Christian Bök

"Eunoia, which means 'beautiful thinking', is the shortest English word to contain all five vowels."

The concept behind this book is intriguing: Five chapters, one devoted to each vowel, that vowel being the only to occur in its chapter. This could go one of two ways: Clearly, it's a wordsmithing exercise and could easily be what I refer to as "mental masturbation," or it could end up being delightfully euphonic and imaginative.

I feel Bök was striving for the latter but that the result was show more closer to the former. There were certainly moments, as images ethereal flitted by, evoked by words that, because of the nature of the exercise, flowed from subject to seemingly disparate subject in what felt like stream of consciousness. But then there was the awkwardness, as the meanings of words were drastically bent to make them fit the exercise, foreign-language phrases substituted for wrong-vowelled English words, and laundry lists of words gratuitously thrown in. In the end, rather than being delightful to read, I found it mostly tedious.

Eunoia describes itself as a novel, but it's more like a prose poem or concept piece. The only chapter that has any coherent sense of plot is Chapter E, a retelling of The Iliad. (Other chapters have plots, but they are so absurd and disjointed that I can't take them seriously.)

Now, my friends know that I am anything but a prude, but I found it just a bit disturbing that every chapter contained graphic sex. Then I read the explanatory pages at the very end and it made more sense:

"Eunoia abides by many subsidiary rules. All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage. All sentences must accent internal rhyme through the use of syntactical parallelism. The text must exhaust the lexicon for each vowel, citing at least 98% of the available repertoire…. The text must minimize repetition of substantive vocabulary…. The letter Y is suppressed."

These final few pages should really have been a preface. I might have enjoyed the text more as a word game of sorts had I been aware of these subsidiary rules instead of attempting to parse it as a story.

There is more to Eunoia than the exercise in assonance. After the five single-vowelled chapters there is a small collection of "poems". These are also wordsmithing exercises, but they are more enjoyable to read. The elegy for the letter W is particularly delightful.

In conclusion, if you like clever, challenging word exercises, you might enjoy Eunoia. But if, like me, you're looking for more, you're likely to find it rather tedious. show less

[The following review is abbreviated. The full review, with images, is at http://writingwithimages.com/?page_id=342]

At the moment, Bök is probably one of the two most-read conceptual writers in English; the other is Kenneth Goldsmith, who is thanked in the book. "Eunoia" is a more consistent book, but raises some of the same issues.

Four reactions to this book, arranged pseudo-scientifically, like Bök's arrangements, leading from local to larger-scale issues.

1. The ghost of Escher

From an show more art historical or art critical point of view, it's a bad sign that the book begins with a page-long quotation from Escher, who has invariably been a sign of a certain misunderstanding of modernisms and postmodernisms. Escher is popular with chemists—he still appears in introductory textbooks, which is appropriate for this book—but not with people engaged with current possibilities of the image. From an expressive standpoint, the epigraph signals the likelihood that Bök will be engrossed in structural games, and that those games and rules might owe more to Escher's kind of compulsive mathematized imagination than to concerns that stem from Oulipo or conceptual poetry.

There are a number of passages in the book where Bök's games seem compulsive in Escher's particular, emotionally stunted, myopically neurotic, algorithmically limited, aesthetically adolescent fashion. Even in the graphics—especially the mylar graphic—it's not possible to imagine much other than an author unreflectively obsessing about the placement of X's in page-layout software. (What is the difference between Escher's unpleasantly narrow experiments, which have exiled him from the narratives of modernism, and Roussel's wonderfully narrow experiments, which have put him at the center of stories about modernism?)

2. The role of crystallography

I come at this book with some knowledge of crystallography: I know Haüy, Bravais, birefringence, and crystal classes. I'm aware that bringing a specialized knowledge to a book that does not demand that knowledge of its readers is risky and usually irrelevant. (I'm also aware that the book isn't about crystallography.) But this knowledge does yield several things that are pertinent to a general reading.

