudices, but when he realized what exactly the baker’s wife demanded from each male client and the baker from each female one, his hair stood on end.
- If I serve you the foodstuffs weighing 2 pounds, - the baker's wife was arguing, - then I have the right to require a proper format, damn it!
- But, madam, - the weak old age voice was opposing, by which Orver identified mister Curpip, elderly organist living at the very end of the quay, - but, madam...
- And you play an organ! - the baker's wife reproached.
Mister Cucpit protested.
- Ok, then I will send you my organ, - he fired up, rushed to the exit and ran into Orver standing by the door. The blow was so strong that Orver couldn't take a breath for a long time after that.
- Next! - the baker's wife squealed.
- One loaf, please, - Orver forced himself to speak rubbing his belly.
- One loaf of 4 pounds for mister L’tuil! - the baker's wife screamed out.
- No! No! - Orver moaned, - a small bun!
- Boor! - baker's wife bellowed and added appealing to her husband: - Hey, Lucen, attend to this seignior so he doesn't do it again.
The hair on Orver's head started moving. He dashed off as fast as he could – right into the shop window. It resisted.
He reached the door and ran out in the street. The orgy in the bakery was going on. Children were served by the baker's apprentice.
- Oh, fuck, - Orver was grumbling standing on the sidewalk. - And what if I prefer to choose myself? No, but the baker's wife, what the bitch? With her mug...
Suddenly he remembered the confectioner's shop across the bridge. The baker-girl is 17 years old, a mouth like a Cupid's bow, a patterned apron... maybe, she has nothing else except for this apron right now...
Orver quickly walked towards the confectioner's shop. Three times he stumbled over and fell down upon twisted bodies. He was not even interested in poses of the partners. Only at the last collision he noted that there were five of them.
- Rome, - he whispered. - Quo Vadis! Fabiola! et cum spirito tuo!* Orgy! Ohh!
He was rubbing his forehead; the reminiscence about a shop window swelled up to the size of a pigeon egg, moreover well hatched out. He was quickening his pace – the intimate pal, drawing reins, was pulling him along, asking to give it up.
He decided that the object is near and orientating himself by touch went along facades. By a plywood circle with a screw which supported one of the cracked mirrors, he detected the antiquary's shop window. Two buildings down the street – the confectioner's shop.
At a full speed he bumped into an immovable body directed with its back to him. He screamed.
- Don't push me, - the harsh voice said, - and take this off my arse far away. Otherwise you can be whacked in the face...
- But... hmmm... don't worry, really? - Orver got confused.
He made an attempt to pass the man round on the left side and bumped into someone again.
- What's up? - the other male voice asked.
- Wait for your turn, like everyone else.
The loud laughter resounded.
- What?! - Orver got perplexed.
- Listen, - the third voice said, - you, of course, has come to see Nelly.
- Yes, - Orver mumbled.
- Wait for your turn, - the man said, - you will be number 60.
Orver didn't reply anything. He felt pretty unhappy.
He left even without knowing was she wearing a pattered apron.
At the first crossroads he turned left. A woman was approaching in the opposite direction.
Both of them fell, then sat down on the ground.
- I'm sorry, - Orver said.
- No, it was my fault, - the woman said. - You kept the right side of the road.
- Can I help you to get up? - Orver offered. - Are you alone?
- And you? - she asked. - Wouldn't five or six of you pounce on me?
- Are you really a woman? - Orver specified.
- Have a look yourself, - she said.
Still standing on the knees they moved up to each other, and her long silky hair touched Orver's cheek.
- Where could we find a quieter place? - he thought.
- In the middle of the street, - the woman said. And they moved there finding their way by the sidewalk border.
- I want you, - Orver said.
- And I want you, - the woman said. - My name is...
- I don't care, - Orver interrupted her. - I'm interested only in what my hands and body can learn.
- Learn, - the woman said.
- I hope, - Orver said, - you don't have any clothes.
- I hope you either, - she said. He lay down next to her.
- There is no rush, - she said. - Start from the legs and come up.
Orver was amazed. And he announced that immediately.
