By Kelman Out of Pessoa

Front matter

BY KELMAN OUT OF PESSOA. Copyright © 2011 and 2023 by Doug Nufer. Introduction copyright © 2011 and 2023 Louis Bury. This work carries a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, which means that you are free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you may also remix, transform and build upon the material, as long as you clearly attribute the work to the authors (but not in a way that suggests the authors or punctum books endorses you and your work), you do not use this work for commercial gain in any form whatsoever, and that for any remixing and transformation, you distribute your rebuild under the same license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/

First edition published in 2011 by Les Figues Press, Los Angeles, as Book 4/5 of the TRENCHART Recon Series.

Second edition published in 2023 by Les Figues, an imprint of punctum books, Earth, Milky Way. https://punctumbooks.com

Introduction

Louis Bury

Here we come across another, very positive feature of play:

it creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into

the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited per-

fection... The profound affinity between play and order

is perhaps the reason why play, as we noted in passing,

seems to lie to such a large extent in the field of aesthetics. —Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

Games: Works of literature are often described as ludic, or game-like, but few, if any, have ever been the product, in form and substance, of an actual game.

By Kelman: Doug Nufer wrote By Kelman Out of Pessoa by going to the track once a week for an entire horseracing season, placing bets on behalf of three fictional characters,’ the results of which, in turn, dictated the structure and plot of the novel.

Games: Nufer did not just play any type of game, but a gambling one in which he wagered his own money in the name of art. As a species of game, gambles attract those drawn to risk, to the commingling of fantasy (the world of the game) with reality (actual money).

1 Following the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, Nufer calls his narrator-characters “heteronyms.” Distinct from its dictionary definition, which refers to a word spelled the same as another but possessing different sound and meaning (like “lead” [to conduct] and “lead” [a metal]), Pessoa’s usage of the term “heteronym’ refers to a fabricated authorial persona with a fleshed out biography and an identifiable literary style. Pessoan heteronyms differ from pseudonyms and noms de plume in that they have a biographical back story and defining stylistic traits and are not just false names.

Games: I am playing a game in this introduction based on tosses of a die: a wager, one Nufer also makes in By Kelman, that an arbitrary, invented literary structure can be as apt a receptacle (and generator) of content as any of the more common, traditional forms.

Predecessors (literary): James Kelman. Fernando Pessoa. Harry Mathews. Gilbert Sorrentino. The OuLiPo.

By Kelman: “Aspects of the hysteria within [Nufer],” the mob of gambling heteronyms that take turns as the novel’s narrators—Cal Nipper, Kelly Lane, and Henderson Will—obsess over sums ($200 losses) at which professional gamblers, by training, barely flinch.

By Kelman: In other novels in Nufer’s oeuvre, such as Negativeland (Autonomedia, 2004), loss is the dominant motif, even a term of value. Here, however, the characters, less confident, seek “the comfort to be gained by gain alone, gain in and of itself, gain, however minuscule, gain.” The constraint determines the attitude: constraints of restriction, like the rule in Nufer’s Never Again that no word can be used twice, create a fictional world permeated by loss and absence; constraints of permutation, on the other hand, like the one used in By Kelman, create a world in which the inhabitants crave correspondences and connections.

By Kelman: The Course, “a weekend seminar” for aspiring horseplayers and the system according to which the heteronyms structure their wagers, smacks of the self-help claptrap Nufer assiduously sniffs out and derides in his fictions. And yet, treacly as its cant may be—“you ARE A WINNER! A WINNER!”—The Course provides the perplexed protagonists with much-needed purpose and direction. Like constraint, its appeal is that of system.

INTRODUCTION 9

Games: The literary accounting of critics and lay readers alike is shot through with the language of wins and losses, successes and failures, pleasures and disappointments—with the rhetoric of games and game playing.

Games: Consider art a complex betting game in which participants—artists, critics, audiences, institutions— wager both money and reputations but must pretend, for the sake of decorum, that no bets are being placed. By Kelman suggests that our (false) modesty cannot conceal the speculative nature of the enterprise—suggests, too, that the size of the stakes matters less than their import to the participants’ lives.

Games: The difference between the type of order play produces and the type of order art produces is that the former tends towards reductive simplicity, the latter towards complexity, even entropy.

Games: The odds of my throwing the category “Games” four consecutives times are Ya. Unlikely as these odds seem, every gambler knows that they’re an eventuality to hit and that, when they do, it’s rarely a happy occasion.

