All PostsNoon, Jeff. Cobralingus. Hove, UK: Codex Books, 2001. Cobralingus website.
On the title page, this book is subtitled “Metamorphiction,” a neologism that handily describes the ten works contained within. Jeff Noon, best known for his science fiction, has created a rather free process for forming a new text out of an old one.
An “Instructions” page for the “Cobralingus Engine” and the “metamorphiction process” lets us into the faux technical terminology that Noon uses throughout the book to mark his work. This terminological apparatus takes away from the work itself by providing a rather cheap sense of trying to be something else. The process does not seem as systematized as the language indicates, though, in the introduction (not by Noon) we are told that one of his inspirations is the filters used on music in the recording process.
To summarize: Each work begins with an “Inlet”, a starting text (most often an out-of-copyright text such as pieces of Shakespeare or Dickinson). That piece of text is then put through a number of “filter gates”, transformation processes. These processes are listed at the beginning of the book but with such ambiguous definitions as: “Control: Brings text down to earth. Forces language to behave itself.” or “Ghost Edit: Kills the text. Calls up a ghost to haunt the language.” (14) As far as the work of constraint goes, these gates are closer to such ideas as the “haikuization”, wherein the process is not explicitly systematized, but rather subjective in use. Occasionally other texts are “sampled” into the process. After each “filter gate” we are given the text created from it. After a number of “filter gates” are gone through we are left with the final text, the “outlet”. Each work consists not just of the “inlet” and the finished “outlet”, but also the intermediate texts, as Noon states in the instructions: “From inlet to outlet, the journey is the goal.” (13)
There is a certain disparity between Noon’s attempts to explain his process, and the opacity of most of what he does in the texts. I am perhaps stuck on the Oulipian idea of creating forms for others to use, but I wished Noon made the process more clear for the reader and (subsequently) interested writer. Maybe others would be creating metamorphictions (maybe others have?). Contradictorily, I feel that if he over-explained the process it would lose something.
The works themselves vary in interest, but manage to show Noon’s love of language and skill with such. There are occasional flashes of brilliance in these pieces. Noon mixes prose and poetry, utilizing lists, rhyme, meter, and concrete poetry, all to the service of the journey from one text to another. He breaks up texts, explodes them into tiny pieces, over-saturates them with repetition, reorganizes and reshapes them, even makes anagrams (the “filter gate” is called “Drug: Anagramethane”).
Thomas Lodge’s “Rosalynde’s Madrigal” (1591), which tells the reader to “plucke the fruite” now because after death “joy and pleasure is there none” is repeated (letters and words) and shaped into a concrete poetry apple shape (with a bite out of it, no less) then mixed with a simple record of Noon’s activities on February 28, 1999 to create a concrete poem about the quotidian and finding pleasure.
Occasionally, I wished the texts had stopped earlier on the journey. A passage from De Quincey’s “Confessions of an English Opium Eater” (1821) is pared down into a series of short poetic lines which are then rewritten as anagrams, creating such transformations as “defrauded” into “Freud dead” (38-39). He creates a simple narrative from these anagrams but then goes off to add chemical symbols and runes, ending up a few pages later with the word “hand” written over and over again in the form of a hand, a sad downhill slope for the formerly interesting work.
Perhaps the most impressive work in the book “Pornostatic Processor” begins simply with Shakespeare’s word “honorificabilitudinitatibus”. He creates a short anagrammatic sequence from the word (“hi-fi / tabu / ion / incubi / id / taro / slit”) (75) and then explodes each of the seven words in the anagram with related terminology. The related terms swarm around the original words and bleed into each other. From this mass of words (covering a whole page, so densely there is not even room for the page number (76)) he writes a story using the twenty-two major arcanum from a tarot deck (in this case the “taro” that is one of the anagrams). The story itself reads like an early cyberpunk tale (shades of Mirrorshades or Burning Chrome), but works well within the tarot context.
The book itself isn’t easy to find (I ordered mine from a used bookstore in the UK). I recommend checking out the website for an animated (Flash) recreation of one of the pieces and the text of the “Instructions”, “Filter Gates” and the origin of the concept. Like many experiments “Cobralingus” is not completely successful, but the journey is often worth the disappointments.
You can find a short example of the Cobralingus engine in action here – http://tinyurl.com/bgk63a