- This is the only way you can imagine everything yourself, - she explained. As you said yourself, we have only one means of cognition – the sense of touch. Don't forget that your look cannot plunge me into confusion anymore. You have got into a mess with your monopoly of erotics. Lets be simpler and more honest.
- You speak smoothly, - Orver was surprised.
- I read “Tan Modern”, - the woman said. - Please, start teaching me sexual manners.
That was what Orver did many times in different ways.
And she had a real inclination and indubitable talents for. The borders of what is possible expand when you're not afraid of the light which can be turned on. And then it cannot be worn out, can it? The theoretical explanations given by Orver about 2-3 rather interesting cases in conjunction with multiple practical using brought to their partner relations more confidential nature.
And that was just that simple and pleasant life fostering people in Pan's image and likeness.
III
In the meantime, it was announced on the radio that scientists are observing a gradual neutralization of the phenomenon and the fog level is going down every day.
They convene a global meeting because the danger seemed to be really serious. But the solution was found very quickly because human inventiveness is versatile. When the fog had lifted which was registered by special detectors the happy life could keep going on because everyone put out his eyes.
---
Javier Krahe is one of the most controversial songwriters in Spain. His lyrics are strongly witty and satirical. Once he was censored by the public tv in 1986 when he began singing Cuervo ingenuo (watch video below), a song with a commited message against the ideological ambiguity held by Felipe González, the prime minister by that time. Since then, he's been marginalized by the media, except on very rare occasions. One of them was in 2004, when he was asked to go to an interview in Lo más plus, a tv program in Canal +. During the interview, they broadcasted a short film by Javier Krahe and Enrique Seseña (filmed in 1978, right after Franco died). After sueing Canal + and Krahe himself, he's now waiting for the trial to take place.
--
(lyrics)
You say that if they vote you / You get us out of the NATO / You convince many people / You win great election / Now you govern nation / Now you be president / You say that partnership / Is trustworthy / Even very convenient / What used to be very bad / Remain all the same / And today is excellent.
White man speak with the tongue of a snake
White man speak with the tongue of a snake
Naive Raven not smoke
The peace pipe with you,
For Manitou!
For Manitou!
You do not have anything clear / About how to end the strike / You be patient / But do conversion / And while having severe stress / You act radically / You arrest for ten days / In black stations / Where abuse is common / Here you not be radical
You not put an end / There you also be patient.
White man speak with the tongue of a snake
White man speak with the tongue of a snake
Naive Raven not smoke
The peace pipe with you,
For Manitou!
For Manitou!
You throw many millions / In buying silly aircraft / The next great president / Instead of cutting / Loco military spending / You be your best customer / You much party but / Is it socialist, is it a worker? / Or is Spanish only? / Well, not one hundred percent / If American too / Gringo very absorbent / White man speak with the tongue of a snake
White man speak with the tongue of a snake
Naive Raven not smoke
The pipe of peace with you,
For Manitou!
For Manitou!
It's raining outside and I feel like hermitating. For the sixth time in two months I've grabbed this book and read it. The first time I did, it was as a result of finding in the library a very short novel I hadn't heard of before. About six months ago I read Espèces d'espaces and L'infra-ordinaire and did a research on Perec because both texts had seduced me like no book had lately done. The visit to the library was to giving back a couple of dvd's and rush back to work but, apart from that, I went for a walk by the corridors and, just to feel like I wasn't busy at all, I checked out some thin books... Le voyage d'hiver", by Perec? 20 pages, huge typeface, double spacing and the only book I'd ever found to be inside a plastic sleeve... 10 minutes of delightfully intense reading.
Two days later I bought the book in Madrid and read it again and since then I've read it almost once a week.
The Winter Voyage
by Georges Perec (1979)
During the last week of August 1939, while rumors of war invaded
Paris, a young literature professor, Vincent Degraël, was invited to spend
several days at a property in the neighborhood of le Havre that belonged
to the parents of one of his colleagues, Denis Borrade. The eve of his
departure, while he was exploring the library of his hosts searching for
one of the books that one has always promised oneself to read, but which
one generally only has time to flip through the pages negligently next to
the fire before going to make up the fourth at bridge, Degraël fell upon
a slim volume entitled The Winter Voyage, whose author, Hugo Vernier,
was absolutely unknown to him, but the first pages of which made such
a strong impression on him that he barely took the time to excuse himself
from his friend and his hosts before going to read it in his room.
