review of
Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - March 1, 2012

This bk is a collection of loose pages in a box. It's published by Visual Editions of London who say: "We think that books should be as visually interesting as the stories they tell; with the visual feeding into and adding to the storytelling as much as the words on the page. We call it visual writing." I find this both exciting, insofar as the publishers seem seriously intent on publishing things that're different, & naive, since they seem to be unaware of, or deliberately in denial of, the tradition that they're a part of.

"We think that books should be as visually interesting as the stories they tell" presupposes that bks inevitably tell stories wch strikes me as rather unimaginative. "We call it visual writing"? Surely they realize that there's such a thing as Concrete Poetry, Visual Poetry, Picture Poems, & Typewriter Art? Surely they realize that there've been narratives that incorporate the appearance of the text as an element of the narrative & that calling such texts Visual Writing is like reinventing & renaming the wheel? Take, eg, my own, Puzzle Writing solicited as an experimental narrative by Crag Hill of Score & published in 1994 ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10434023-puzzle-writing ) - or Tom Philips' A Humament published in 1980.

Composition No. 1 predates both of the above in its original publication date (1961?) but doesn't predate the beginnings of Concrete Poetry in the 1950s. Even more importantly, it doesn't predate Pictorial Poetry wch editor Milton Klonsky, in his Speaking Pictures, dates from the 16th century.

Visual Editions also claims that Composition No. 1 is "is the first ever “book in a box”" & that might be true but I'm usually a bit distrustful of claims of being "first". Often these claims are made by people who simply haven't researched more obscure precursors. Again, Composition No. 1 might be the 1st but the wonderful Correspondence - an exhibition of the letters of Ray Johnson, published by the North Carolina Museum of Art in 1976, surely deserves an honorable mention for its looseleaf structure.

When I found this marked down from $40 to $35 at the Strand Bookstore in NYC I was initially interested but after leafing thru it a bit didn't find the innovations to be worth the price. It wasn't until I found a used copy for $25 that I decided to buy it.

It might seem that I'm a bit down on this & on Visual Editions but, actually, I'm highly interested in both. I think Visual Editions shows great promise & I hope they flourish financially. Saporta's use of looseleaf structure was very stimulating. Being familiar w/ experimental writing, I half-expected Saporta's narrative to be more 'abstract' than it was & was pleased to discover that in many respects it's a very conventional narrative in wch flashbacks & flashforwards & jumpcuts are the standard MO for moving between pages. The closest thing I can accurately compare it to in novels wd be Julio Cortazar's wonderful Hospscotch 1st published in 1963 but, as much as I love Hospscotch, I'd have to admit that Composition No. 1 is even formally ahead of that if the original publication date of 1961 is correct (Tom Uglow's Introduction claims 1962 but I've found 1961 as the date here: http://nickm.com/if/composition_no_1.html ).

It's perhaps easiest to compare Composition No. 1 to 20th century avant-garde musical structure, particularly aleatoric music, insofar as the building blocks are recognized as valid in any linear or even vertical relation. Interestingly, the title of the bk is also the title of a painting by one of the bk's characters, Dagmar. This seems to tie the novel into modern art.

The order of the pages as I got them in my copy had a title page on top followed by a credit page followed by the introduction followed by the only page not cut to the same size: "The Anatomy of Your Favorite Novel" by Salvador Plascencia - twice the page size but folded over to make it fit. I kept those pages in this order but slightly cut & shuffled the remaining pages to be in keeping w/ the openness. When I read Finnegans Wake when I was 22 I started from a page in the 'middle' of the bk, maybe 356, & read to the end & then from the beginning to my starting point b/c I'd been told that the bk was circularly structured & that the end connected to the beginning.

Plascencia is credited w/ providing "diagrams" wch, as far as I can tell, means only the diagrams on the afore-mentioned page. What's unclear to me is WHO DID THE TYPEWRITER ART that's on the verso of every page of Saporta's novel? According to the GoodReads description "Along with their usual consideration to high quality craft and finish, the designers have also generated unique digitally-generated artwork for the backs of each page, making for a gorgeous, tactile design relevant to literary, art and design and digital audiences." Yes, but are they just fluff added irrelevantly to Saporta's story? That wd seem to be the case, nice tho they are.

Each page has a few paragraphs of narrative descriptive text on one side & the "digitally-generated artwork" (that looks like typewriter art to me) on the other. Even tho it appears to be constructed from letters & words, in its form as published here it's so reduced that even w/ my best magnifying glass it's barely readable as text. Instead, the images look like topographies, close-ups of natural textures, arial fotos of mudslide areas, computer projections of stochastic phenomena, etc.. I assume these are just there to fill space instead of having text on both sides & don't serve a deeper purpose.

