How could a stadium sink?

revisiting Harry Mathews

I am hoping that Dalkey Archive’s announced program of reissuing Harry Mathews’ novels means he will receive some of the same sort of rediscovery that their Miss Mackintosh** has seen. OuLiPo (to get that elephant out of the room) seems to have slipped from an arcane glow more prized among puzzlists than fans of literature, to a dusty corner of the internet’s virtual Wunderkammer, without ever quite dying out*. Mathews, at the time the “only English-speaking member”, started out with a bang, the three-book omnibus The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium and Other Novels (1975)--online here. I think the Complete Review’s pages are a pretty good assessment & i won’t try to duplicate that here, but rather focus on my own experience.

I was doubtless pre-adolescent when i first rode on a cross-country train in the 60s. My seatmate, who could have been a young professor but more likely a grad student, was reading Scientific American, which i had never seen before (growing up in Oak Cliff, the only culture was car culture). I was so fascinated with what i read over his shoulder that he gave me the magazine. I began to read it religiously at the local library. My favorite part (besides the romantic stories of discoveries in higher mathematics or conjectures in quantum physics) was Martin Gardner’s “Mathematical Games” column. And it was there i learned of OuLiPo.

As it happened, the Downtown library did have the Mathews omnibus. I blew through it (as i shouldn’t have, but in those days i only knew a 1200-wpm gobble), & now about all i can remember was that i liked Tlooth best--for its frame story of revenge gave it a certain emotional heft. Also, i think it’s that one with the infamous spoonerized sex scene (which i believe should have become the standard practice to evade censorship). Otherwise it was all a bit puzzling. Nothing, plainly, was to be taken at face value. But it wasn’t quite ironic, either...

Started rereading Odradek*** online just now, & to my mind it’s fairly Pynchonesque, without any overt conspiracies. There’s pedantic wit, much arcana, one obvious Borges reference & doubtless many more that i didn’t catch. Mathews’ art is an art of secrets, the way an author of whodunits who accrues a following will end up anticipating how they’ll be trying to guess, & instead writes in order to stymie them. The frame story is epistolary, on the surface a correspondence between culturally-removed lovers who are themselves out of place (the woman is from an imaginary Southeast Asian country who finds herself in Italy; the Anglophone man, in Florida). At the same time they are searching for a Medici treasure, lost in the Caribbean by a shipwreck. The woman’s pidginish English is made still weirder by her tendency to mistype the letters of a word in slightly scrambled order****.

I think he has a tension here between genuine exoticist attraction & a satire against “Orientalism” (not unlike certain parts of Firbank). In any case, both interlocuters change in the course of their correspondence (her English improves, his feelings develop nuance), & this arc is almost like part of a regular novel. Is it a rewarding book, a profound book, or even a unique curiosity? I’m still wondering...

Many years later i was surprised to hear of a new Mathews novel, Cigarettes (i kind of thought he was dead, i guess)--1987. But to read it was to sustain a special kind of shock, for this was a book without wordplay, without outside references, a book so rooted in a kind of diaristic mundanity that it seemed impossible that it should have a hidden meaning.

And was this the joke, that people would still go on looking for secrets there? Or did someone else maybe write this, & he published it under his own name, out of sheer perversity?

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*there are now at least 4 “E-lipogram-novels” besides Ernest Vincent Wright’s & Adair’s translation of Perec: Andy West- Lost and Found (2002); Adam Adams- Unhooking a DD-Cup Bra Without Fumbling (2008); Gordon John Harrison- But That’s Absurd (2011); and Phong Nguyen- Roundabout (2024). I’ve heard rumor of two or three others. I have the last three.

**i was working at a used bookstore in the last pre-Y2K days when i found one of the original hardbacks on a dusty back shelf. Under the impression that i would never be interested in rereading such an arduous if lyrical boondoggle, i completed it on my lunch hour over many months, & put it bck on the shelf. Okay, i’m an idiot. I also failed to buy an Ann Quin.

***a word from Kafka, meaning a Czech gremlin

****i’m sure this is the only time this has been used systematically in a book, although it’s not taht diffiluct to depicher.