Richard von Sturmer: doppelgänger (9/12/2020)
The Interrupted Journey
Yesterday I packed up my office at the University of Waikato and am now back in Auckland. When I was passing the photo wall in the foyer of the Arts building, I saw you and wondered, “What is Jack doing here?” Looking closer, your hair was the wrong colour. But in the background there was the message “Ross the face of.” Sort of Yoda-speak. It left me rather confused. And why are you, if it is you, why are you holding up an illustrated map of the Central North Island? I’m still a bit perplexed.When Richard sent me the image above with the query: ‘Is this you?’ I too felt quite perplexed. The photo does indeed look quite a lot like me. The words ROSS THE FACE OF are also unequivocal, but the Central North Island is certainly not a region with which I have any particular affinity. My roots lie more in Northland.- Richard von Sturmer, email to JR (9/12/2020)
Another interesting thing about it is that it shows a middle-aged man with full cheeks, narrow-rimmed glasses and ruffled orange hair. I have the full cheeks and the glasses, but my hair is dark brown going on grey. I did once have it dyed, in a moment of feverish reinvention, during a trek in Thailand. The idea was to go blond, but unfortunately, due to the hairdresser’s unfamiliarity with European hair, it came out orange instead.
So, yes, I did once have hair to match that in the picture, but I was much thinner and younger-looking then – it was more than two decades ago – so while all those attributes have certainly belonged to me at one point or another, I never had them all at the same time: in this part of the multiverse, at any rate.
Another perturbing recent event involved one of those late night searches to confirm your own existence, which in this case took the form of a series of clicks on the ISBN codes for my own books.
Most of them were fine – they duly led to the publication in question – but one of them came up with quite another book. Presumably the National Library had made a mistake, and confused one obscure small publication with another. I had a lot of problems with that book, in fact: it was an anthology of student life writing, and I decided to title it [your name here] in order to gesture (as I thought cleverly), at the essential interchangeability of all such human experiences.
Unfortunately the librarians took that title to be a mere stand-in for the actual title still to come, and refused to list it in their catalogue under that appellation. I had to explain to them again and again just what I had in mind before they would relent. Indexing a title which begins with a square bracket also offers some unique challenges for both human and machine intelligence.
I wonder if John Ashbery had the same problems with his own 1998 book of poems Your Name Here, which appeared a few years after my stroke of bravado? Whether he did or not, any merit there may have been in this jeu d’esprit has now been eclipsed by the so-many-times-brighter magnitude of his star.
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All of which brings me to the principal pretext for this meditation. The other day I made a surprising find: a large grey volume of variations and additions to Georges Perec’s famed 1979 short story ‘Le Voyage d’hiver’ [The Winter Journey] by members of the European experimental literature club Oulipo [[OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle] = Workshop of Potential Literature].
Georges Perec / Oulipo. Le Voyage d’hiver & ses suites. Postface de Jacques Roubaud. La Librairie du XXIe Siècle. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2013.
The reason this seemed so strange is that I’m the only local Perec enthusiast I know of (despite all my best efforts to turn others onto his work), so it’s hard to see how this particular volume ended up, second-hand, in a vintage bookshop in Auckland.
What’s more, this particular story is probably my favourite among all of his fictions. It has a strange atmospheric charm to it which seems – to me at least – almost to outweigh its admittedly intriguing hypothesis.
The conceit of the story is that a single author, Hugo Vernier, wrote an obscure book in the mid-nineteenth century which anticipated not just the ideas but even the verbal substance of most of the greatest works of French poetry from Baudelaire onwards. Unfortunately the one copy of this work seen and scrutinised by the protagonist is torn from him by the fortunes of war. His Winterreise, winter journey, takes place in 1940, just before the fall of France, and he is never able to relocate the book subsequently.
The various members of Oulipo run with this basic idea of anticipation and turn it into an extraordinary farrago of counter-plots involving Hitler, J. Edgar Hoover, and a whole raft of Journeys here, there and everywhere.
