39 Books: 2001

In 1995 I found this hardback edition in the British History section of a Brighton bookshop six years after the French original was cited by Gabriel Josipovici as one of his books of the year: "a beautifully controlled examination of the effect on [Roubaud] of his wife's death and of the failure of his literary ambitions". I read it for the second time in 2001 and have gone on reading it ever since.

The bookshop worker who misshelved the book can be forgiven because The Great Fire of the London is not the correct title. It is the first 'branch' of a six-book series with The Great Fire of the London as the overall title. Only the first three have been translated. The proper cover title for the first branch is Destruction. For those who can read French, there is a combined edition of over 2,000 pages.

What concerns me here, though admittedly not at all back then, is the subtitle: "a story with interpolations and bifurcations". Throughout the main body of the novel there are pointers to entries placed toward the end of the book related to the current content. While I tend to ignore this and read one page after another, in the translator's Afterword, Dominic Di Bernardi says the book prefigures the "hypertext interactivity of web reading" and "their vast possibilities for the flexible interlinkage of written text, sound, and image", all of which offers "the necessary tools for a revolution in text-based culture". He explains that Roubaud was fascinated, along with other members of the OuLiPo group, with the possibility of escaping romantic notions of authorial mastery by creating "stories whose progress is strictly determined by a reader-user's choices between alternatives". Roubaud calls it "tree fiction". If his examples are medieval manuscripts, Di Bernardi lists more recent precursors: Borges' Garden of Forking Paths, Perec's Life: A User's Manual, Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch, Julián Ríos's Larva, two novels by Milorad Pavic, and Michel Butor's Boomerang. In English, we can add BS Johnson's The Unfortunates.

What this indicates, decades on from such projections into the digital wonderland in which we now frolic, is that any revolution in text-based culture has run into sand. Are such books still being written and published? No doubt there are online text-based works with an almost infinite number of routes through, around and within them via hyperlinked branches, but video games seem more suited to this and vastly more engaging. However, since the advent of e-readers, another possibility has emerged. My experience of using a tablet to read ebooks is that each individual work, no matter what genre – essay, novel, academic monograph, even poetry – disappears as a unique work, becoming indistinguishable from all the other files. One loses sight of the author's name first of all, then the title, and then what one had read previously, as the user-interface discourages the back and forth of paper, and then one loses sight of discrete works at all. Everything becomes a river out of which one cannot step.

This has prompted a longing for one of those large, hugely expensive tablets as a desire not to consume more but to take more control over what I consume. This reminded me that for all the convenience it has over a real book, an ink pen and a paper notebook, as well as in purely commercial terms given that the ebooks can often be downloaded for no cost, the form nevertheless appeals to the promise of value however cashed out: as escapism, social cachet, utile knowledge. This helped me to appreciate what Maurice Blanchot means at the beginning of The Infinite Conversation when he speaks of 'the absence of the book', by which he says does not mean developments in the audiovisual means of communication:

If one ceased publishing books in favor of communication by voice, image, or machine, this would in no way change the reality of what is called the "book"; on the contrary, language, like speech, would thereby affirm all the more its predominance and its certitude of a possible truth. In other words, the Book always indicates an order that submits to unity, a system of notions in which are affirmed the primacy of speech over writing, of thought over language, and the promise of a communication that would one day be immediate and transparent.  [Translated by Susan Hanson]

Instead he suggests we need to abandon these principles so that "we might go beyond, that is, to the limit, in order to attempt to break the circle, the circle of circles: the totality of the concepts that founds history" and in which "writing ... supposes a radical change of epoch" by going in a direction "in which it is not possible to maintain oneself alone". Roubaud's The Great Fire of London begins as a means of smothering grief, an abandonment of personal hope, destruction of the idea of literary achievement, but whose completion must always be held in abeyance.

For those interested, Dalkey Archive has a casebook in electronic form on The Great Fire of London apparently for free.