Mercy

Every fortnight we at Mercy meet in Liverpool to talk shop and thrash out, Pinky And The Brain style, how we're going to take over the world. The subject of our discussions lately has been trying out other artists styles in order to flex the creative muscles. Any artist has his or her influences, so we thought it a good idea to try ours on openly rather than being, as French author Raymond Queneau put it, "the slave of other rules we are unaware of."

Queneau is the touchstone in this genre-hopping dress-up game. In 1947 he published a book called Exercises In Style, 99 variations on an unremarkable story about two events that take place a few hours apart. Here's the ur-text with which Queneau began his experiment:

"One day at about midday in the Parc Monceau district, on the back platform of a more or less full S bus (now No. 84), I observed a person with a very long neck who was wearing a felt hat with a plaited cord round it instead of a ribbon. This individual suddenly addressed the man standing next to him, accusing him of purposely treading on his toes every time any passengers got on or off. However he quickly abandoned the dispute and threw himself on to a seat which had become vacant. Two hours later I saw him in front of the Gare Saint-Lazare in earnest conversation with a friend who was advising him to reduce the space between the lapels of his overcoat by getting a compotent tailor to raise the top button."

Queneau rewrote the tale using Hellenisms ("In a hyperomnibus full of petrolonauts...'), interjections ("Psst! H'm! ah! oh! hem!") and even mathematics ("In a rectangular parallelepiped moving along a line representing an integral solution of the second order differential equation..."). He took his inspiration from anywhere language was used according to certain conventions, be it the blurb on the back of a dreadful novel or, below, the humble telegram:

"BUS CROWDED STOP YNGAN LONGNECK PLAITENCIRCLED HAT APOSTROPHISES UNKNOWN PASSENGER REASON UNAPPARENT STOP QUERY FINGERS FEET HURT CONTACT HEEL ALLEGED PURPOSELY STOP YNGMAN ABANDONS DISCUSSION PRO-VACANT SEAT SEAT STOP 1400 HOURS PLACE ROME YNGMAN LISTENS SARTORIAL ADVICE FRIEND STOP MOVE BUTTON STOP"

Two excellent modern examples of this exercise have found their way onto our reading list. The first, called (predictably) Exercises In Style, is the work of comic book artist Matt Madden. Like Queneau, Madden makes his first tale totally banal (click to enlarge):


Reworked in a different style, even that can become exciting. Here it is again, given the schlock horror treatment:


Our other reference point has been Ross Sutherland's Trips To Spar, a story about a visit to the local convenience store that graduates from a 19th century ode, via something Aleister Crowley might have written, to a vigorous hip hop call and response.



As with any course of study, Mercy has set itself some homework, to be completed by the time we next meet on March 21. Here's the beginnings of mine, an attempt to retell Chapter 3 of Genesis as a univocalism (or story using only one vowel, in this case, E). Sticking to the constraint, and seeing as this chapter of the Bible deals with the Fall of Man, I've named my version The Descent:

The legend refreshed: the serpent, the sweet present, reddened cheeks. The Sceptre'd Spectre sees them dressed, then decrees they settle elsewhere. Rent-terms reneged, the rebel newlyweds trek west: myth tells they enter Egypt. There the temptress tends the hens, breeds ferrets, sweeps the byre when needs be. Shelves her revenge scheme. Tested, yes, when her eldest went berserk (the "me, bredren's keeper?" speech, remember?), she never regrets the seed vessel theft, even when every evening she's greeted by the belch, "Eve, fetch me the beer!"