Reader's Digest: March 18, 2023
In a recent TLS, Richard Beard reviewed The Lascaux Notebooks, a collection of verse attributed to Jean-Luc Champerret. It’s described by the publisher as “the oldest poetry yet discovered,” based on 17,000-year-old markings in the Lascaux caves. According to the jacket copy, “Philip Terry's contribution is to have discovered and rendered this seminal, hitherto unsuspected work into English.”
While archaeologists maintain that these signs are uninterpretable, Champerret assigns them meanings by analogy, then—in an inspired act of creative reading—inserts them into the frequent 3 x 3 grids to be found at Lascaux. The results—revelation of Ice-Age poetry—are startling.
Having been intrigued enough to read the book a while back, what startled me in the review were the scare-quotes, citing Terry’s “research,” in which he “learns” that Champerret was a French resistance codebreaker who scouted the caves as a potential hideout in 1940 and was inspired by what he found.
Champerret turns out to be made up, a figment of Terry’s Oulipian invention. From his editorial introduction:
Just as Wittgenstein argues that one does not learn a game by reading a book of rules, but by playing it, so, for Champerret, … practice would prove or disprove the validity of his ideas, which is the point at which he stopped theorizing and began to write poetry using the signs and grids he inherited.
Readers find themselves unwitting parties to a game that Terry and his publisher play deadpan. Since the game is private, it’s hard to know who knows what’s going on. Terry’s book was reviewed, apparently in earnest, in the Literary Review, and it was the subject of a straight-faced essay in Minerva, “the leading international art and archaeology magazine.” But who’s to say? If Terry was able to publish his “discovery” with no scare-quotes in the LRB—it was this piece that led me to his book—maybe others knowingly played along? I was completely in the dark.
Re-reading Terry’s introduction now, I appreciate his chutzpah. Here’s how he appraises Champerret’s method:
Scientifically, this proves nothing; poetically it is a tour de force. … Champerret’s work amounts to no less than the greatest modern ‘defense’ of poetry that we have.
That’s a pretty nice way to blurb oneself.
Terry later acknowledged his stunt, writing about it in the Irish Times—“I decided that if Ice Age poetry didn’t exist, it needed to be invented, or discovered, by a leap of the imagination”—only to fall back on the narrative present: “Champerret, however, is not content with abstract propositions.”
Let us turn, then, from abstract to concrete: what should we make of the poems themselves? I would say they’re mixed. From this 3 x 3 grid…
eye bison sun horns bison spears legs bison club
… Terry extrapolates these lines:
The white eye of the black bison is like a star at night the curved horns of the black bison are like sharp spears the thick legs of the black bison are like heavy clubs
… which is an okay poem, I guess. The experiment is better than its results.
Other poems are more intriguing, like this “riddle” attached to a footnote that gives a clue to Terry’s escapade, citing volume 410 (!) of the Proceedings of the Oxford Prehistorical Society:
She is in the river and in the pot she falls from the sky when it is night she is in the cave but also at the waterfall
According to the footnote, this poem is a variant of one whose solution is obviously “water.” But as befits a riddle of a poem in a riddle of a book, the answer could be “darkness,” too.