The Winter Voyage was a sort of first-person narrative, situated in
a semi-imaginary country where the heavy skies, somber forests, soft hills
and canals divided by greenish locks evoked with an insidious insistence
the countryside of Flanders or the Ardennes. The book was divided into
two parts. The first, the shortest, retraced in sibylline terms a voyage
with initiatory implications, where it seemed as if each stage was
somehow blocked, and at the end of which the anonymous hero, a man
that everything led to believe was young, arrived at the shore of a lake
drowned in a thick fog; there a guide awaited him, one who led him to a
tiny island in the middle of which arose a high and somber building; the
young man had barely set foot on the narrow gangplank that constituted
the only access to the island when a strange couple appeared: an old man
and an old woman, both draped in long black capes, who seemed to
emerge from the fog and who came and placed themselves on either side
of him, seized him by the elbows, squeezed themselves as close as
possible to his sides; almost welded one to the other, they clambered up
a rocky path, penetrated the dwelling, climbed a wooden staircase and
arrived at a room. There, as inexplicably as they had appeared, the old
people disappeared, leaving the young man in the middle of the room. It
was barely furnished: a bed covered with a flowered bedspread, a table,
a chair. On the table a meal had been prepared, fava-bean soup, fish
stew. From the room's high window the young man watched the full
moon emerge from the clouds; then he sat at the table and began to eat.
And it was on this solitary supper that the first part came to a close.
The second part constituted in itself almost four fifths of the book
and it quickly became apparent that the short narrative which preceded it
was nothing but an anecdotal pretext. It was a long confession of an
exacerbated lyricism, mixed up with poems, enigmatic maxims, and
blasphemous incantations. He had barely begun to read when Vincent
Degraël experienced an unsettling sensation that was impossible for him
to define precisely, but which did nothing but grow as long as he turned
the pages of the volume with his hand trembling more and more: it was
as if the sentences that he had before his eyes had suddenly become
familiar to him, set themselves to recalling to him irresistibly something,
as if with the reading of each one came to impose itself, or rather to
superimpose itself, the memory both fluid and precise of a sentence
almost exactly the same he would have already read elsewhere; as if these
words, more tender than caresses or more perfidious than poison, these
words in turn limpid or hermetic, obscene or warm, sparkling,
labyrinthian, and endlessly oscillating like the crazy needle of a compass
between a hallucinated violence and a fabulous serenity, sketched a
confused configuration where one thought to rediscover mixed up together
Germain Nouveau and Tristan Corbière, Villiers and Banville, Rimbaud
and Verhaeren, Charles Cros and Léon Bloy.
Vincent Degraël, the field of whose preoccupations covered
precisely these authors he had been preparing for several years a thesis
on "The Evolution of French Poetry from the Parnassians to the
Symbolists" believed at first that he had effectively already read this
book by chance during the course of his research, then, more reasonably,
that he was the victim of an illusion of déjà vu, as when the simple taste
of a mouthful of tea takes you back all of a sudden thirty years to
England, it had taken almost nothing, a sound, an odor, a gesture
maybe that instant of hesitation that he had remarked before taking the
book down from the shelf where it had been classified between Verhaeren
and Vielé-Griffin, or maybe the avid manner with which he had scanned
the first few pages so that a fallacious memory of an anterior reading
had come palimpsestically to perturb to the point of rendering impossible
the reading he was in the process of doing. But soon doubt was no longer
possible and Degraël had to give in to the evidence: maybe his memory
was playing tricks on him, maybe it was only coincidence that Vernier
seemed to borrow from Catulle Mendès his "seul chacal hantant des
sépulcres de pierres", perhaps one could take into account fortuitous
encounters, marked influences, voluntary homages, unconscious copies,
the desire to parody, the taste for citations, happy coincidences, perhaps
one could consider that expressions such as "le vol du temps",
"brouillards d'hiver", "obscur horizon", "grottes profondes",
"vaporeuses fontaines", "lumières incertaines des sauvages sous-bois",
belonged in common to all poets and it was therefore just as normal to
encounter them in a paragraph of Hugo Vernier as in the stanzas of Jean
Moréas, but it was absolutely impossible not to recognize, word for word
or almost, by the simple happenstance of reading, here a fragment of
Rimbaud ("Je voyais franchement une mosquée à la place d'une usine,
une école de tambours faite par des anges") or of Mallarmé ("l'hiver
lucide, saison de l'art serein"), there of Lautréamont ("Je regardai dans
un miroir cette bouche meurtrie par ma propre volonté"), of Gustave
Kahn ("Laisse expirer la chanson... mon coeur pleure / Un bistre rampe
autour des clartés. Solonnel / Le silence est monté lentement, il apeure /
Les bruits familiers du vague personnel") or, barely modified, of Verlaine
("dans l'interminable ennui de la plaine, la neige luisait comme du sable.
