The Grasshopper
I’ve just read Bernard Suits’s The Grasshopper. I first heard of it and realized I wanted to read it a month or so ago when reading a piece by Simon Blackburn for the next issue (the tenth anniversary issue, number 40) of The Philosophers’ Magazine. In answer to a question about ‘the most under-appreciated philosopher of the last ten years’ he said ‘Inevitably, it is probably someone of whom I have not heard. But a little known and now dead philosopher called Bernard Suits wrote an absolutely wonderful book on the notion of games and play, called The Grasshopper, published by Broadview Press. I do not think I have ever met more than one person who has heard of it.’ Really, thought I, making a note of it. Then just a few weeks later Nigel Warburton wrote a review at ‘Virtual Philosopher’ of a new edition, and then Tom Hurka who wrote an introduction to the new edition commented, and then Bernard Suits’s widow Cheryl commented. The Grasshopper is being hauled out of obscurity, and a good thing too. It’s a terrific book.
Nigel has a later post about it here.
I had one very interesting, what to call it, there’s no word for this – thought-linkup, while reading. Page 39 in the University of Toronto 1978 edition:
…in anything but a game the gratuitous introduction of unnecessary obstacles to the achievement of an end is regarded as a decidedly irrational thing to do, whereas in game it appears to be an absolutely essential thing to do.
Not quite, I thought; there’s something else, I thought; what is it…oh, poetry. That description works beautifully for poetry – and I couldn’t think of anything else that fit as well. So poetry turns out to be closely related to golf and squash and chess and bridge. Who knew? Poetry that has unnecessary obstacles, that is, not free verse. I no sooner had that thought than I remembered – with a considerable feeling of delight, I must say – that Robert Frost disliked free verse: he said it was like playing tennis with the net down. Well there you go. Good eh?
When reading poetry I often keep in mind these words from Calvert Watkins’ book “How to Kill a Dragon,” from chapter 16, “The hidden track of the cow: Obscure styles in indo-european”:
“In the poetic traditions of most or all of the early Indo-European languages we find texts, often in large numbers, which for one reason or another present, or seem to present, some sort of obstacle between the hearer – the “reader” – and the message. And it often seems that that “obstacle” is in some sense what that society considers art. paro ‘ks.akaamaa hi devaah. ‘For the gods love the obscure’, as we read in the Shatapathabraahmana 6.1.1.2 and many places elsewhere in Vedic literature.”
There is also the French Oulipo (alas their work doesn’t translate well) who are using “constraint” to find new forms of literature.
An example of that is the lipogramme, illustrated in Perec’s novel La Disparition, a kind of Roman Noir of more than 300 pages written without the letter “e”. It’s been translated in English several times (I guess the challenge is too tempting) usually under the name A Void.
The Oulipo’s goals and methods may seem silly but are actually worth checking on and are often hilarious (the reworking alone by Perec of famous poems in the middle of his novel is priceless) and the organisation is still going strong after more than 45 years and even has an American member.
There is a good, if rather short, Wikipedia article on the Oulipo which details some examples of constraints and a French Wikipedia entry on La Disparition in the form of a “Lipogramme en E”
Also, there is a cult French radio program called Des Papous dans la Tête which takes much of its inspiration from Perec and Queneau. Worth checking if you are fluent in French (it’s available on the web).
And of course, there is the whole discourse of French post-structuralism and its parallel forms [e.g. Lacanianism], which make such capital out of deliberate obscurity. If we interpret such productions as merely moves in a game where a concept marked “profundity” is intended to be produced through obscurity, perhaps we have penetrated to their ludic core?
I’d just like to mention Matthew Barney who deliberately puts obstacles in the way of his creation of artworks. A simple example is deciding to draw something on a high ceiling so that he has to use a trampoline to reach it, but some of the challenges he sets himself are much more elaborate.
Terrific.
I know about the no letter e novel (though I didn’t remember title or author) – and Suits mentions the idea in The Grasshopper – I of course immediately wondered if the mention inspired the novel or if Suits was remembering the novel. But I think the novel is well after 1978, yes? (I’ll look it up, obviously.) I would love to find out that the Grasshopper inspired the novel.
Gadsby: A Novel of Over 50,000 Words
Without Using the Letter “E”!
By: Ernest Vincent Wright.
See: http://www.spinelessbooks.com/gadsby/
Re: Lipograms, etc. Taken from world wide words: “There are several examples of works written without using some letter of the alphabet. Usually e is left out, perhaps because that’s one of the most frequently found and so presents the greatest challenge (for example, you can’t use such common words as the, use or are). Some of these works are quite long. Examples are Gadsby, a 50,000-word novel published by Ernest Vincent Wright in 1939, and George Perec’s French
language novel La Disparition of 1969, which was translated into English in 1995 as A Void. Such works are called lipograms, from the Greek lipogrammatos, “missing a letter”. And James Thurber once wrote a story about pirates who banned the use of “o” on an island, The Wonderful O, which is about the problem of leaving out a letter rather than an example of the type”
Ah, Suits was remembering the novel then.
I used to be on the Oulipo emailing list until I changed my address a couple of years back. The lipogram is probably the easiest of the constraints used by these guys. (Incidently, a lot of them are mathematicians…)
Most of the time what they were doing went way over my head but they are obviously having a lot of fun, like this time when they were competing to produce poems according to 4 differente constraints:
Alexandrin (the classic French verse of 12 syllabes)
Monovocalism en i (only vowel allowed being i)
Palindrome (the verse can be read from left to right as well as from right to left able was I ere I saw Elba…)
Rigidite de l’Okapi (alternance consonnant/vowel cvcvcv…)
A bit mad, as I said, but engagingly so…
Geek stuff. Very cool.
Hell, I struggle with composing a simple villanelle.
Yes, you’re right, poetry does that too.
But there’s something else which often involves the gratuitous introduction of unnecessary obstacles to the achievement of an end … what is it? It has arbitrary prohibitions like food and sex taboos. Complicated rituals. Irrational leaps of faith and painstaking demonstrations of obedience. You have to renounce things you enjoy and enjoy things you’d rather not, just for the sake of doing so. Crawl on your knees when it’s easier to walk, just because. That sort of thing.
Can’t bring it to mind. Ah, well. Maybe it is a game after all.
Heh heh heh.
Still, just to clarify what Bernard Suits is talking about – the ‘end’ that is to be achieved is a real end: a clear-cut result which then completes the game. He later goes on to talk about open-ended games (pretending, role-playing) but also says people eventually find the lack of an end unsatisfying and move on to games that end.