Codex

by Roche Maurice

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Did I read this? No. But I thought I’d tell gr that I did. So they’d think I read French. But I don’t

Doesn’t matter.

So many years later I finally have a copy of the book containing the graphic I’ve used for the Buried Book Club. Which club has been so much fun these past 10+ years. Just so much incredible stuff out there that we’ve never never heard of.

I’ve been off gr for a bit. But you all are much missed. Thanks for all your fantastic delightful reading.

[Geoff]

Images were requested/images are provided.

~


~


~


~


~


~


~
And one for those Bis Spaders over at the Buried Book Club:

[Nate D]

Somehow, I had to add this page to goodreads as Roche is sorely under-represented here, but just look at the photos I took in the Bowdoin college library today. Copies of his first four novels, none ever checked out. And this one looks even (bett/crazi)er than Compact.



Apparently Mark Polizotti has a shelved translation of it somewhere, but though he did an incredible job with Compact, he also deems Roche ultimately untranslatable, it seems, at least without severe flattening or re-imagining.

Later: I couldn't resist and actually picked up a copy in French. Maybe the most beautiful book I own.

[Bill · Rating 5 out of 5]

It would be absurd for me to position this as a review, so I won't: I don't speak French! I did however buy a copy of this book, as well as his earlier "Circus" which together with his first novel "Compact" make a sort of trilogy.
I so enjoyed and was fascinated by the English translation of "Compact" that I had to see more. I discovered "Compact" through Richard Kostelanetz's anthology of essays "The Avant-Garde Tradition In Literature" and then "In The Wake Of The Wake" ed. by David Hayman. Roche seemed to be given a special respect among so many radically experimental authors covered in those books. When I read "Compact" I could see why. The format alone, six different narratives each with their own text type being at once continuous and independent, was astounding to me, in concept and that it was coherently pulled off. Having in the years since I read the book gotten very used to the idea I can now see the possibility of a mediocre book having pioneered this arrangement. But "Compact" is extremely entertaining, and not despite itself.

I'd read a brief excerpt of Mark Polizzotti's "CodeX" in an anthology I can't right now remember. It seemed much more cryptic. I couldn't discern any real plot or character. I borrowed a copy at a library and looked through it. Looking back at my first impressions, I don't think I fully acknowledged the draw of the book being enhanced by it being written in a language I don't understand. I have a very poor capacity for learning other languages, which means that I have a semi-subconscious avoidance of either embarking on the task and commitment to learning a new language as well as incorporating phrases and words from other languages into my use of English. When I say "semi-subconscious" that is because I know the reason for this, but I am not always aware of its influence exercising itself within the moment. I had an amah, -- Malay for nanny, -- when I was still a baby, who conversed with me in Malay which I learned fluently before I knew English. When I had to leave my amah I refused to speak Malay again. This is no slight against my mother; it's just that my amah was perhaps more of a mother to me than my biological mother because she was kind and paternal and spent more time with me then.

I wrote Mark Polizzotti a few years ago asking him about his full translation of "CodeX" into English and he said it was undertaken when he was a grad student, and he wasn't proud of it, and he wouldn't be publishing it. He felt the translation showed his own inadequacies but also the impossibility of bringing the work into an English version. This wasn't because of the French-specific wordplay or format issues. This was more, he said, because of "cultural play that would be very hard to communicate to an English-speaking audience, at least not without so many footnotes that the joke, and the point, would be lost. It participates strongly in a specific time and place - the Paris intellectual milieu of the mid 70s - and I suspect a lot of it would be obscure even to many French readers today. As much as I admire it, I don't think it has the universality or the staying-power of Compact, or of some of Maurice's last books, such as 'Je ne vais pas bien mais il faut que j'y aille'." This was in response to my proposing "CodeX" and all of Roche's work as having a commercial potential nowadays as an author that would draw a small but uniquely obsessed fanbase of readers. And Mark is right in his way, -- and how could I disagree with him who knew Roche and his works very closely, -- but I still persist in believing that these English-speaking readers exist or more precisely would be created if Roche's work were translated into English. Because "Compact" was such a runaway bestseller!

This all sounds like I've been obsessed with an author who writes a particularly difficult style of French that is loaded with double and triple meanings in more words than not, typographical acrobatics far beyond the dated and mostly quaint ("cute") tricks of the Tel Quel poets, and then as reported a cultural vocabulary I have absolutely no familiarity with beyond some possible at best trite intersection with the French New Wave films . . . and I don't speak French. And apparently the one novel of his I've read in English is much more structured and accessible. As Mark Polizzotti put it in his letter, "The fact is, it would take a uniquely intrepid and independently wealthy publisher to take it on: CodeX makes Compact look positively commercial." It sounds like this because I guess it is like this. I read "Compact" over 20 years ago. I've opened it and reread passages here and there since, but have only thought of Maurice Roche from time to time, usually while musing about my ideal library of the future.

There is an American author I don't want to name but who demonstrates my argument that Roche would find a small but enthusiastic audience in English translation. He wrote a book that played on a specific horror trope and used a lot of typographical InDesign manipulations. This book gained a significant following, enough to where the novel was unique not so much in its design but that that design had been supported and funded by the publisher in a decidedly post-experimental literary (post-literary) commercial publishing culture. This same author's books since have become less grounded in identifiable character and event, and much more, let's say, adventurous in their page-by-page layouts. I have many feelings about this author's work which I don't wish to share here because I am only cursorily familiar with it, being a surface-inspector of it at best. But I want to do justice to mentioning this work and not just in support of my argument for Roche. There is a parallel between "Compact" and this annoyingly-unnamed American author's first book. And there is a broad, sweeping "parallel" between both authors' work since: they've lost their moorings or at least their obvious or pre-fabricated ones and serve to create their own. I say all this to propose that if "Compact" had been properly marketed it could have been a welterseller on design alone. People would have been intimidated into reading it through and would have consulted a lot of "What It Means" articles to help them repeat those insights at parties with their book-loving friends. So from the most crass marketing perspective, Maurice Roche has every potential to sell to the English-reading world because his books won't be read and won't be understood.

So on a whim I bought my own copy of "CodeX" and spent too much money on it ordering through the A-hole. It's great to see it again. What does it say? I've been running paragraphs or phrases through Google Translator and much of it is definitely off, but some of it gives me a little idea of what I'm not reading. In other words, even through Google Translator I'm getting some magical language.

So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to open-source this. I'm going to create a website and we're going to offer page by page the works of Maurice Roche for English translation. We're going to get the copyright from his publishers for probably two dollars and we're not going to profit from this project because no profit will be possible except for the publication of his other work. The participating group will get to decide when a page is definitively translated as final . . . there will be an annual option to appeal and re-open, or not . . . there will be thousands upon thousands of rules and addendums and cancellations of addendums. Stay tuned. I'm dialing the phone for Editions Seuil right now.. . . . .

[Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alexander Laurence has translated the experimental French novel CodeX by Maurice Roche. Parts of this translation was published in Talisman and Apalachee Quarterly 43 in 1995.