Christian Bok’s Eunoia
Here’s a little teaser review to start off from the website MadInkBeard:
Eunoia is probably best served read aloud, the assonance and rhyme are more clearly heard, but it is also interesting visually as text. The repetitive vowels make the page appear strange, abnormal. Chapter O is round while Chapter I is sharp.
As narrative the chapters aren’t all equally interesting. The retelling of the Iliad in Chapter E goes on a little too long, while Chapter O holds no real coherence at all, semantically. These failings are made up for with the inherent interest of the linguistic acrobatics and the sonorous writing. “Eunoia” is a unique work, of a different order than Perec’s similar texts (his “Les Revenentes” and “What a Man”), and a great example of what a constraint can do for linguistic virtuosity, if not necessarily for rich narrative.
In this case, the very difficult constraint perhaps limits a little too much what can be said. Personally I do get more pleasure from a text that is narratively interesting and less constrained (a fine balance).
The creator of this site also has some interesting conceptual stuff on there, such as pictureless comics.
Comments(8)
I enjoyed Eunoia a lot. It has taking me a lot more time to read than a normal book of this length because I wanted to read every word out loud, at least in my head, to get a sense of what writing with only one vowel sounds like. If the paragraphs actually contain a narrative, I consider it a bonus, since I’m already impressed that such constraints produced anything coherent. Besides, since there are many words in the dictionary (and other languages) I don’t know, the sounds of the words became more important to me than their meaning as I read.
Perhaps this is the merit of Eunoia that could outweigh its lack of narrative form. When the author created the constraints with which he wrote, I doubt he had coherent narrative as the top priority in his mind. By isolating the vowels, their own qualities begin to emerge and be amplified. In this way, we can perhaps learn new things about them, such as how their pronunciation can evoke certain feelings and how they might contribute to normal text when they’re all used together. I thought it was interesting that ‘E’ and ‘I’ did not express so much unique qualities in my mind because their pronunciations can change dramatically depending on how they are used. Yes, the words’ meanings can distort our views about them too, but would the sound of a word not have any effect on what it comes to represent?
In a sense, Eunoia’s writing is like a scientific experiment done on words. In order to study them, words are put into isolated and simplified situations where extraneous influences are eliminated as much as possible. The results might be unrealistic and restricted, but they are to a certain extent pure.
There are more constraints than just vowel sounds in Eunoia. Reading the last page, you wonder if it is the work of a high class, well read madman, an obsessive-compulsive academic, or some sort of bourgeouis computer program. What, after all, is a prurient debauch?
But after reading what a prurient debauch was I came to even further respect the project, which really mixes the literary sacred (Westerners revel the Greek legends) and the everyday profrane (twin siblings in bikinismight kiss rich bigwigs, licking his limp dick until…) . Eunoia is a mathmatical work given its constraints and precision, but its greatest strength in my opinion is the syllabic beauty when its orated. For all its eruidite lexical playfulness and highfallutin backbone, it just sounds so pretty – even if my toungue found itself in a knot afterwards.
The idea that sound generated lexical and narrative choices is an appealing one. I wonder what can be taken from that: perhaps designing sentences, stanzas, etc. with a specific aesthetic textual intent… for instance, words that begin and end with the same letter, so :
Dont tackle eel
And then add some other constraint, like every word has exactly one ‘l’ somewhere in the word:
Whole elbow wool loam mole
the possibilities are really expansive and exciting.
-Andrew
I loved the contrasts between the chapters. When I read a page from ‘A’ out loud, the last few lines had to be bellowed backwards as I was chased down the hall by some friends who, though appreciative, decided that it was too much to listen to for long. The ‘E’ chapter sat much more agreeably with them, and I agree, it sounds more natural for the most part… So many of the words I expect to see while reading, “the” for example, are “e” words. Continually talking about an object or a thing is OK, but “the deep fens where leeches dwell” sounds more natural to me than “a flagrant backlash as rampant as a vandal’s breath.” ‘U’ was the most incoherent to me, the hardest to read, although also the most lewd, while ‘O’ was more playful… I think my favorite content-wise was ‘I,’ and my favorite stylistically was either ‘O’ or ‘A.’
The other thing that struck me was how international everything felt. It makes sense that expanding into the Middle East, Greece and other domains expanded the set of words he had to work with, it was simply a stronger effect than I would have guessed. I really liked it, although my tongue, too, was tied in knots for a while.
At some point, if you keep adding rules, you won’t be able to look at your piece and say, “I wrote that,” because it will have written itself.
So what does that make you? More of a programmer or a compiler than a writer (at least in the way we traditionally concieve the writer). You establish preconditions and the words fall into place.
Of course (and this is the interesting part), you could make an argument that ALL writing is essentially like this. There are scads of rules in “conventional” pieces, though we generally do not think about them. If you were to claim, for instance, that the typical crappy romance novel is just as heavily structured as Eunoia, I would have to agree.
