Literary Ludics Warren F. Motte, Jr. I N THIS ISSUE the reader will find a collection of essays as ap parently various as the endless forms of play itself. Jean Alter pro poses a stroll through the ludibrique, that so-called subliterature where, as he says, “ Pérotisme se sublime en pornographie.” His canon is composed of twelve novels, chosen from the same dubious display in (one imagines) a dingy provincial train station. Between readings of Orgies spatiales and Les Amazones de Bavière, Alter elaborates a theory of pornography as ludic economy. In so doing, he in effect performs the ludic as well, offering a game of catch-the-allusion to his reader, scriptor ludens in search of a lector ludens. Frédérique Chevillot, after rewriting Roger Caillois, focuses on the relation of the text and the metatext that the author tenders as gloss. Giving particular attention to the incipits of three metatexts by Raymond Roussel, Italo Calvino, and Marcel Bénabou, she questions the manner in which the text initiates itself, and suggests that the primal lie which she finds in each clears away a fictional space and allows the writing to proceed (a suggestion, it may be noted in passing, not without implications for this preface). Postulating an agonistic game involving rule and fiction, Chevillot will speculate, also, upon why Marcel Bénabou did not write any of his books. Susan Ireland, touring “ The Comic World of Jacques Roubaud,” discusses the latter’s first two “ Hortense” novels, and argues that both explicitly in scribe the writing act within a ludic frame. She points out processes of carnivalized intertextuality in those novels, quirky borrowings from writers as seemingly diverse as Flaubert, John Buchan, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Raymond Queneau, compositional integers in what Roubaud himself calls a roman-valise. Beneath the obvious (and refreshing) whimsy of these novels, Ireland suggests, Roubaud is presenting a blueprint for a literary experimentalism grounded in play. T. Jefferson Kline invites us to play the game of Kim in Butor’s Degrés. Invoking Johan Huizinga and D. W. Winnicott, Kline says that the game “ serves as a springboard for a vertiginous play of supplementary meanings and figures that increasingly undermine the narrator’s purpose.” As he iden tifies metonymic, metatextual, intertextual, and metaphorical levels in the novel, Kline finds points of intersection affording a space for a Vol. XXXI, No. 4 3 L ’E s pr it C réa te u r metacultural reading of the text. As Sydney Lévy presses us into a search for the lost soap, he will evoke along the way some of the privileged games of contemporary writing. Ebulliently reading Proust and Perec, Ponge and Borges, Lévy postulates a ludic dynamic of appropriation whereby literary commodities, like soap, circulate from hand to hand. Manipulated, rubbed, chafed, any soap becomes, he argues, Monsavon; it washes itself even while it scours us clean, in what Ponge calls a “ toilette intellectuelle.” Writing on an empty stomach, I have for my part tried to demonstrate the essential similarity of reading and eating, tempted by the toothsome décor of Alina Reyes’s powerful first novel, Le Boucher. There, erotic games are staged upon a background of raw meat, as animate, sexualized flesh plays against the eloquent carcasses of the cold room. But the real meat of this text resides in the words that compose it; and, as meat is progressively sexualized, so is the process of textuality. Reyes, in short, tells in carnal detail the story of a novel that must be consumed. Benevolently warning his reader from the outset that he intends to turn his back on objectivity and launch into a meandering, narcissistic subjectivism, Jean-Jacques Thomas proposes an analysis of the lies and whisperings of a contemporary writer, an analysis obeying a rather special code, to wit, Thomas’s zip code. Proving once again that a letter always arrives at its destination, he tells us at last, in a rather spec tacular explosion de vérité, and after locating his argument scrupulously in the contiguity of those of Nietzsche, Bataille, Breton, Sartre, Caillois, Barthes, and others, the name of the author he’s considering. And...
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Dec 1, 2008
Gerald Weissmann 
Open Access