A good deal of the merit of Perec’s story comes from its brevity. This book of sequels is over 400 pages long. So where did it come from? How did it end up on the neglected ‘foreign language’ shelf of a city bookshop? Did it belong to some visiting scholar, compelled to abandon their luggage by the demands of the coronavirus? Or a local experimental literature fanatic, who either read and forgot it, or else found the somewhat demanding idiom of some of the stories beyond their linguistic abilities?
Not that I found them particularly easy going either. The only way I got through them, in fact, was to ration myself to just one of the 26 voyages per diem (a device I’ve employed before to get through seemingly impossible reading tasks: the whole of Proust in French, for instance, or the multiple discursive volumes of Casanova’s memoirs).
Most of the stories in the Oulipo book are predictable enough: more-or-less ingenious variations on the forest of themes built up by their predecessors – since the concept of this group of stories as a ‘roman collectif’ appears to have arisen fairly early in the piece.
As I kept on reading, though, the conviction that they’d somehow missed the point of Perec’s story grew and grew. His protagonist’s fortuitous discovery of Vernier’s book is the central moment in his existence mainly because he allows it to be. The rest of his life is spent in a futile search for it as a way of recovering not so much the artefact itself as that lost moment.
It was, after all, the last instant at which France – or even European civilisation – could be said to have been truly itself, before the events of June 1940, the Nazis processing through Paris, the long inexorable ‘Night and Fog’ of the occupation.
Vernier’s book was an apport from an unknown, frankly impossible past. Its very existence adds to but does not cause the uncanny atmosphere of Perec’s story, one of the last he was to publish before his untimely death at the age of 45.
The photo of my double must surely be an apport, too. It exists because Richard snapped a picture of the picture and sent it to me. Even he, however, didn’t know of the coppery hair. Its true significance was hidden from him.
Is it a fetch, then, in the form of a doppelgänger? Or, that even more sinister portent, a Vardøger? The photo of me with red hair was taken on top of a building in Mumbai. I’ve never been back to India since then, so is this a reminder to resume my pilgrimage?
I have a strong sense of a fork in the path of my destiny back in the early 1990s, when I chose to return to Auckland instead of staying in Palmerston North. Is the face in Richard’s photo that of my might-have-been? He looks cheerful enough, but with something a little haunted about the eyes.
One thing is certain, this discovery sets up choices. One is to try to return to that moment, my own Morgenlandfahrt, my Journey to the East. Another is to ignore it totally, and hope it’s not the bad omen such sightings so often seem to be. The other – which I think I may now end up choosing – is to listen to the voice of the thunder, resume the interior journey, and reform my life.
[9/12/20-16/7/21]
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The Road Not Taken: A Global Short Story Journey. Maurice A. Lee & Aaron Penn. USA: Lee and Penn Publishing, 2023.
That's not quite where the story ends, though. I sent the piece printed above to the editor of local literary journal brief shortly after finishing it, and it was accepted for issue 57, which was due to appear in 2021. I even received some proofs to correct, but it has (alas) never materialised.
Given the last issue of brief came out some four and a half years ago, in 2018, I suspect now (I hope I'm wrong) that it never will, and that brief must be added to that illustrious list of New Zealand alternative literary magazines which have now, unfortunately, departed the scene.
I felt that a year and a half was probably long enough to wait before sending it elsewhere. The trouble with that, though, it that it's such a "brief" piece of work, comprehensible within that setting, but a bit too allusive and offbeat for most other editors.
I was, therefore, a bit surprised to receive an email a few days ago informing me of the appearance of the anthology pictured above. I do remember sending them a story a year or so ago, but had no particular expectation of ever seeing it in print.
What really astonished me was the title, though. It's not that it's an unfamiliar one. Most people have at least heard of Robert Frost's poem, even if they haven't actually read it. If not, here it is to remind you:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The poem was, according to Frost, written about his friend, fellow-poet Edward Thomas, and his eccentric way of taking a walk.
Thomas chose to go off to war, to the Western Front, where he was killed by a shell on April 9th, 1917. Frost returned to America, where he became probably the most famous and honoured (though also, possibly, the most feared and hated) poet of his generation.
Which of them took the right path? We'll never know.
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