Palindromitis: Reversibility, Undoing, and the Time of Language

"Der Skandal des Anfangs," the "scandal of the beginning": toward the end of the last of his five 1994 lectures on poetics, the Frankfurter Poetikvorlesungen, Oulipo member and Romanian-Germanophone poet Oskar Pastior interrupts his reflections on ending to speak of the scandal that is already (in) every beginning: choosing one way to begin over all others constitutes an offense to the abundance of alternative, potentially equally legitimate beginnings. Yet this offense, according to Pastior, stands at the beginning of every text. Instead of proceeding from a proper arch-e, a text always stumbles into existence, posing a stumbling block for any reader seeking to enter it. Such an improper, perhaps even monstrous, beginning reduces the principle, that is, the governing and determining force of the beginning; it dislodges the beginning's status as the first moment from which everything else follows and throws into doubt whether there could ever be a properly first, originating moment from which a text departs.

This scandalous impropriety of beginnings is part of the impetus that leads Pastior to explore poetic forms that distort and twist a text's rectilinear, successive ordering from an arch-e to a telos in an attempt to rectify the offense caused by this "scandal of the beginning." Such twisting, a troping of sorts, operates through a variety of modes of intertwining, rearranging, and, above all, constraining the "Vor-gang" (pro-cess) and the "Rückkoppelungs[-]vorgänge" (feedback processes) (Pastior 1994, 52) of a text.¹ This paper will investigate two of the most extreme of these forms: the anagrammatic and, mainly, the palindromic poem—both of which involve a turning back toward the text's beginning to reand undo it; to reverse, in the case of the palindrome, the flow of language and with it, perhaps, the temporal directionality that structures the text. Beyond investigations into a rare and rather contrived poetic form, which could seem at first sight to be of limited import, the palindrome's significance thus lies in its ability to produce a highly complex thinking of reversibility, the temporality of undoing, and the status of language vis-à-vis both time and reality: "the palindrome test produces as well as simulates thinking" (Pastior 2018, 267). Testing language under the constraint of the palindromic form both produces and simulates—the relationship between an actual (wirklich) production and an "as if" simulation will be central to the third part of this paper—thinking. In this "workroom" or "workshop," indicated by the "ouvroir" in Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, in this artisanal, craftsman-like environment of experimenting on language,² the palindrome twists and turns language in a playful, artificial, and at times irksome manner³ until it releases a thought, a thought that a direct or theoretical contemplation of these questions would not necessarily have been able to produce.

The first such thought that the palindrome test lab produces and simulates concerns the nature of time. Contemporary French poet and fellow Oulipo member Frédéric Forte in a text titled "99 notes préparatoires au palindrome" remarks: "02. Un palindrome est une machine à annuler le temps" (Forte 2006).⁴ The possibility of an annulment of time—or rather, in contrast to Forte, the impossibility of annulling time and instead of bending and reconfiguring it—is at the core of the analysis proposed in the first section of this paper, which reads some of Pastior's palindromes as well as his poetological remarks concerning this poetic form. Here, as throughout, poetry and poetics (as a purported "theory" of poetry) present themselves as inseparable in their shared articulation of form and thought: for Pastior, no strict line of demarcation between a poetological "meta-discourse" and the poetic object can be drawn; they mingle, undoing and calling for each other.⁵ True to the name of the Oulipo to which Pastior belonged starting in 1992, the palindromic form develops a potentiality of and in language:⁶ the potentiality that we might read and write in a manner that bends the linearity of language and, with it...