(a) I can see how, in some sections, Bök is trying to find verbal equivalents to crystallographic facts, and fails. The way he fails is significant. In the poem "Birefringence," he tries to conjure interference colors by comparing them to stained glass, "gasoline rainbows," "iridescent / insects," and several other things. The result, for someone who knows the colors, is insufficient; and for someone who doesn't, the result is scattered in an illegible fashion: that is, the illegibility appears to be rule-driven and its obscurity related to language games, but actually it is caused by limitations in the author's descriptive power.

(b) In the poem on Miller, Bök makes what I experience as a half-hearted attempt to conjure Miller indices (comparing them to the Dewey decimal system): what matters is that I can see this is half-hearted, because of the impossibility of conjuring something like Miller's system: Bök knows the attempt is tepid, but that he doesn't need to be more precise because his readers will not judge that aspect of the book—but poems like the one on Miller demonstrate how loosely he regards his crystallographic master metaphor: a looseness that is not at all projected by the book. I wonder if the book could have been even stronger if he had found a way to signal the looseness of his attachment to his non-poetic sources.

(c) Specialist knowledge is also pertinent because the book's appeal should not, even from Bök's point of view, depend on the hundreds of polysyllabic technical terms: their exoticism and opacity can't be the central strength or indispensable strategy of the book. When those terms aren't opaque (for readers who know some crystallography), they reveal themselves more clearly as inexact references chosen in accord with very loose criteria: they are used to suggest global parallels with some poetics, or to provide Greek- or Latin-sounding obstructions to the text.

(Incidentally, there is a similarity between Bök's taste in crystallographic illustration and mine. When I first read this book I suspected he had taken two illustrations from a book of mine, "Domain of Images," which has a chapter of crystallography, which is also, like this book, one of the few texts on crystallography that is not intended as a contribution to science. Bök reproduces two very obscure images I also have in my book on pp. 119 and 129. But Bök's book was published in 1994, before mine, so it's evidence of a similar sense of what counts as an interesting crystallographic image.)

3. Emotional passages

There is one section of the book, "Diamonds" (p. 64), that is self-contained and different from the rest of the book. "Diamonds" purports to be about the author's father, a diamond cutter. It is affectively direct, and scientifically minimal. It isn't a flaw, in a book about flaws, to have a section that's separate: but it is problematic to have that difference consist in directly emotional and even confessional prose, and to have that direct appeal to feeling be tied to a dilution of the scientific poetics, because that means the other sections—most of the book—require science in order not to speak directly about emotions, and that, I think, is not Bök's purpose.

4. Self-imposed rules

The fundamental issue in all these points (1, 2, 3) is the role played by self-imposed rules: the master trope of crystallography, and the many smaller rules that govern how individual concepts and people are articulated as poetry. My concern here is the irregular application of those rules, and the kinds of occasions and contexts where Bök permits himself to bend or suspend the rules.

As in "Eunoia," the rule-bound construction of the book is continuously undermined by clearly aesthetic choices, freely made, which are themselves almost always the result of specific late-romantic and modernist allegiances. Sometimes Bök sounds like Celan ("Bleeding away / ages of images," p. 30), sometimes Bachelard ("A crystal is the flashpoint of a dream intense / enough to purge the eye of its infection, sight," p. 37), sometimes A.R. Ammons or his admirer the chemist Roald Hoffmann ("A word (like love) has a high refractive index," p. 37). Much of this material is late romantic, including typical romantic natural science interests like abyssal creatures and invertebrates ("lammelibranchs, coelenterates. / the lost animalculae from alien seas" (p. 47). The specter of Escher returns whenever the rules appear to be constructed by the author in order to articulate his own repetition compulsions: "any path that you take / breaks from its route / in the way that a root / word, when said, gets / tangled in its ganglia" (p. 44). This is rum poetry, driven by a nearly autistic sort of compulsion, much like the long lists of supposedly similar things in Roussel's "New Impressions of Africa." All these non-rule-bound emulations and aesthetic choices distract from the book's rule-bound, self-proclaimed metaphoric purpose. As in "Eunoia," I wish he had either presented these as also rule-bound ("I choose Celan because he is the poet of the crystal fragment," etc.) or purged them from the text in favor of echoes and allusions that remain illegible. show less

This turned out to actually be a really interesting read. Though short it is full of insight relevent not just to some obscure poetical form but for aesthetics as a whole. I have always loved Jarry but despite the ubiquity of his name throughout avant-garde literature this is the first peice that I have been able to find that takes a critical and philosophical look at what it was he was actually doing (important for the fact that Jarry never outright explained it, rather he acted upon it, in show more life as well as in wiriting).