Games: The odds of five consecutive throws: %43. My frustration at having to write, improbably, in this category for so many consecutive throws inadvertently illustrates the way in which plot and narrative are built in to the very form of By Kelman, irrespective of its content, illustrates the way in which games inherently possess a dramatic structure.

By Kelman: Henderson Will, the queer node in Nufer’s psychic triad, thinks, alternately, in Spoonerisms and in chiasmus: “His mind would work as his work would mind: backwards.” Contrarian to the core, Will is considered “the key” to the heteronyms’ gambling enterprise: “If we could come to terms with him,” muses Kelly Lane, “maybe we would solve a major puzzle of the scheme.”

Predecessors: Each of the novel’s principle literary influences can be seen as the embodiment of a novelistic desire. Kelman: the desire to write about horse betting and have it be something other than mere genre fiction. Pessoa: the desire to make an elaborate show of masking and unmasking aspects of oneself. Mathews: the desire, destined to remain unsatisfied, to impose order upon experience through the use of permutational procedures. Sorrentino, via Flann O’Brien: the desire to let one’s characters run amok, ceding, to the extent possible, authorial control.

By Kelman: The rough, grainy argot of the track—“boxed in,” “bobble,” “chalk,” “punter,” “spit the bit,” “mudder,” “early speed,” “late speed,” “tactical speed,” “post posi- ” “getaway play’—resembles the rarefied realm of a tion, literary patois in that both at once blunt and exacerbate the force of lived experience.

By Kelman: The racing season, like the novel form an arbitrary unit of length and organization, appears, by book’s end, sculpted and purposive: “[Kelly Lane] wonder[ed] why she, too, now thought of the season in the shape of a whole process, an arc or plot or sequence that leant itself to some meaning or theme rather than as an artificial construct of actual opportunities to win money, wherein the opportunities themselves constituted all that should have mattered to her or to any of us.”

By Kelman: The novel ends with Nufer’s heteronymic mob in the black (+$362) and with Kelly Lane as the big winner of the group (+$756). Speculating that her win “was what it was, no more and no less than a game,” the novel ends with this curious sentence, set off as its own paragraph: “Only the results were official.” The novel’s closing tension comes from the disjunct between the dry, quantitative record of the wagers and the narrative spun out of it: from the gulf between the raw data of our lives and the qualitative meanings we craft of them.

By Kelman: The concern, expressed best by Kelly Lane, is that the analogy between life and games is too accurate, too thoroughgoing an analogy: “Maybe the only dread any of us should have is that at the end we'll be back where we started, with no more insight than what you

INTRODUCTION 1 would expect to be manifested by the tokens of a board game.”

By Kelman: Perhaps Henderson Will, the heteronym who “only could long so go nothing for playing,” is seen by Kelly and Nipper as “the key” to the puzzle that is the novel because of his intensified linguistic and cognitive capacities: playing for nothing, or, rather, “nothing for playing”—living his life as though it were merely a game and nothing more—would be akin to thinking in run-of-the-mill linguistic ruts, something he, as well as Nufer himself, seems constitutionally incapable of doing.

Games: Literary games always sport at control, only to see the effort collapse under the weight of their—of life’s—irreducible complexity.

By Kelman: Case in point: though I’m looking for a way to conclude this introduction, the rules of the game I’m playing, designed to make the task of writing more manageable, now compel me to write on a category, “By Kelman,” about which I have no appropriately summative thoughts. The best I can do is to stage even this unwanted disruption as a necessary part of the whole.

Predecessors: Blaise Pascal’s famous wager—that it’s a good bet to believe in God because if you win you gain everything and if you lose you lose nothing—was a bet, ultimately, not about God’s existence but about the nature of life itself: that we humans possess more purpose and meaning to our movements than mere board game tokens. The irony of this plea, framed cannily as a wager, is that in order to make it, in order to assert his hope that we aren't just wooden tokens adrift in the cosmos, Pascal resorts to the reductive language of gaming (as if the possible outcomes of the bet could be so simple as either “gaining everything” or “losing nothing”). Nufer’s novel—and ludic literature more generally—plays, gleefully, in the fraught space of this irony.

