You’re My Earth, I’m Your Sputnik: Some Experimental Fiction

You wouldn’t know it from most American fiction these days, but a good many writers have abandoned the codes of realism to pay obeisance to more ancient sources of fiction: the imaginary and the artificial. These works proclaim their made-upness, their unreality, their textual difference.

Century 21 by Ewa Kuryluk. (Dalkey Archive Press: $19.95.) This high-pitched, many-voiced swan song of the Millennium is freighted with just about the maximum of erotic emotion (and I don’t mean sex scenes) supportable by a novel these days: “Our union is perfect, but we choose to repeat it again and again. Oh my bohemia stipularis! Oh my colcassia antiquarum!

“Copulating with you in the koa forest, I’m as profuse as the mamake and pipturus albidus. You’re the shaft, I’m the bark. You’re my blood, I’m your hide. Oh my kalo, I cultivate you from dawn to daybreak. . . . You’re my snake, I’m your gecko. You’re my earth, I’m your sputnik.”

The “cast” of Century 21 includes Djuna Barnes, Joseph Conrad, Goethe, Anna Karenina, Malcolm Lowry, Italo Svevo, Simone Weil, Moses Maimonides and the “Moonscholar.” But of course these aren’t characters in the usual sense. These names are simply chess pieces in a kaleidoscope, having an endless conversation--exalted, mundane, degraded--about love and art and the plagues of flesh and history.

Albucius by Pascal Quignard. (Lapis Press, Venice, Calif.: $35.) “Historians are frightening,” says the narrator of “Albucius,” “they seem to believe the things that happen to humankind are coherent.” Certainly this excursus on the life and work of an obscure Roman writer from the time of Caesar and Pompey doesn’t proceed by marching costumed facts past the reader in a chronological dress parade. For 25 brief chapters Quignard (author of the book and screenplay “Tous les Matins du Monde”) moves rapidly back and forth in time, enlivening the sketchy documentary evidence about Albucius with reconstruction, digression, explication, historical background, and even Latin lessons.

Caius Albucius Silus (69 BC-AD 10) was, as an orator and novelist, not concerned so much with originality or beauty as with the effects of language in action. He became obsessed with the power of sordissimus-- the unclean, the uncouth, the reviled. Asked to name examples, he mentioned “rhinoceroses, public toilets, sponges, household animals, adulterers, food, the death of loved ones, and gardens.” His “novels”--actually brief pointed texts culminating in moral conundrums (and often legal debate)--typically involve rape, murder, suicide, torture, and cannibalism.

According to Quignard, whose fascinations with this shadowy character quickly rub off on us, “Albucius brought Latin speech to a richer, more varied state.” He called the novel a “bed-and-breakfast,” which gives hospitality to the most irregular topics and basest materials. “In comparison, poetry, philosophy, theater, music, are paltry things.”

One of the lessons of Albucius involves the word satura-- originally a salad bowl or “mixed platter,” it came “to designate a form of novel-writing in which most of the then-existing literary genres were subjected to a cut-and-paste operation.” (A century after Albucius, Petronius would produce his Satyricon.)

“Nothing could interest me unless first broken up, kneaded, mingled, digested, then gurgitated onto the tongue,” Quignard has Albucius say toward the end of his life. We can see Albucius as Quignard’s imitative homage, and also as a salutary reminder that many things we consider new have ancient antecedents.

The Fear of Losing Eurydice by Julietta Campos. (Dalkey Archive Press: $19.95.) This delicate and lyrical novel by one of Mexico’s leading authors interweaves many different strands of text with all the fluidity of dreams. There’s the story of Monsieur N., a lonely French teacher posted to a remote West Indian seaport. Through stumbling on a Jules Verne shipwreck tale, he becomes obsessed with islands, real and fictional, and through islands, with telling not only a love story, but the love story, the story of all couples, whose natural habitat is the Island.

Then, printed in a narrower column, there’s the text Monsieur N. is actually writing, which begins: “I am going to tell a story: Once Upon A Time there was a man and a woman.” This tale meanders and mutates and, far from being the idealized love story its author perhaps envisions, describes a series of fantasized particular loves.

Situated alongside N.’s story are the quotations about islands that Campos has collected from Dante, Holderlin, Gaugin, Rousseau, Baudelaire, Daumal, Cervantes and Pound.

And inserted into all this are the self-reflective comments of narrative voice--the “I”--who is manipulating everything--or else being manipulated: “The story of love is a dream that is writing me.”

The text never stabilizes in this hall of mirrors, but simply flows along its uncharted course.

These three novels, for all their exuberance, ask that the reader meet them halfway. Adventurous readers will find the challenge well worth undertaking.