Jacques Roubaud’s extraordinary 1989 novel The Great Fire of London pushes self-reflexivity awfully close to what we would have to imagine its limits, extrapolating to every coordinated extremity ways and means of producing a literary work that engineers itself in and through the description of itself. Map and territory, compass too. This may sound eminently “postmodern”—a word I am near incapable of using without confining it to the gulag of scare quotes—but, of course, Roubaud was a member of Oulipo, or the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, a transnational workshop largely kicked-off by renegade mathematician and Surrealist apostate Raymond Queneau, ongoing to this day, the primary conceit being that of a fellowship dedicated to the experimental research of generative constraints and formulae (often mathematical or crypto-mathematical) respective of the function they might be made to serve in the composition of literary works. We would likely be better served by calling this commitment to the conception and operational application of formal systems hypermodernist rather than postmodernist. Roubaud’s book also demands to be assessed as a critical and pathbreaking experiment in the field of autofiction. He is unambiguously the narrator, retaining his proper name as such. The novel would appear to pivot around his wife Alix, who had died in 1983 and who likewise retains her proper name. The genesis of the novel is first the genesis of a decision wrought by a dream, the decision leading to the Project, the Project already implicit in the original dream. The Project does not have anything like a proper sense until 1980, when the dream, the initial product of which had been, upon waking, merely the words “the great fire of London,” sits nineteen years in the past (belonging as such to a different reference frame to that of the novel, which occupies the non-time of a succession of early mornings, the milieu of its composition). Or something like that. “The outset, then, which I now find quite remote, is in the autumn (December) of 1961. The year 1961 surrounds the dream. Plus something I’m not going to tell, that there will be no end to my telling perhaps, or my not telling, I don’t know.” I am nearly finished reading The Great Fire of London, one branch of the Project, but a branch with many branches (“a story with interpolations and bifurcations”). Two subsequent autoficitions would appear to have emerged from the Project, and they are the next two books on my immediate itinerary. What Roubaud is not telling or will find no end to telling (or not telling) obviously has a great deal to do with grief, an occluded factor which might also help a person make sense of a project that tells us it is appropriating “elliptical deduction” and other elements of Nicolas Bourbaki’s Elements of Mathematics in order to to perform an act of destruction mimetic of what is announced in the book’s title, framed as an active alternative to passive forgetting. Of the 99 axioms from which the book generates its idiosyncratic mode, the 92nd has a special sting to it, hijacking Dante and once again talking about the deceased Alix without talking about her: “Destruction was my Beatrice.” If that sounds terribly heavy, much of The Great Fire of London strives to be quite light, perhaps an extension of its not talking about what it is most deeply about, and the first four chapters take us on many genial diversions hither and yon, as far as the Mississippi and the Land of Twain. The Project is an abiding day to day, in a sense, a way of going on and getting on, but it is poetry first and math second in its strictest sense, while also somehow being a novel by default. It catalogues habits and personal connections, intimacies and amusing quandaries, its author a man who likes to walk and likes to count and likes to count whilst walking (“rhythmic algebra”)—who likes to swim, but only in the sea. For our interests here, it is my intention to zero in—not even a branch, call it a perch—on a wonderful consideration of shaving in section 45 of the forth chapter, which happens to be a chapter called “Portrait of the Absent Artist.” In the early morning hours of whatever date Roubaud happens to be writing about shaving, he shares with the future reader (of whom he can only have a cautiously optimistic hope of ever reaching), some of the quotidian shaving specifics, such as a current fondness for “Williams brushless shaving cream from a can” and a recent adoption of “disposable razors, single or twin-blade,” which have been “driving out both from supermarkets and drugstores white Gillette Stainless Steel long-lasting blades in packets of five or ten, themselves having once supplanted the individually paper-wrapped blue Gillette blades of my youth that now can be happened on only by chance at antique shops, strewn among 78s or Pathé-Marconi radio sets.” It is probably not surprising that Roubaud’s shaving rituals will come in short order to be established as uncommonly rhythmic/arithmetical. However, for me the first point of considerable interest here is how the author presents the mirror image encountered whilst shaving as the only time he ever sees himself, or rather his likeness. “I don’t see a self, nor Jacques Roubaud (my name).” If Roubaud is looking at his face he is largely missing his face as well, because what he is actually looking at are the various patches of his face as he shaves them in sequence: upper lip, lower lip, chin, right cheek, left cheek, neck. Reading this, I immediately thought of a scene from Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us in which the protagonist, played by non-professional actor Behzad Dorani, shaves in close-up, staring directly into the camera lens, which assumes the position of the mirror. It is a striking moment, probably in large part because it represents one of the most unambiguous interjections of artifice in a film where artifice is generally far more sly. A famous example of the sly approach in the film is an earlier shot which depicts an apple rolling across a balcony, into a gutter, and finally down into the street; this shot seems like an incidental documentary detail, but it took something close to an entire day to set up, this even involving the strategic laying of cement. The Behzad Dorani character, a cosmopolitan urban TV producer who finds himself in a remote Kurdish village under something close to false pretences, addresses, whilst shaving, a local woman intermittently visible in the background; a reverse shot from behind him shows the actual small mirror into which he is nominally directing his unbroken attention. The scholar Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa has claimed that Kiaorstami also put Behzad Dorani on a stool to achieve the precise composition he desired for the shaving close-up. In Kiarsostami, it would seem to be the case that there is always considerably more artifice at work than you would have ever imagined to be the case. In the first and then the second expanded edition of their dialogic study of Kiarostami, consisting of individual essays by each of the authors in addition to dialogues between the two of them as well as dialogues including the director, Jonathan Rosenbaum and Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa provide a comprehensive overview of Kiarosatami’s methods and themes. Among other things, it is established that The Wind Will Carry Us is named for a Forough Farrokhzad poem and contains a recitation of said poem during a key sequence. Saeed-Vafa informs us that “Iranian literature, culture, and language are full of multifaceted metaphors, symbols, allegories, and proverbs,” arguing that the preeminent text in this respect is One Thousand and One Nights. “Iranian culture and politics require a covert expression of subject and self,” and tactics are utilized to “conceal meaning and talk about larger issues—as in the poems of Hafiz—for sacred purposes, secret purposes, or both. That is to say, the mysteries of the system and the universe are understood and conveyed only through metaphor.” Aside from being a radical poet, Forough Farrokhzad was a pathbreaking filmmaker in her own right, 1962’s The House is Black having influenced a generation of Persian film directors. Kiarostami would certainly be among those influenced, and, already established as a filmmaker, he would himself become a poet of distinction. Kiarostmai’s cinematic metaphysics is largely a cosmology foregrounded by the “multifaceted metaphors” of the zigzag path and the peripheral detail. Behzad Dorani’s character in The Wind Will Carry Us is a man limited by his own tunnel vision, not especially awake to the excitation of incidental or peripheral details; in the recitation of the Forough Farrokhzad poem from which the film takes its name, we watch as he fails to meaningfully assimilate the words or the predatory slant given to them by the context in which they are presented, such that it cannot only be a matter of his missing the reality of logistics, the lives and contexts of the Kurdish villagers with whom he interacts, always paternalistically, but of its being at the same time a matter of his not being in any way connected to the spiritual dimension. If we think of the shaving scene in light of the consideration of shaving in Roubaud, we can see how Behzad Dorani’s character, who many of the villagers call “the engineer,” is a man who gazes operationally, instrumentally, not even taking in the entirety of his own face, merely one patch at a time. This is a gaze, staring directly at us in that one shot, that doesn’t tell us the entire truth about what it omits, merely that it is a gaze that does omit, habitually, all the time, in order to perform the narrowing of a function. This in a film full of many characters we only hear as offscreen voices or who are only mentioned, neither seen nor heard. And there is yet another layer to consider here. Jonathan Rosenbaum rightly sees Behzad Dorani’s “engineer” as only the latest in a series of figures distributed throughout Kiarostami’s oeuvre who represent director surrogates in service to self-critique. Kiarostami perfected a playful sort of “pedagogical” cinema, often focused on the politics of the classroom, as such playing a large role in making films about children popular in Iran (something which would become a regular censor-deflecting ingredient as well). This all started because early on, beginning during the reign of the Shah, Kiarostami had worked under the auspices of Kanoon (the Center for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults). The limits of pedagogy become in Kiarostami the limits of the pedagogue, the fatuous paternalistic figure who presumes to know but always becomes a sort of foil, less crippled by that which he doesn’t know than by the hubristic presumption which cannot help but circumscribe his field. Kiarostami has said that the wizened older men in his films, for whom he feels a deep reverence while remaining critical, are inspired by his own father, but there can be no denying that he appears to go to certain pains to establish these figures as analogues for himself as well. The shaving shot in The Wind Will Carry Us expresses this, too. It is very often Kiarostami who is immediately off camera, feeding actors their lines or asking them questions intended to provoke unmediated extemporaneous rejoinders. A gaze turned on the camera in Kiarostami is uniquely a matter of the gaze turned on the director, and here we might benefit by tracing another connection to Jacques Roubaud and The Great Fire of London, turning now to an interpolation toward the back of the book that branches off section 61 of the fifth chapter, relating to the dissymmetrical palindrome by way of which a mirror confronts the W with its M in Geroges Perec’s Life A User's Manual. Might this not be the correspondence in that unusual and striking shot from The Wind Will Carry Us? The camera takes the place of the mirror and as such opens up the question of dissymmetrical optic circularity, Kiarostami M to Behzad Dorani’s W. The open question is the register in which Kiarostami operates. Jonathan Rosenbaum consistently returns to these matters: the philosophical wide shot that invites expansive meditation rather than allegorical pigeonholing, how this is an “incomplete” or “interactive cinema” full of calculated “narrative ellipses” intended to make the viewer perform the ultimate synthesis...to literally complete the film. Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa asserts that swindlers and liars often present themselves in Kiarostami as agents of greater truths, just as the cinema presents itself as a means to truth by way of deception. I sense that Kiarostami places his surrogates around him and inside of his mise-en-scène as a reminder both to look out for his own worst instincts, but also to help him forgive himself for any relapse. As for Jacques Roubaud, he tells us one more crucial thing about shaving. Writing in his early morning idyll, Roubaud remembers that he had written a poem nine years earlier that detailed the sequence of his shaving ritual, its mathematical order of operations. He consults the earlier poem and is aghast to discover that, unbeknownst to himself, unconsciously, the schematic has changed ever so slightly. He would have sworn the order had always remained perfectly routinized, “a fixed point in my life, assuring my continuity…”: upper lip, lower lip, chin, right cheek, left cheek, neck. Well, no, evidently not. Nine years earlier the sequence is recorded as having commenced with the chin and only gotten to the upper lip after both cheeks and the lower one. Can you not relate? This happens in certain pieces of minimalist music that modulate over time, just beneath the surface of the perceptible; minute twenty-five is very different from minute five, but you never really heard the progressive transition. And it is absolutely how we live and grow. Others who see us only irregularly will notice changes in us that have been gradual, that we perceive only faintly if at all. A landmark can help to place us with respect to how we differ from the version of the self that passed it by however far back. I hold the cinema to be especially salubrious here. I can come back to a movie I have not seen in many years and it can suddenly be a mirror capturing the realization of a change I was not properly conscious of having undergone.
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