Preface

Doug Nufer

The study of literature isn’t generally thought of as a course to make you rich, so when a wagering system sprang from the pages of “A Wide Runner” by James Kelman in Not Not While the Giro and Other Stories, I was skeptical. Readers familiar with Kelman’s workhorse characters might question whether sensible investment advice could ever come from men who live in pubs and die in vats of acid. A work of art, moreover, does not exist in order to provide tips for how to beat the races; and, particularly in Kelman’s work, the delusions the archetypical loser exploits so as to pursue his shabby dreams must, in all artistic and intellectual honesty, result in failure. Be that as it may, the stop-at-a-winner money management system and the speed handicapping selection method used by John and Jock in “A Wide Runner” not only illustrate sound principles of racetrack strategy, but also offer a blatant opportunity for exponentially charged financial gain, in light of the heteronymic possibilities touted by the work of Fernando Pessoa.

Unlike some of the stories from that maiden collection, “A Wide Runner” has not been reprinted in other anthologies. Its use of slang that may seem vaguely obscure or frankly obscene to readers outside of the Scottish punter community, and its focus on a subculture that international publishing concerns evidently deem unmarketable, may well have rendered the story that has the potential to revolutionize the betting markets of the world obsolete, but what do acquisitions editors and publishing house accountants know of high finance? Whatever choices these publishers and Kelman made with respect to this 5,o00-word story, we are more interested in the choices the player may make, in light of what Kelman and, by extension, Pessoa here reveal.

“A Wide Runner” begins as the young narrator, Jock, is discovered sleeping in a London college garden shed by a man who subsequently offers him a job as a porter at the college. Jock meets John, a porter near retirement age who is prone to bet and mostly lose huge sums on the horses. Whatever social standing the elder John might have had has been eroded by his need to borrow money from nearly everyone he knows, and so John may take Jock for a new, untapped friend (not to mention, a surrogate son) and a fellow seasoned punter who can appreciate the finer points of the game. Work, trips to the betting shop, and hours at the pub keep Jock and John occupied until John wins a hefty multiple bet payoff. This enables him to embark on a well-capitalized foray into a system that someone he knew used successfully before going broke for other reasons.

“The system is quite well known, nothing startling; it’s called stop-at-a-winner and in principle consists of a minimum 1 bet and a maximum of 4,” the narrator conveys John’s explanation, unveiling a progression that increases according to the proportions 2-4-6-8. Win or lose, the betting stops after the fourth bet, but once you win, you go home. “In theory, to choose one winner from four is not too difficult,” and yet, “When somebody’s on a losing streak, everything can go crazy.”

Once they decide to place bets according to the stop-at-a-winner progression, they determine a method to pick the winners. To assist his characters in their quest to chart previously uncharted territory (or to demonstrate how thoroughly dedicated they are), Kelman poses an equine virus that puts a halt to all horse racing, so in order to ply their scheme, the punters go to the dogs. That is, they study the results of greyhound races in the stacks of newspapers John just happens to have at hand to see which methods have proven to be most successful. The records they study aren't nearly as sophisticated as the Daily Racing Form past performances available to handicappers in the us, but they think this approach is more sophisticated than what most punters do at the track just because it is a plan. This approach also demands fidelity to the method chosen, so that once they see that the “time dog” (the dog posting the fastest time in its recent races) is most often the winner, Jock and John

PREFACE 15 become speed handicappers. Committed to this method of picking winners and to the stop-at-a-winner betting system, our men “don’t need no fucking luck,” John says, because they “eliminate the fucking middle man,” i.e., the bettor himself.

Fair enough. Most people assume that racetrack success is purely a matter of luck and many know that you often beat yourself by second-guessing bad decisions made worse as you identify yourself as a loser, not just for a day at the races but for a lifetime of missed opportunities, simply because you don't have what it takes to be able to look into the mirror and say, “You are a winner.” What’s harder for readers who don’t habitually play the races to grasp is the need John has to share his bankroll with a partner whose bets are to be identical to his own. And yet, this sort of symbiotic co-dependence is not uncommon at the track. Punters will share information and match each other’s bets. Even a by-thenumbers method such as speed handicapping can prod debate over which figure best represents what the runner will do next. More than strategy, though, and more to the point of the alliance between Kelman’s characters, punters who join forces get moral support. Could it be, then, that this is a lame ploy to thwart your weaknesses by creating another entity that can stand in for you, an entity that can function as a third person or even as, some might say, the “fucking middleman” the process is designed to eliminate?

