DURING THE SEVEN YEARS it took Christian Bök to write Eunoia he would often
read to audiences from his work in progress. He preferred not to tell them
what was coming so that he could see the look on their faces when they
realised what was happening.
“It would suddenly start dawning on people that I was performing this very
athletic and acrobatic feat,” he says. “You could see the light bulbs going
on.”
Listeners' first instinct would be to “wait for the moment of failure, to see
where I had screwed up. But their awestruck reaction would be all the more
heightened by the fact that I didn't cheat.”
Similar reactions may account for a little piece of publishing history that
occurred after a passage from Eunoia was read recently on the Today
programme on BBC Radio 4. The book's entire British print run sold out
within hours.
Bök is a modest man (and, by now, a famously tidy one: he wears neat suits and
talks in elegantly formed sentences, like an overeducated weatherman). But
he has learnt to be immodest about his work for the simple reason that it
would not otherwise be possible to describe people's reaction to it.
To say Eunoia is not like anything else you will ever read is not hype. It's a
statement of fact. Bök calls it a “univocal lipogram”, but this does not
convey its elemental madness. Each chapter uses only one vowel. Not one
vowel once, but the same vowel over and over again, in real words that are
almost never repeated, formed into real sentences with real meaning.
Force language through this horrifying meat grinder, season with ribald
Canadian wit (not an oxymoron, as it turns out), and you get sentences such
as this: “Slick pimps, bribing civic kingpins, distill gin in stills,
spiking drinks with illicit pills which might bring bliss.” Or this: “Porno
shows folks lots of sordor - zoom-shots of Bjorn Borg's bottom or Snoop
Dogg's crotch.”
This is some of the milder rude stuff. It gives a flavour of the real smut
that is a hilarious feature of each chapter, and which Bök, who takes his
art seriously, says he included “to provide as many avenues of entry to the
book as possible”.
When Eunoia was first published in Canada, most mainstream critics wrote it
off as a gimmick. Which it is, as Bök almost admits. “Everyone who writes a
poem according to a formal constraint is accepting a contrivance,” as he
points out. But his contrivance was a hit. A bestseller from Toronto to
Vancouver, it made its detractors look obtuse and turned its author into
just the paradox he wanted to be - an infiltrator of the Canadian academic
establishment as a professor at the University of Calgary, and a cult figure
in the literary avant garde that he had revered since his own days as a
student. It was sweet vindication of his ideas, but above all of his toil.
Despite the critical success of his first book, a slim volume of experimental
poetry called Crystallography, no one gave Bök an advance for his second.
“So I was working 40 hours a week at the special orders desk of a big Toronto
bookstore. Then after that job was done I'd spend 20 or more hours a week
tutoring advanced high school students in science and mathematics. Then I'd
go home and work on my PhD dissertation [on the French playwright Alfred
Jarry, a major influence on Monty Python] to about 11 o'clock or midnight,
then I'd open the files on Eunoia and work until 4 or 5 o'clock in the
morning. And I did that every day, and I did it for seven years, and I would
crash at the weekends trying to recuperate. So the book was written under a
lot of duress. It was a pretty black time, financially and emotionally.”
And the work itself? Get this: He read the 1.5 million-word, three-volume
Webster's College Dictionary from beginning to end five times over, once for
each vowel, each time listing by hand every univocal word that used the
vowel of the moment. That took six months. It turned out to be the easy
part. Those five long lists he then sorted by parts of speech, and sorted
again into topical categories. And then he tried to write with them.
Occasionally, alone with his obsession in the dead of night, he would push
back from his desk and howl with delight at a word sequence that seemed to
have tumbled fully formed on to his screen. “Those were the great moments,”
he says, but they were rare. “For six and a half years it was like doing the
Devil's crossword.”
The question arises: why on earth did he bother? He calls himself an engineer
at heart who decided to follow his bliss and be a poet “to have an excuse to
be the most imaginative person in the room”. Which is nice. But it doesn't
come close to explaining his choice of self-torture.