Whatever the case, the 'typewriter' art is rendered biomorphic by not sticking to rows of lines but having the text more in free-flow w/ spaces between some areas like rips or rifts & other areas w/ greater blackness due to overtyping. The closest thing I can compare these to are Steve McCaffery's great CARNIVAL series, the 1st panel of wch (made from 1967-1970) was published by The Coach House Press in 1973. McCaffery's is far more astounding, tho, & WAS made w/ a typewriter instead of the much more easily generated digital (presumably computer) process.

As for the narrative, it's carefully crafted to hang together in any order & to still have some tale-telling tension. There're 3 main characters: Marianne, Dagmar, & Helga. The reader gets intermittent glimpses of their lives. Helga is a teenager coming of age sexually. Tension is generated by making it unclear whether she's nervously inviting a passionate sexual encounter or whether she's half-welcoming a forced one. Marianne is the only character who suffers from a progressive deterioration. As such, whenever she appears, her mental state may apply a place in a chronology. Dagmar is, perhaps, the most mysterious of them all. Sometimes I thought that she might be the one forcing the sexual encounter w/ Helga.

Other narrative ploys appear: a war between the Germans & the French is in progress. It may or may not be WWII. There're various side-conflicts that set a stage w/o overly defining it. Marianne's husband is a compulsive gambler who's ruining them financially. Marianne might be sd to be the main character &, for me, the novel works just as a conventional novel insofar as every time I learned more about the characters I was interested in their development.

Most of all, this bk is like a jigsaw puzzle. There's a picture to be brought to completion & reading the pages is the same as adding a piece. & the finished puzzle IS a 'picture' - it doesn't have a beginning or an end, it's whole in & of itself.

One cd order the pages so that the most chronological narrative is created using Marianne's deterioration as a central line. Even in that way, however, things like Cohen's struggle, or Buisson's gang, or the war narrative wd have no clear place in time. Saporta has been careful to make sure the narrative stays open. While I can't agree w/ the reviews that say that this bk is "is an object of immense beauty and danger" & such-like (after all, I see alotof artist's bks that are even more spectacular) I find that all in all, this was excellent & goes far beyond gimmickry. ( )

Vedi: Federico Fastelli, Il nuovo romanzo: La narrativa d’avanguardia nella prima fase della postmodernità, p. 199 e segi. Una fascetta dice: «TANTI ROMANZI PER QUANTI SONO I LETTORI. L’ordine delle pagine è casuale: mescolandole, a ciascuno il “suo” romanzo». Sulla copertina: «Si invita il lettore a mescolare queste pagine come un mazzo di carte. Se gli fa piacere, può anche alzarle con la sinistra, come si fa dalla cartomante. In ogni caso l’ordine in cui appariranno allora i diversi fogli determinerà il destino di X».

From what I gather the original edition of the book has an author's foreword in which Saporta specified that the pages of it be shuffled before being read and went on to claim that our lives are affected by the points when and the order in which the events in them occur as much as by the nature of those events. In other words, Composition No. 1 is in this format for a valid artistic reason and not out of frivolity.

There are three (or four, or just possibly two) main characters in the novel. Certain episodes are referred to repeatedly but the various takes on them are of different moments in their unfolding. Constants are Helga, Dagmar, and Marianne, as well as German reprisals upon a French village that had been liberated by the maquis; thefts of envelopes; the quasi-rape of Helga; Marianne's increasing instability; a lying child and his Maman. In other words, it's not a difficult book to follow as one never loses one's bearings altogether. At the end there are certainly various possible interpretations of the content, but I can't think of any deeply satisfying work that that can't be said of.

Overall the book was absorbing and suprisingly evocative. And this new edition is a nice one: the box is sturdy, the design good (and do have a glance at the backs of the pages), and a glossary of the features of a (conventional) book is appealingly quirky. I couldn't, though, find the name of the translator, and only by reading the Guardian's review did I learn that it was the highly-regarded Richard Howard, who rated only a very small credit on the inside of the box. If the publisher issues another edition I hope that Howard will be accorded the prominence now given to 'Tom Uglow, Google and You Tube', whoever he is. I do though think I'll take Mr Uglow-of-Google-and-You-Tube's advice and, sooner or later, read the book again in a different order. ( )

Hard to say exactly what this book is about - or why it's something to be read, other than that it is an object of immense beauty and danger.

I read the whole thing in one go after having waited for quite some time, under the influence of Tylenol and a low-grade fever. I do believe this only helped add to the ethereal nature of the book and, hey, I'll take it.

This won't be for everyone, certainly - but even if you don't like the book, you have to admire Visual Editions' beautiful work on the creation of the piece itself.

More ramblings about the strange creation over at Raging Biblioholism: http://wp.me/pGVzJ-ha ( )