Gabriel Josipovici — The Present [1975]

Gabriel Josipovici has been working in the minimalist modernist mode (minimomode?) since the late 1960s, producing over five decades a stream of short novels where the narrative position is continually being skewed, time, place, and even character are equally untrustworthy, and the story seemingly falls into the interstices between everyday conversation and trivial dramas. In a Hotel Garden and Conversations in Another Room flaunt Josipovici’s use of the novel-of-dialogue technique, caulked with assisting prose whenever required, exploring alongside writers like Manuel Puig and Ariel Dorfman this Barthesian notion in the 1980s, punching against the intrusive narrator and allowing the reader to ‘construct’ the novel alongside the writer—a technique that makes for ‘pageturning’ works that spit on real ‘pagetuners’ that lard their pages with boring description and nonsense learned in writing classes. Contre-Jour is a sneaky novel that makes tremendous use of the (usually tired) technique of a second-person address to an unnamed listener. The speakers and addressees are unnamed apart from mother, daughter, father, and the subtitle A Triptych After Pierre Bonnard clues the reader in to the sleights-of-hand at play. Josipovici’s style evolved into the ‘90s with the atypical breakless ramble Moo Pak, presented in the form of a literary essay or dérive, drifting from philosophy to peevish contemporary commentary to longer musings on the late life of Jonathan Swift, and Proust, encompassing a breathtaking range of literary history. More recent works include Everything Passes: a short prose work that is a curious and haunting rumination on loss, the passing of time, the abandonment of family, and people who like to write Rabelais criticism. Making use of strangely effective repetitions, blank space, conspicuous absence of invading overarching narrator, tagless dialogue, the novel is richer upon re-reading. Only Joking is a novel (almost) all in dialogue, a fast-moving noir-of-sorts, comedy-of-sorts, thriller-of-sorts, and sort-of-sorts. Similar in tone to Gilbert Adair’s A Closed Book, another cunning (almost) all-in-dialogue novel, this one concerns a cast of characters whose relations to one another and place in the plot is only learned as the novel progresses, creating intrigue and setting up a world from what is omitted. This brings us to The Present: three characters inhabiting fluctuating realities in the same London flat. As the blurb outlines, the novel aims to explore “that feeling of being becalmed, adrift in a present cut off from past or future, when the imagination churns furiously and at random, re-arranging compulsively a handful of elements into story after story,” which sums up the effect of this short novel perfectly. Each novel from Josipovici is an intelligent and original tussle with the form, and mixes seeming simplicity with re-readable complexity, producing works that engage at the superficial and theoretical levels, a rare feat for an experimental novelist. About ten novels from Josipovici remain out of print—an omnibus is desperately needed to keep this vital and prolific author in our purviews.

Editions:

Hardback, Gollancz, 1975.

Bibliography:

Novels:

The Inventory, Michael Joseph, 1968

Words, Gollancz, 1971.

The Present, Gollancz, 1975.

Migrations, Harvester Press, 1977.

The Echo Chamber, Harvester Press, 1980

The Air We Breathe, Harvester Press, 1981

Conversations in Another Room, Methuen, 1984

Contre-Jour: A Triptych After Pierre Bonnard, Carcanet Press, 1986

The Big Glass, Carcanet Press, 1991

In a Hotel Garden, Carcanet Press, 1993

Moo Pak, Carcanet Press, 1994

Now, Carcanet Press, 1998

Goldberg: Variations, Carcanet Press, 2002

Everything Passes, Carcanet Press, 2006

After and Making Mistakes, Carcanet Press, 2009

Only Joking, CB Editions, 2010

Infinity, Carcanet Press, 2012

Hotel Andromeda, Carcanet Press, 2014

Short fiction:

Mobius the Stripper: Stories and Short Plays, Gollancz, 1974

Four Stories, Menard Press, 1977

In the Fertile Land, Carcanet Press, 1987

Steps: Selected Fiction and Drama, Carcanet Press, 1990

Heart's Wings & Other Stories, Carcanet Press, 2010

Raymond Federman — The Voice in the Closet / La Voix Dans Le Cabinet De Debarras [1979]

Perhaps Federman’s most challenging formal experiment, if not his most audacious, this short prose work was published in 1979 in a French/English paperback alongside Maurice Roche’s inscrutable French short Echos. For over four decades, Federman strove to tell and retell, construct and reconstruct, his life, exploring and exploding metafiction in a manner unlike any other writer of the period, resulting in a corpus of nonpareil novels that constitute some of the best of postmodernism (and some of the best novels, period). This opens: “here now again selectricstud makes me speak with its balls all balls foutaise sam says in his closet upstairs but this time it’s going to be serious no more masturbating on the third floor” and continues in one unbroken stream-of-conscious ‘sentence’, incorporating much of the self-conscious matter that perforates his long novels alongside attempts to place himself inside the head of little Federman, locked in a closet by his mother to avoid being taken to the camps in 1942, an incident illumined in more detail in his last novel Shhh: A Story of a Childhood. This short splurge of words can be read as Federman’s sincere attempt to formalise that pivotal moment in the young man and writer’s life: his mother, by choosing to “save” him in this manner, set in motion a re-birth of sorts for Federman, and his extraordinary life, lived in loud colours, is the homage he made to his mother’s sacrifice, and to his sisters (to whom this work is dedicated). The task of attempting to find a formal expression for his life’s experiences has also provided Federman with scope for despair and difficulty, but has yielded pyrotechnical masterpieces like Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It. The last word(s) from Ray:

I am back again in the actuality of my fragile predicament backtracked into false ambiguities smelling my hands by reflex out of the closet now to affirm the certainty of how it was annul the hypothesis of my excessiveness on which he postulates his babblings his unqualifiable design as I register the final absence of my mother crying softly in the night my father coughing his blood down the staircase they threw sand in their eyes struck their back kicked them to exterminate them his calculations yes explanations yes the whole story crossed out my whole family parenthetically xxxx into typographic symbols while I endure my survival from its implausible beginning to its unthinkable end yes false balls all balls ejaculating on his machine reducing my life to the verbal rehearsals of a little boy half naked trying to extricate himself as he goes on formulating yet another paradox

Editions:

Paperback, Coda Press, 1979.

Paperback, Station Hill Press, 1985.

Paperback, Stacherone Books, 2002.

Bibliography (English works):

Novels:

Double or Nothing, Swallow Press, 1971.

Take It or Leave It, Fiction Collective, 1976.

The Voice in the Closet, Coda Press, 1979.

The Twofold Vibration, Indiana University Press / Harvester Press, 1982.

Smiles on Washington Square, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1985.

To Whom It May Concern, FC2, 1990.

Aunt Rachel’s Fur, FC2, 2001.

My Body in Nine Parts, Stacherone Books, 2005.

Return to Manure, FC2, 2006.

Shhh: The Story of a Childhood, Stacherone Books, 2010.

Short Fiction:

More Loose Shoes and Smelly Socks, Six Gallery Press, 2005.

The Twilight of the Bums (with George Chambers), Stacherone Books, 2008.

The Carcasses (A Fable), BlazeVox, 2009.