Literary context helps, up to a point. Bök had admired Georges Perec's seminal
e-less whodunnit of 1969, La Disparition, but had been disappointed by the
sequel, Les Revenentes, in which he felt that Perec had cheated by inventing
words. People doubted it was possible to write anything worth reading using
only one vowel, and Bök, who calls himself obsessive compulsive, wanted to
prove them wrong. He also wanted a challenge that would bring experimental
writing level with the visual arts in terms of pushing its own limits.
So we can think of Eunoia as a diamond-encrusted skull made of words. But can
we think of Damien Hirst working on anything for seven years?
Bök's stamina is monumental, and he sometimes seems prouder of it than of his
conventional talents as a writer. In an interview with The Ottawa Citizen
six years ago he confessed that he had dreamt of following the likes of
Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje into the Canadian pantheon, but
“realised quite early on that I could only aspire to a competent mediocrity”
as a novelist.
Not about to let that hold him back, he embraced extreme constraint. Like any
good sadomasochist's harness, it hasn't let him down - though he still has
no publisher for his next project, a poem that he plans to encrypt as a gene
sequence and implant into a very sturdy bacterium whose ancestors, he hopes,
will still be alive when the Sun explodes.
Extract
A
Hassan balks at all sacral tasks - a mass at Sabbath, a fast at Ramadan: “what
Kabbalah and Brahmana can match blackjack and baccarat?” Hassan brags that a
crackajack champ at cards lacks what knack Hassan has at craps. A cardsharp,
smart at canasta, has a scam: mark a pack, palm a jack. (A cardmatch can act
as a starchart that maps fata arcana.) A shah hazards all cash, stands pat
and calls. A fatal pall wracks a casbah, as a charlatan fans a grandslam
hand (“damn, darn, drat” rants a braggart). A rascal salaams and thanks
Allah that a bank can award a man a stash that dwarfs what alms a raj can
amass.
Hassan drafts a Magna Carta and asks that a taxman pass a Tax Act - a cash
grab that can tax all farmland and grant a dastard at cards what hard cash
Hassan lacks.
E
The empress ... sheds her velvet dress; then she lets repellent men pet her
tender flesh. Her lewdness renders even these lechers speechless. She
resembles the lewdest jezebel.
Whenever Helen seeks these perverse excesses, her regretted deeds depress her;
hence, Helen beseeches Ceres (the blessèd Demeter): “let sweet Lethe bless
me, lest these recent events be remembered” - then the empress feeds herself
fermented hempseed, her preferred nepenthe. Whenever she chews these
hell-bred seeds, the hempweed skews her senses. The hemp, when chewed,
lessens her tenseness (hence, she feels serene); nevertheless, the weed,
when needed, renders her dependent. She enters the deepest sleep - the
nether sphere, where sleepers delve the secret depths.
I
Writing is inhibiting. Sighing, I sit, scribbling in ink this pidgin script. I
sing with nihilistic witticism, disciplining signs with trifling gimmicks -
impish hijinks which highlight stick sigils. Isn't it glib? Isn't it chic? I
fit childish insights within rigid limits, writing shtick which might
instill priggish misgivings in critics blind with hindsight. I dismiss
nitpicking criticism which flirts with philistinism. I bitch; I kibitz -
griping whilst criticizing dimwits, sniping whilst indicting nitwits,
dismissing simplistic thinking, in which philippic wit is still illicit.
Pilgrims, digging in shifts, dig till midnight in mining pits, chipping flint
with picks, drilling schist with drills, striking it rich mining zinc. Irish
firms, hiring micks whilst firing Brits, bring in smiths with mining skills:
kilnwrights grilling brick in brickkilns, millwrights grinding grist in
gristmills.
Listen
to Christian Bök reading from Eunoia
Eunoia by Christian Bök
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