Le ciel était couleur de cuivre. Le train glissait sans un murmure..."), etc.
It was four in the morning when Degraël finished reading The
Winter Voyage. He had located about thirty borrowings. There were
certainly others. The book by Hugo Vernier seemed to be nothing other
than a prodigious compilation of the poets from the end of the nineteenth
century, an infinite diorama, a mosaic wherein each piece was the work
of an other. But at the very moment when he forced himself to imagine
this unknown author who had sought in the books of others the very
matter of his text, when he was trying to imagine to its very limits this
insane and admirable project, Degraël felt growing in him a disturbing
suspicion: he had just remembered that in taking the book from its
bookcase, he had mechanically noted the date, moved by the reflex of the
young researcher who never consults a work without taking down the
bibliographic materials. Maybe he was wrong, but he believed he had
read: 1864. He verified this, heart beating. He had read well: this meant
that Vernier had "cited" a verse by Mallarmé two years in advance,
plagiarized Verlaine ten years before his "Ariettes oubliées", written lines
by Gustave Kahn almost a quarter of a century before he did! This meant
that Lautréamont, Germain Nouveau, Rimbaud, Corbière and many
others were nothing but the copyists of a genial and neglected poet who,
in a once-in-a-lifetime work, had known how to bring together the very
substance from which three or four generations of authors would find
their nourishment!
At least, evidently, if the publication date figuring on the work were
not false. But Degraël refused to envisage this hypothesis: his discovery
was too beautiful, too evident, too necessary not to be true, and already
he imagined the vertiginous consequences it was going to provoke: the
prodigious scandal that would be constituted by the public revelation of
this "premonitory anthology," the amplitude of its implications, the
enormous putting into question of everything that critics and professors
of literature had imperturbably professed for years and years. And his
impatience was such that, renouncing sleep for good, he rushed to the
library to try to learn a little more about this Vernier and about his work.
He found nothing. The few dictionaries and indexes present in the
Borrade library ignored the existence of Hugo Vernier. Neither the senior
Borrades nor Denis could teach him anything more: the book had been
purchased at an auction, ten years ago already, at Honfleur; they had
glanced at it without paying much attention.
Throughout the day, with the help of Denis, Degraël proceeded to
undertake a systematic examination of the work, going to seek scattered
fragments in dozens of anthologies and collections: they found almost
three hundred and fifty, divided among close to thirty authors: the most
celebrated as the most obscure poets of the last part of the century, and
even some prose writers (Léon Bloy, Ernest Hello), seemed to have made
of The Winter Voyage their bible, where they had sought the best of
themselves: Banville, Richepin, Huysmans, Charles Cros, Léon Valade
brushed up against Mallarmé and Verlaine and others at present fallen into
obscurity who were named Charles de Pomairols, Hippolyte Vaillant,
Maurice Rollinat (the godson of George Sand), Laprade, Albert Mérat,
Charles Morice or Antony Valabrègue.
