chapters were written (always deferring to the preceptive logic of the winch chapter), a natural momentum and structure would emerge, allowing the novel to take shape and reveal itself. Ah‑Sen almost exclusively wrote winch chapters meant to be situated at the beginning of novels, and had a prodigious archive of over fifty undeveloped winches, some of which are published in this collection (“Underside of Love,” “The Slump,” “As to Birdlime,” “The Lost Norman”).
In the Beggarly Style of Imitation (Below the Level of Consciousness) is perhaps the purest expression of this tottering and ultimately unsustainable model of creative behaviour. The conceit was simple, but no less hubristic: a miscellany that would reflect the storied genesis and formalization of elements that would become recognized as the modern novel. It was meant to be a celebration of the grand project of writing in its myriad forms—a modern day feuilleton. Unfortunately, the book luxuriates in its failure of this gargantuan task, in the inability of the project ever reaching completion. Quite noticeably, Gothic romances, parables, travelogues and the various forms of bucolic narratives, to name but a few formative examples, are all absent from it (there was some talk of stopping these obvious lacunae by publishing future collections of recitative imitation, but indolence, or I should say retirement, proved too attractive). Participating in the musical tradition of the contrafactum, in substituting new lyrical content over historical melodies in deliberate acts of textual erasure, however partial and given to reflecting its chronological record, Imitation uses familiarity with narrative forms as the basis to produce startling and at other times inefficacious results. The stories on offer are “exercises of stylistic decadence,” experiments in bald or disruptive imitation known as the “parametrics of purity.”
Imitation had an exploratory mandate, and was perhaps never meant for publication. It was an apprenticeship in writercraft and tropology; or to continue the musical analogy, many of these stories were attempts to “detune” and perform the pieces in an altered key. From a practical standpoint, Ah‑Sen and I were simply attempting to understand what artistic results came about from the “hermeneutic square,” the four states of Translassic consciousness. But I see now that the project took on new dimensions when Ah‑Sen and I decided to dissolve our romantic and professional relationship: not content to rest on its laurels, it appears the text morphed violently into a meditation on eros and its accompanying agonies and delusions, and perhaps even more unfalteringly, must now also satisfy a tertiary objective of being an experimental sequel to Grand Menteur.
Planned as a trilogy of metaobject codex-novels, Grand Menteur, In the Beggarly Style of Imitation and the unreleased third Menteur book were, in an act of vicious paradox, conceived as diegetic artefacts of dubious authorship ostensibly written by the subjects of these books themselves, loosed onto the supra-fictional, real world. These codices were effectively Walserian microscripts that Sous gang members created to keep their alibis consistent in the event of capture. The third novel dealt primarily with the daughters of the Grand Menteur and Grand Piqûre being asked to record a soundtrack for a stalled film about the Sous Gang, a kind of gonzo, demon-laden Day for Night directed by Claude Ste. Croix VII and Aldegonde Ste. Croix VI (a prelude to these events occurs in “Sous Spectacle Cinema Research Consultation with Bart Testa,” while the Ste. Croix family history is touched on in “As to Birdlime”).
A short survey through the stories that follow might not be inopportune, given Ah‑Sen’s refusal to go into illustrative detail about process or organizational reasoning to anyone but members of the Translassic Society (besides being a fanatically devoted believer in the intentional fallacy, when pressed publicly on professional ambitions, he would usually offer nothing more than boffolas about having obscenity laws brought back on his account).
“Underside of Love” takes place shortly after the events of Grand Menteur, and prominently features Cherelle Darwish, the self-effacing, pigeon-hearted daughter of the Grand Piqûre, the Black Derwish. Readers will recall that Cherelle excelled at receding in the background of the pages of that novel, except when it came to the critical moment of palming off psychotropic mushrooms to Rhonda “Roundelay” Mayacou, the Menteur’s daughter. In “Underside,” Cherelle is given agency not hitherto afforded by penurious attempts at her characterization, the hysterical nimieties of the preceding novel reduced to the emotional rubble of a melodrama (or perhaps a Semprún novel).
This winch chapter was commissioned by Ah‑Sen’s friend, the writer Paul Barrett, for a magazine celebrating the career of Barbadian author Austin Clarke. It was a work of parallel fiction that mirrored “Give Us This Day: And Forgive Us” from Clarke’s story collection When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks, borrowing its basic plot elements of a doomed romantic couple, an eviction (and the psychological effects deriving therefrom), and a character uninterested in political activity and metamotivation because their basic needs had yet to be realized. Imitation here served a generative purpose, and was an early incursion into the possibility of two texts operating diachronically as sister stories.
The experiments with overwriting continued with the Borges-inspired “Ah‑Sen and I,” a palimpsest of “Borges and I” (down to the word count) that even incorporated Ah‑Sen’s first negative book review. The miming of Henry Fielding’s picaresques in “As to Birdlime,” which borrows its title from a passage in Jonathan Wild, is perhaps the most unabashedly imitative story in the collection, bordering on being a derivative copy; but notwithstanding the most waspish aesthete’s chop-logic about the pre-eminence of “authentic” literature, surely Ah‑Sen cannot be at fault for taking the counsel to walk before running under advisement. These exercises arose at my behest, after all; Ah‑Sen’s technical fluency with kilworthying was nil, and I believed that rewriting existing passages from writers we admired would eliminate more lame misadventures in composition. Kilworthying was as close to a scientific measure of “sinking into the mind” of an author possible, of becoming intimately familiar with the syntax, grammar and styling that governed their minds. In this fashion, we would be able to trace inspiration to a homologous source, and in so doing, perpetually have ideas at one’s elbow.
“Sentiments and Directions from an Unappreciated Contrarian Writer’s Widow” and “Swiddenworld: Selected Correspondence with Tabitha Gotlieb-Ryder” are notable not only for working with established forms of the aphoristic and epistolary modes made well-known by writers like La Rochefoucauld, Lichtenberg, Tobias Smollett and Mary Hays, but for furthering the connective nodes with the world of Mauritian Menteurism the most aggressively out of all the installments in Imitation after “Underside.” “Swiddenworld,” taking its cues from James Joyce’s letters to Nora Barnacle, accounts for the Menteur’s disappearance from his daughter’s life, perhaps the greatest unanswered question from Grand Menteur, while “Sentiments and Directions” contains Cherelle’s meditations on love and loss which resulted from the glossed-over dissolution of her marriage in “Underside.”
The lyrics to three of the Black Derwish’s Mauritian singles (“Mahebourg,” Triolet,” and “Baie-du-Tombeau”) panegyrizes and further cements Cherelle’s unflinching allegiance to her father’s criminal enterprises, while the excerpt from “The Lost Norman” represents the briefest of rapprochements between the Menteur and the Piqûre, who penned the Norman Wisdom–inspired story together about their favourite English film star’s lost picture. In actuality, this winch chapter existed briefly as one of the ten novels Ah‑Sen had completed, but the majority of the manuscript had been lost in a house fire where it had been improperly stored. The novel attempted to integrate all the Norman Wisdom films in an irresolute act of intertextuality, presenting the filmic Normans as fifteen brothers masquerading as one man for tax evasion purposes. The book was a damning condemnation of housing worries, landholdings fraud and cantillating landlords who liked to hide their wealth behind Rupert Rigsby-esque self-flagellation. The book was not particularly known for its subtlety among those privy to early drafts—if I am remembering correctly, the book histrionically opened with the line, “Beneficed scum-legion of the world, thy name is Landlord!” The Lost Norman was subsequently abandoned, and the segment here is all that remains of the project.
“The