But hold on. There is a difference between the romance novel and other types of writing, isn’t there? The thing is, most writers, if they recognize the “rules,” have the possibility of stretching them, or bucking them entirely. Christian Bok does not have that option. His situation is different, granted, because he did choose his own rules– but can you feel how there is no tension in the piece? No life?
Eunoia is interesting as an excercise, but I feel like Bok has given me a stone monolith, when what I really want is a razor blade.
i agree strongly with the quip, and the previous comments, i love assonance, consonance, and any sonance in general. my favorite parts were the sexually explicit parts, it was fun to read how many of these words are assonant. also the “snoop dog” and “hotbot” and “how now brown cow” shout outs were amazing. i also enjoyed the adventures of hassan, but was not as fond of the o and e chapter “storyline” if you can call it that i thought them pretty dry, u although i realize was probably the hardest to write was still pretty hard to get into.
this book although so interesting was hurt by its constraints in my opinion it can not be enjoyed outside of its appeal as a challenge to write, the oulipo would be proud but this wont be topping the best seller list or even revered for its profoundness, it almost seems any profound passages come about by coincidence. but i feel shameful giving this book negative criticism because it must of been so hard to produce. all that being said, i think i will enjoy the second read more then the first, when the novelty wares off and i can jude the work on a more level playing-field in my head.
-josh
I’ll admit, I was a bit surprised at first. It’s definitely not your average book, in fact, thinking of Eunoia as a book might be misleading since it seems to be more of a literary experiment: “What kind of prose can one write while only using a small percentage of the english language?” I found it particularly interesting to think of how it must’ve been for the author to dig deep within his attic of seldom-used words to find those special one-vowel gems that he used to make his chapters. Now imagine how lexically-talented all of us would be if we could only use one specific vowel in normal speech, rotating between vowels each day? We too would be calling upon rare words, and probably end up sounding more pompous than necessary.
Actually, one weird thought that Eunoia triggered for me was “Cavemen.” Cavemen and women were men and women just like us, but they were limited to a small subset of tools to make their various crafts. They couldn’t benefit from welders, soldering irons, and other sorts of machines to construct objects. They were limited to tools like “rock” and “slightly bigger rock.” Since they had not much else to choose from, their prowess with the rock far surpassed our own. They could look at a rock and see a potential wheel, whereas a modern day human looks at a rock and sees a dirty chunk of granite or limestone. What am I getting at with this? Well just as the cavemen’s lack of technology gave way for the development of their own creativity and methods of self-expression, self-imposed literary constraints also give way to discovering just how maluable the english language can be, and how we can find the wheels amongst our own rocks.
I, too, found myself enjoying the experience of reading Eunoia perhaps a bit more than I would have expected–not just for the cleverness with which Bök responds to his own constraints, but for the effect these constraints produce in themselves. If Bök’s Eunoia is any indication, it does appear, then, that placing formal constraints on the process of (literary?) writing can be somewhat “productive. ” What this productivity might be, however, is obviously up for debate. In Eunoia, I think Bök produces novel imagery, particularly in Chapter A where he densely weaves juxtaposed nouns in mostly site-specific and confined narrative scenarios, creating a vividness and an experience of place and space that has imaginative impact well beyond the impact of the now banally vivid images of TV, advertising, and film that bombard us every day. If the depiction of Hassan’s life is at all a critique of the excess of contemporary culture, then the confined spaces teeming with nouns that Bök presents might be experienced as recreating the bewitchment and claustrophobia that comes with living in a world over-saturated by the commodity.
And if indeed Bök is at all proffering a critique or even a comment on contemporary culture in Eunoia, then I think claims of its algorithmic quality become greatly exaggerated. It is true that an algorithm could comb the dictionary for every word that contains only As or Es or Is or Os or Us, but it seems to me that it would be extremely difficult to write an algorithm that could then turn around and arrange these words in a way that could comment intelligently and novelly on the contemporary situation — I can’t imagine (and perhaps my imagination is limited) an algorithm that would be capable of responding to its own experience of culture with its own reproduction of cultural experience. In that regard, you could say that Bök’s response to the constraints he’s placed upon himself is to find precisely the way in which these constraints might turn up productive–in other words, it’s as if he’s created the constraints so that he might find a way not to let them best him, a de-humanizing of the process in order to re-humanize it, yielding something of interest along the way.
Lisa
Almost every page is beautiful. I do love the sounds, but I can’t imagine having it read to me because it’s a very visual experience, as well.
I found the more I read, the more I was able to follow the playful babble and banter of the content…when I concentrated. I’m torn between wanting to reread it to discover the details I know I’ve missed and being exhausted with it. I think it’s more complicated than it appears–because in many ways it has simple qualities. It’s easy to place into boxey categories based on its restrictive form. Not only is there so much more to discover in its many restrictions and its many forms, but I think there’s a great deal more I could find in the content, especially considering the way my eyes and brain would hone into the book’s sounds and allow the meaning of the words on whole paragraphs to pass completely under my radar.
Maybe I’ll read it aloud to someone else.