Degraël noted carefully in a notebook the list of authors and
references for their borrowings and regained Paris, firmly decided to
pursue his researches the very next day at the Bibliothèque Nationale. But
events did not permit him to do so. At Paris, his draft notice awaited
him. Mobilized at Compiègne, he found himself, without really even
having the time to know why, at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, passed over into
Spain and from there to England and didn't return to France until the end
of 1945. During the entire war, he had carried his notebook with him
and had miraculously succeeded in never losing it. His researches had
evidently not progressed very much, but he had nonetheless made what
for him was an important discovery: at the British Museum he had been
able to consult the Catalogue général de la librairie française and the
Bibliographie de la France and had been able to confirm his formidable
hypothesis: The Winter Voyage, by Vernier (Hugo),
had well been published in 1864, at Valenciennes, by the Hervé Bros.,
Printers-Booksellers, and submitted to legal deposition as are all works
published in France, and been deposited at the Bibliothèque Nationale
where the call number Z 87912 had been attributed to it.
Named professor at Beauvais, Vincent Degraël devoted from then
on all his spare time to The Winter Voyage.
His avid researches into the diaries and correspondence of the
greater part of the poets of the latter part of the nineteenth century rapidly
convinced him that Hugo Vernier had, in his time, known the celebrity
that he had merited: such notes as "received today a letter from Hugo",
or "wrote a long letter to Hugo", "read V. H. all night", or again the
celebrated "Hugo, only Hugo" by Valentin Havercamp, didn't refer at all
to "Victor" Hugo, but rather to that bad-boy poet whose brief work had
apparently singed the hands of everyone who had touched it. The
startling contradictions that literary criticism and history had never been
able to explain thus found their only logical solution, and it was evidently
by thinking of Hugo Vernier and his Winter Voyage, that Rimbaud had
written "Je est un autre" [I is an other] and Lautréamont "La poésie doit
être faite par tous et non par un" [Poetry should be made by everyone and
not by one alone].
But the more he located the preponderant place that Hugo Vernier
should have occupied in the literary history of France at the end of the last
century, the less was he able to furnish tangible proofs: for he had never
again been able to place his hands on a copy of The Winter Voyage. The
one which he had consulted had been destroyed at the same time as the
villa during the bombing of Le Havre; the copy deposited at the
Bibliothèque Nationale was not in its place when he asked for it and only
at the end of tedious searches was he able to learn that the book had been,
in 1926, sent to a binder who had never received it. All of the researches
that he had others make for him, literally dozens and hundreds of
librarians, archivists, and booksellers, proved worthless, and Degraël
soon convinced himself that the five hundred copies of the edition had
been voluntarily destroyed by the very ones it had so directly inspired.
About the life of Hugo Vernier, Vincent Degraël learned next to
nothing. An unhoped-for footnote, unearthed in the obscure Biographie
des hommes remarquables de la France du Nord et de la Belgique
(Verviers, 1882), informed him that Vernier had been born in Vimy
(Pas-de-Calais) on September 3, 1836. But all of the civil records of the town
of Vimy had been burned in 1916, at the same time as the copies
deposited at the hall of records in Arras. No death certificate had ever
apparently been filed.
For almost thirty years, Vincent Degraël forced himself in vain to
reassemble the proofs of the existence of this poet and of his work. At
the time of Degraël's death, at the psychiatric hospital in Verrières, some
of his former students undertook to classify the immense pile of
documents and manuscripts he had left behind: among these figured a
thick binder bound in black cloth and whose label read, carefully
calligraphied: The Winter Voyage. The first eight pages retraced the
history of these vain researches; the three hundred and ninety-two others
were blank.
Translated by Peter Baker. Baltimore, October 1, 1997. [full text obtained from http://pages.towson.edu/baker/perec.html]
Two days later I bought the book in Madrid and read it again and since then I've read it almost once a week.
The Winter Voyage
by Georges Perec (1979)
During the last week of August 1939, while rumors of war invaded
Paris, a young literature professor, Vincent Degraël, was invited to spend
several days at a property in the neighborhood of le Havre that belonged
to the parents of one of his colleagues, Denis Borrade. The eve of his
departure, while he was exploring the library of his hosts searching for
one of the books that one has always promised oneself to read, but which
one generally only has time to flip through the pages negligently next to
the fire before going to make up the fourth at bridge, Degraël fell upon
a slim volume entitled The Winter Voyage, whose author, Hugo Vernier,
was absolutely unknown to him, but the first pages of which made such
a strong impression on him that he barely took the time to excuse himself
from his friend and his hosts before going to read it in his room.