The elegance of Bok's writing makes the erudite concepts easy to follow despite ones not always being familiar with particular postmodern philosophies concerning language and knowledge. Definitely serves as a jumping off point into some really great stuff. I couldn't agree more with Bok in his description of Jarry's paralogy as not being against logic or rationality, but as serving to reconcile math and science with poetry. Where "in the world of possibilities, reality is the exception," Jarry offers a pataphysical universe where poetic exploration serves as a liberation from paradigmatic constraints on actual existence, not as a type of metaphysical transcendence that fills the new age isles in every bookstore but as a pataphysical reality in which meaning is liberated from objectivity and epistemelogical anarchy serves as the impetus to an infinite amount of permutations for creativity. "To explore the rule is to be emancipated from it by becoming the master of its potential for surprise, whereas to ignore the rule is to be imprisoned in it by becoming the slave to the reprise of its intention." Rule is not puerily caste aside for some sort of petulant rebellion, rather it is apperceptively used and superextended in a hyperbolic Umour that creates its own world replete with charicatured contradictions and personified irony, getting one over on metaphysics by getting one over on itself.

The historical mapping of Jarry's ideas was also very enjoyable to read. I had never considered the futurists as being so intimately related to Jarry before, never really knew what the hell Oulipo was doing (l'OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle, who knew?), and never even heard of the Canadian Jarryites before. Overall Bok's breakdown of the structure and nature of Pataphysics (though not being exhaustive) and his extensive knowledge of those who do and have experimented within 'Pataphysics (both poets and philosophers alike) make this well worth the time and reinvigorates the individual creative process, not by offering some new form or fad, but by looking into the nature of the poetic experience itself(be it writing or reading) as being just as fantastical as that of the logical and thus instilling the poetic back into the scientific, the scientific with the poetic, and revealing the distinction as merely superficial when, all things being equal, reality is just as outrageous as what it could have been, and by extension, will be. Ha-Ha show less

But why does Bök cripple the interest of his book by using Perec-style rules of inclusion: 'All chapters must allude to the art of writing. All chapters must describe a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage' (that is from Bök's Afterword, called 'The New Ennui'). Yes, the language is mesmerizing, and it's true that Oulipo-style restrictions, as in Perec's work, can produce unpredictable and consistently fascinating distortions of conventional show more narrative lines and ordinary usages. Those inventions owe their hypnotic quality to the fact that a reader can't decipher the tone, the voice, the style of the text because language is continuously deviated by rules that have nothing to do with ordinary narrative. All that is well known, and enjoyed, by fans of Roussel, Perec, and the other Oulipo writers. I entirely agree, and that is why I bought this book. But there is a second-order logic that is missing from Oulipo, and it becomes evident here. Why insist on just that assemblage of disparate narrative elements (the nautical scene, etc.)? Superficially, because it is yet another apparently random, willful restriction on conventional writing.

But that is only a superficial answer, and the lack of a better answer goes to a blindness in Oulipo. Consider the reader interested in the passages that 'allude to the art of writing.' Consider the momentary annoyance such a reader feels as the narrative inevitably swerves aside to accommodate the 'culinary banquet.' Annoyance and 'chafing' (one of Robbe-Grillet's words) is integral to the project of Oulipo, but not that specific annoyance. It remains at the level of ordinary narrative engagement, and is not folded back into the new experience generated by the rule-bound text. This book, and some of Perec's, would be so much stronger if the choice of mandatory subjects, and the transitions between them, were motivated at the level of the language, and not at the level of the critique of literary forms. As a reader, I relish annoyance: I don't mind it, and I actually look for it. But I want to know that it resonates with the act of reading, and not just with a loose, unjustified, arbitrary accumulation of generative rules. show less