Yes and no. Driven by a notion that stop-at-a-winner is so powerful that no off-site bookie will take their bets, they spend hours commuting to and from the track, although it seems extravagant to go to such lengths to attend just one or a few races. But they keep to their system and their bankroll grows, even surviving the occasional three-day losing streak. John and Jock are comfortable playing the favorites their method often picks, and so their system seems like a key to the mint rather than a variation on the classic sucker gambit of chasing your losses. But another losing streak eventually sets up a decisive finish: Jock follows the method and system, betting a “time dog” longshot while John backs the favorite because circumstances make the “time dog” look like a bad play. The “time dog” wins, the younger man hauls in a bundle, the friendship sours, Jock leaves; John stays and resumes losing.

Now, a general reader might think Jock was right to quit a winner, that the system, however successful it may have been in the short run, was ruinous, and that the brunt of the story is meant to focus not on the young and feckless Jock, but on the old and pathetic John. A reader versed in the arts of handicapping and wagering might think that, as crude as the selection method and betting scheme were, such a system might well generate profits, particularly if it applied more advanced selection techniques and multiplied wagers according to a more aggressive progression.

Readers of Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, meanwhile, have another idea: rather than pair up into a single betting entity, Kelman’s characters should have split up into heteronyms. What better way to “eliminate the fucking middle man” than to create separate bettors, each following a peculiar scheme? Like the heteronyms Pessoa created to write poetry, comment on each other’s work, and intrude into his own life, the heteronym horseplayers would each follow their own approach to picking winners.

These beings may seem similar to characters in fiction or drama, but to apply the principles of Pessoan heteronymy to the track, you must appreciate how they differ from literary characters: one difference is, these characters act in the real world. Whether they act strictly in character or in a way which embodies the quirks of their creator, they publish work in their own names. By setting them loose in the world as autonomous individuals, Pessoa (or you, the boss of your own private gambling mob) could only claim to have a kind of remote control over them. Another difference is, as Pessoa explains, “The origin of my heteronyms is basically an aspect of hysteria that exists within me.” As a measure to control the potential for hysteria, then, each of the heteronym punters would use the stop-at-a-winner wagering system outlined by Kelman.

Unlike James Kelman (1946-), Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) is not someone whose books could be expected to contain practical references to the track. Nevertheless, any entrepreneur who would breed racing hetero-

PREFACE 17 nyms inspired by Kelman out of Pessoa should consider the poetic bloodlines. Pessoa wrote poetry under three principal heteronyms as well as under what he called an “orthonym” of his own name, in addition to employing some sub-heteronyms, as he created separate bodies of work that variously echo pastoral and classical traditions and the verse of Walt Whitman. Pessoa’s line on his entries was: “[Alberto] Caiero has one discipline: Things must be felt as they are. Ricardo Reis has another kind of discipline: Things must be felt, not only as they are, but also so as to fall in with a certain ideal of classic measure and rule. In Alvaro de Campos, things must simply be felt.”

Because none of these heteronyms, not even Campos, displayed much aptitude for the sporting life, I do not recommend reviving them for the purpose of teaching the basics of pari-mutuel wagering and then sending each off with a bankroll in order to win your fortune(s). Besides, Caiero and company were Pessoa’s problems; or, the solutions inspired by his own hysteria. You have problems of your own, serious personal problems that may only be resolved by a workout at the track. To attempt to deal with these problems without first familiarizing yourself with the most efficient selection methodologies and ways of integrating these into a coherent heteronymic deployment strategy would be a terrible mistake. But not as much of a mistake as ignoring them.

No matter what you do, these heteronyms of yours are there, festering inside of the fucking middleman that is you, infecting you with the hysteria of insurmountable desire. Without them, you are nothing. With them, you can be a winner. But only with my help.

From Doug Nufer, Divide and Conquer: Lose Yourself and Beat the Races (Reno: Off-track Books).

Sources

Kelman, James. Not Not While the Giro and Other Stories. London: Minerva, 1989.

Pessoa, Fernando. Always Astonished: Selected Prose by Fernando Pessoa. Translated and edited by Edwin Honig. San Francisco: City Lights, 1988.

. Fernando Pessoa & Co.: Selected Poems. Edited and translated by Richard Zenith. London: Grove Press, 1998.

“From time to time, every confirmed horseplayer is racked by doubts about what he is doing with his life.”

—Andrew Beyer, Picking Winners

“These people aren't real. I’m making them up as they go along...”

—Gilbert Sorrentino, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

Doug Nufer By Kelman Out of Pessoa

To those who conceive of me to think of them as they might be,

Live Workout: Emerald Downs, Auburn, Washington

2003 Season