The Winter Voyage was a sort of first-person narrative, situated in
a semi-imaginary country where the heavy skies, somber forests, soft hills
and canals divided by greenish locks evoked with an insidious insistence
the countryside of Flanders or the Ardennes. The book was divided into
two parts. The first, the shortest, retraced in sibylline terms a voyage
with initiatory implications, where it seemed as if each stage was
somehow blocked, and at the end of which the anonymous hero, a man
that everything led to believe was young, arrived at the shore of a lake
drowned in a thick fog; there a guide awaited him, one who led him to a
tiny island in the middle of which arose a high and somber building; the
young man had barely set foot on the narrow gangplank that constituted
the only access to the island when a strange couple appeared: an old man
and an old woman, both draped in long black capes, who seemed to
emerge from the fog and who came and placed themselves on either side
of him, seized him by the elbows, squeezed themselves as close as
possible to his sides; almost welded one to the other, they clambered up
a rocky path, penetrated the dwelling, climbed a wooden staircase and
arrived at a room. There, as inexplicably as they had appeared, the old
people disappeared, leaving the young man in the middle of the room. It
was barely furnished: a bed covered with a flowered bedspread, a table,
a chair. On the table a meal had been prepared, fava-bean soup, fish
stew. From the room's high window the young man watched the full
moon emerge from the clouds; then he sat at the table and began to eat.
And it was on this solitary supper that the first part came to a close.
The second part constituted in itself almost four fifths of the book
and it quickly became apparent that the short narrative which preceded it
was nothing but an anecdotal pretext. It was a long confession of an
exacerbated lyricism, mixed up with poems, enigmatic maxims, and
blasphemous incantations. He had barely begun to read when Vincent
Degraël experienced an unsettling sensation that was impossible for him
to define precisely, but which did nothing but grow as long as he turned
the pages of the volume with his hand trembling more and more: it was
as if the sentences that he had before his eyes had suddenly become
familiar to him, set themselves to recalling to him irresistibly something,
as if with the reading of each one came to impose itself, or rather to
superimpose itself, the memory both fluid and precise of a sentence
almost exactly the same he would have already read elsewhere; as if these
words, more tender than caresses or more perfidious than poison, these
words in turn limpid or hermetic, obscene or warm, sparkling,
labyrinthian, and endlessly oscillating like the crazy needle of a compass
between a hallucinated violence and a fabulous serenity, sketched a
confused configuration where one thought to rediscover mixed up together
Germain Nouveau and Tristan Corbière, Villiers and Banville, Rimbaud
and Verhaeren, Charles Cros and Léon Bloy.
Vincent Degraël, the field of whose preoccupations covered
precisely these authors he had been preparing for several years a thesis
on "The Evolution of French Poetry from the Parnassians to the
Symbolists" believed at first that he had effectively already read this
book by chance during the course of his research, then, more reasonably,
that he was the victim of an illusion of déjà vu, as when the simple taste
of a mouthful of tea takes you back all of a sudden thirty years to
England, it had taken almost nothing, a sound, an odor, a gesture
maybe that instant of hesitation that he had remarked before taking the
book down from the shelf where it had been classified between Verhaeren
and Vielé-Griffin, or maybe the avid manner with which he had scanned
the first few pages so that a fallacious memory of an anterior reading
had come palimpsestically to perturb to the point of rendering impossible
the reading he was in the process of doing. But soon doubt was no longer
possible and Degraël had to give in to the evidence: maybe his memory
was playing tricks on him, maybe it was only coincidence that Vernier
seemed to borrow from Catulle Mendès his "seul chacal hantant des
sépulcres de pierres", perhaps one could take into account fortuitous
encounters, marked influences, voluntary homages, unconscious copies,
the desire to parody, the taste for citations, happy coincidences, perhaps
one could consider that expressions such as "le vol du temps",
"brouillards d'hiver", "obscur horizon", "grottes profondes",
"vaporeuses fontaines", "lumières incertaines des sauvages sous-bois",
belonged in common to all poets and it was therefore just as normal to
encounter them in a paragraph of Hugo Vernier as in the stanzas of Jean
Moréas, but it was absolutely impossible not to recognize, word for word
or almost, by the simple happenstance of reading, here a fragment of
Rimbaud ("Je voyais franchement une mosquée à la place d'une usine,
une école de tambours faite par des anges") or of Mallarmé ("l'hiver
lucide, saison de l'art serein"), there of Lautréamont ("Je regardai dans
un miroir cette bouche meurtrie par ma propre volonté"), of Gustave
Kahn ("Laisse expirer la chanson... mon coeur pleure / Un bistre rampe
autour des clartés. Solonnel / Le silence est monté lentement, il apeure /
Les bruits familiers du vague personnel") or, barely modified, of Verlaine
("dans l'interminable ennui de la plaine, la neige luisait comme du sable.
