Pacific Index

The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis by Jacques Roubaud

This series continues in reviewing old, European, perverse, and largely irrelevant male authors with the volume of poetry and prose, The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis by Jacques Roubaud. 

   This book exists as another spore in the festering disease that is the author’s mourning of his departed wife, Alix Cleo Roubaud. She died suddenly from a pulmonary embolism at the age of thirty-one. The vast majority of Roubaud’s writing largely stems from his grief and his hyper-examinations of it, creating an almost circular liminal space where death assaults the mind’s failure to comprehend absence, and instead continues the suffering and insanity that it causes. His wife’s death, judging from his writing, caused an intense estrangement from reality, bordering on psychosis, and served to unhinge and entirely alienate him from the structures of daily life. His trilogy of largely autobiographical novels (The Great Fire of London, The Loop, Mathematics) sprouted entirely from the meditations on his grief and his inability to face reality, though the subject of this review will be his slimmer volume of intensely horrifying poetry.

   Dancing between the mathematic and literary lives, Roubaud was a member of the famed French literary group, Oulipo, who’s goal in writing is could be summed up as a group of authors and mathematicians who utilize intense constraints in writing in order to come to new perceptions in literature. Stemming from the bones of the Nouveau Roman tradition, Roubaud rubbed elbows with the likes of Raymond Quenau, Italo Calvino, Harry Mathews and Georges Perec in his writing. His writing is comparative, though markedly less intense than the rest of the flock with their restrictions and implosions of narrative creativity. Instead, his writing contains a looser control, his sentences usually possess mathematical formulae which are, as of right now, beyond the ability of this reviewer in understanding. 

   This volume, as well as the corresponding text, Some Thing Black, serves chiefly as a collection of circular meditations on his grief, taken together as a remarkable representation of the power and powerlessness of art to sustain human life through great personal tragedies, as well as a reacquaintance with the world after intense estrangement. Taking its title from David Lewis’ treatise on modal realism (the theory of multiple to infinite universes and realities) On The Plurality of Worlds, Roubaud envisages daily reality as composed of infinite realities, every moment separate from the last. The only uniting principle is the death of his wife and his obsession with it. His writing is frankly horrifying to read. It forces one to confront intense dissociation and dilation in time and senses, often bordering on and completely crossing that border into schizophrenia. Much like in Mircea Cartarescu’s Solenoid or W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, there exists multiple realities of the human experience and all of them are united in despair. Speaking of W.G. Sebald, these poems exist almost in tandem with the circular musings and intense obsessions found in Sebald’s work.

   “For now you’ve come full circle back to the moment of entering this meditation, you are again at daybreak, in its paralyzing light. But what have you learned? Having nothing, what could you expect from reflection? That a few minutes pass, that the abyss of panic be followed by resigned anticipation of certain habitual gestures: turn out the lamp, pick up your clothes, swirl and shake the liquid in your cup, so much effort for so little gain?”(pg.60) Your face is shoved into the universal feeling of despair, and you’re forced to wallow in it long after you remove yourself from this thin bundle of paper.