ABSTRACT
Marie Étienne’s King of a Hundred Horsemen is a mysterious poetic-prose sequence that both solicits and bears rereading. Consisting of nine numbered section titles, one numbered endnote page (that resembles in itself a prose poem), and ninety numbered “prose sonnets” (whose “lines” may be sentences, words, or snippets of dialogue), the book first looks like an ordered arrangement of memories and narratives. The arithmetic structure brings to mind a parade, a procession, or—ironically—a military formation, and the pre-established constraints also seemingly derive from Étienne’s “lively if distanced or bemused interest in the Oulipo movement,” as Marilyn Hacker, the accurate, prizewinning, translator of this book, puts it in her informative preface. Yet Étienne, adds Hacker, is actually “interested more in a philosophical reflection on the direction taken by written texts as they develop than in a ‘submission,’ however playful or arbitrary, to form or formula. For her the writer is the ‘coachman driving the team of horses pulling the carriage,’ exercising a control kept by awareness of a constant and fruitful tension between the conscious and the unconscious, as well as between content and form.”