Le ciel était couleur de cuivre. Le train glissait sans un murmure..."), etc.
It was four in the morning when Degraël finished reading The
Winter Voyage. He had located about thirty borrowings. There were
certainly others. The book by Hugo Vernier seemed to be nothing other
than a prodigious compilation of the poets from the end of the nineteenth
century, an infinite diorama, a mosaic wherein each piece was the work
of an other. But at the very moment when he forced himself to imagine
this unknown author who had sought in the books of others the very
matter of his text, when he was trying to imagine to its very limits this
insane and admirable project, Degraël felt growing in him a disturbing
suspicion: he had just remembered that in taking the book from its
bookcase, he had mechanically noted the date, moved by the reflex of the
young researcher who never consults a work without taking down the
bibliographic materials. Maybe he was wrong, but he believed he had
read: 1864. He verified this, heart beating. He had read well: this meant
that Vernier had "cited" a verse by Mallarmé two years in advance,
plagiarized Verlaine ten years before his "Ariettes oubliées", written lines
by Gustave Kahn almost a quarter of a century before he did! This meant
that Lautréamont, Germain Nouveau, Rimbaud, Corbière and many
others were nothing but the copyists of a genial and neglected poet who,
in a once-in-a-lifetime work, had known how to bring together the very
substance from which three or four generations of authors would find
their nourishment!
At least, evidently, if the publication date figuring on the work were
not false. But Degraël refused to envisage this hypothesis: his discovery
was too beautiful, too evident, too necessary not to be true, and already
he imagined the vertiginous consequences it was going to provoke: the
prodigious scandal that would be constituted by the public revelation of
this "premonitory anthology," the amplitude of its implications, the
enormous putting into question of everything that critics and professors
of literature had imperturbably professed for years and years. And his
impatience was such that, renouncing sleep for good, he rushed to the
library to try to learn a little more about this Vernier and about his work.
He found nothing. The few dictionaries and indexes present in the
Borrade library ignored the existence of Hugo Vernier. Neither the senior
Borrades nor Denis could teach him anything more: the book had been
purchased at an auction, ten years ago already, at Honfleur; they had
glanced at it without paying much attention.
Throughout the day, with the help of Denis, Degraël proceeded to
undertake a systematic examination of the work, going to seek scattered
fragments in dozens of anthologies and collections: they found almost
three hundred and fifty, divided among close to thirty authors: the most
celebrated as the most obscure poets of the last part of the century, and
even some prose writers (Léon Bloy, Ernest Hello), seemed to have made
of The Winter Voyage their bible, where they had sought the best of
themselves: Banville, Richepin, Huysmans, Charles Cros, Léon Valade
brushed up against Mallarmé and Verlaine and others at present fallen into
obscurity who were named Charles de Pomairols, Hippolyte Vaillant,
Maurice Rollinat (the godson of George Sand), Laprade, Albert Mérat,
Charles Morice or Antony Valabrègue.
Degraël noted carefully in a notebook the list of authors and
references for their borrowings and regained Paris, firmly decided to
pursue his researches the very next day at the Bibliothèque Nationale. But
events did not permit him to do so. At Paris, his draft notice awaited
him. Mobilized at Compiègne, he found himself, without really even
having the time to know why, at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, passed over into
Spain and from there to England and didn't return to France until the end
of 1945. During the entire war, he had carried his notebook with him
and had miraculously succeeded in never losing it. His researches had
evidently not progressed very much, but he had nonetheless made what
for him was an important discovery: at the British Museum he had been
able to consult the Catalogue général de la librairie française and the
Bibliographie de la France and had been able to confirm his formidable
hypothesis: The Winter Voyage, by Vernier (Hugo),
had well been published in 1864, at Valenciennes, by the Hervé Bros.,
Printers-Booksellers, and submitted to legal deposition as are all works
published in France, and been deposited at the Bibliothèque Nationale
where the call number Z 87912 had been attributed to it.
Named professor at Beauvais, Vincent Degraël devoted from then
on all his spare time to The Winter Voyage.
His avid researches into the diaries and correspondence of the
greater part of the poets of the latter part of the nineteenth century rapidly
convinced him that Hugo Vernier had, in his time, known the celebrity
that he had merited: such notes as "received today a letter from Hugo",
or "wrote a long letter to Hugo", "read V. H. all night", or again the
celebrated "Hugo, only Hugo" by Valentin Havercamp, didn't refer at all
to "Victor" Hugo, but rather to that bad-boy poet whose brief work had
apparently singed the hands of everyone who had touched it. The
startling contradictions that literary criticism and history had never been
able to explain thus found their only logical solution, and it was evidently
by thinking of Hugo Vernier and his Winter Voyage, that Rimbaud had
written "Je est un autre" [I is an other] and Lautréamont "La poésie doit
être faite par tous et non par un" [Poetry should be made by everyone and
not by one alone].
But the more he located the preponderant place that Hugo Vernier
should have occupied in the literary history of France at the end of the last
century, the less was he able to furnish tangible proofs: for he had never
again been able to place his hands on a copy of The Winter Voyage. The
one which he had consulted had been destroyed at the same time as the
villa during the bombing of Le Havre; the copy deposited at the
Bibliothèque Nationale was not in its place when he asked for it and only
at the end of tedious searches was he able to learn that the book had been,
in 1926, sent to a binder who had never received it. All of the researches
that he had others make for him, literally dozens and hundreds of
librarians, archivists, and booksellers, proved worthless, and Degraël
soon convinced himself that the five hundred copies of the edition had
been voluntarily destroyed by the very ones it had so directly inspired.
About the life of Hugo Vernier, Vincent Degraël learned next to
nothing. An unhoped-for footnote, unearthed in the obscure Biographie
des hommes remarquables de la France du Nord et de la Belgique
(Verviers, 1882), informed him that Vernier had been born in Vimy
(Pas-de-Calais) on September 3, 1836. But all of the civil records of the town
of Vimy had been burned in 1916, at the same time as the copies
deposited at the hall of records in Arras. No death certificate had ever
apparently been filed.
For almost thirty years, Vincent Degraël forced himself in vain to
reassemble the proofs of the existence of this poet and of his work. At
the time of Degraël's death, at the psychiatric hospital in Verrières, some
of his former students undertook to classify the immense pile of
documents and manuscripts he had left behind: among these figured a
thick binder bound in black cloth and whose label read, carefully
calligraphied: The Winter Voyage. The first eight pages retraced the
history of these vain researches; the three hundred and ninety-two others
were blank.
Translated by Peter Baker. Baltimore, October 1, 1997. [full text obtained from http://pages.towson.edu/baker/perec.html]
Pure gold. Thanks there's such a belligerent voice at the European Parliament!!!!
Even over Daniel talking about the fact that the fat cats feed their kittens' unattainable emancipation, meaning France/Germany/etc submit Greece by selling them weapons to face the Cyprus conflict while the first are the monetary fund of the second, what I do really care about? About this guy kicking asses up the boring Strasbourg party. It's soooo comforting to know not everyone up there is made of stone.
(Side note: Daniel Cohn-Bendit is co-president of the group European Greens and was an active student leader during May 68 in France).
"Toward a science of simplicity" is a talk given by George Whiteside at TED about the simple background of apparently complex matters. Although one may think he lets out some cloudy opinions a few times, he gives a wonderful example of coherence between the subject and the way he exposes it, not to mention the talk is fun, and thus, one gets the message.
(vídeo con subtítulos en castellano, aquí)
To begin with, yeah... don't want to disappoint anybody. A cheesy short movie a friend of mine showed me three years ago. I immediately became a superfan of it and sent once a "hi, i love your work" to Julia Pott, the girl who made this My First Crush.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)