A pair of shorts

Last week I bought a pair of shorts at the publisher's launch: Varamo and Recluse.

Along with Evelyn Juers, author of Recluse, I have long been interested in the myth that the origin of Charles Dicken's character, Miss Havisham, was Newtown's retiring nineteenth century inhabitant, Eliza Donnithorne. Even as I have discovered over the years that there is nothing at all to the supposition, when I wanted to read Great Expectations to my children over the summer holidays one year, it mustn't only have been the fact that the story opens in a graveyard that had made me decide to start the reading early one summer evening during a picnic in Camperdown Cemetery, where Eliza was buried in her father's grave in 1886. Although I began reading it to them on Christmas Eve, as the book itself begins, this was simply a co-incidence; it is only late on a Christmas Eve when, all the preparations for both Christmas and the coming long months of summer, have at last come to a necessary close with the shutting of the shops. I must have thought of Magwitch though, and mused that his imaginary, antipodean adventures might have brought him to this cemetery or at least to this settlement at the terminus of a short nineteenth century omnibus ride from Sydney where, even in her lifetime, Eliza Donnithorne was rumoured to have been the model for the character which all of England and its colonies feared and so loved for her bitterness and her mad, white wedding gown and mouldering feast.

Despite her careful, persistent research, however, Juers finds that Eliza remains nearly as elusive to outsiders as she was while she was still alive and so, in place of a detailed portrait, the book stretches an extended, dizzying web of connections -- with details of Eliza's relatives, her associates, the descendents of the children she might have known in England and India -- around this quiet, almost unknown centre. So powerful is Juers's evocation of these connections that we feel what a relief it must have been for her to live on the other side of the world from this network of well-wishers who could never understand why it was, once her father had died, that she didn't come home -- that is, home to England.  The most precious aspect of Eliza that Juers discovers is this love of seclusion and, along with this, her love of books. Far from a cobwebbed, dank and reeking inner chamber, Juers has us imagining a replete and well-read sanctuary on the doorstep of the increasingly busy main street of Newtown, and as well as this, a generous heart. Miss Havisham might have brought up a young girl to wreak her revenge on all of the male world but Eliza Donnithorne, we learn, never turned a beggar of either sex away. Recluse is a gently paced extended meditation on reclusion -- a reclusion that we no longer wish to disturb.

Similarly, for all its teeming oddball peripheral characters, César Aira's Varamo, translated by Chris Andrews, has a quiet, if anxious, narrative thread through the middle of it. It has the feel of one of Italo Calvino's tales of urban naives: Varamo like a Marcovaldo or Mr Palomar -- but with an additional touch of Russian-style bureaucracy: a Mr Palomar as described by Gogol. Varamo is set in 1923 -- the height of literary modernism; in 1922 T. S. Eliot had published 'The Wasteland', and the flavour of this broad period of modernism is everywhere, from images of Varamo in his bowler hat in the 'crepuscular landscape of Panama'  -- suggestive of paintings by Magritte -- to the moment when, carrying his tiny mother with the ease that Kafka's Georg Bendemann carries his own paranoid parent in 'The Judgement', I almost expected Varamo's mother suddenly to grow tall, strong and frightening and take over the story with her wrath as Georg's father does. But Varamo is a tale that resists our desire for such elaborations. It is fitting that Varamo's seemingly surrealist attempt at embalming a fish and constructing a scene of it playing a piano -- no great modernist or surrealist statement in Varamo's eyes, but just a scene that he thought 'would be amusing, and was bound to appeal to customers' and hence to bring him extra cash to supplement his meagre public servant wage -- that this attempt should end with a half dead poisoned fish that his mother cooks for their dinner and a model of a piano that he can never get right, for even as he tries to imagine a piano as Cezanne might have done -- as 'basically made up of cubes embedded in one another' -- the object that he produces after many attempts, 'didn't look like a piano at all, even to him'.

The theme of money and deception is there from the beginning, when Varamo is paid his wages in counterfeit notes which he is too slow off the mark to hand straight back to the cashier. His fish sculpture fails, but fortune, or at least a reprieve in his financial anxieties, comes in the form of three pirate publishers hungry and ready to pay two hundred pesos for 'something really new'. I will quote what Chris Andrews himself read at the launch as it is a perfect comic scene:

'Do you write?' Varamo smiled and said no, amused by the thought. It had never occurred to him. 'But we're open to local writing, especially if it's the work of intelligent and cultured people like yourself. You wouldn't like to try?' Varamo replied that it was tempting. But he had no experience, he didn't even know the basics of the writer's craft... 'That doesn't matter at all,' the publishers exclaimed. On the contrary: in barbaric lands like the Americas, writers produced their best work before learning the craft, and nine times out of ten, their first book was the strongest, as well as being, in general, the only one they wrote. Since Varamo had no counter-arguments left, he improvised an obliging fantasy: 'For a while I've been wanting to write a book, to record what I've learned from my experiences as an amateur embalmer. I've even come up with a title: How to Embalm Small Animals.' Had he known what a keen interest his declaration would provoke, he would have kept his mouth shut. The three publishers expressed their desire to publish the book straight away. 'When can you deliver the manuscript?' 'Does it have illustrations?' 'I have enough paper ready for a good print run.' 'I'd do it in hardcover.' Although the project was a castle in the air, Varamo felt he should rein it in somehow: he said that he still hadn't received satisfactory results with his embalming. 'That doesn't matter!' The thing was to make it look like real work; in the current phase of capitalism, work was coming to resemble play, and losing its necessity; that was why instructions were the way of the future, a poetry of instructions freed from the tyranny of results. They continued in the same vein for a while, but Varamo wasn't listening, and eventually he interrupted them. 'I have an idea: what about How to Embalm Small Mutant Animals, wouldn't that be a more attractive title?' The publishers gaped in amazement. They were thinking: He's one of us.

This is the only mention of mutants in the book, as far as I can recall, but there is one of Aira's famous shifts in genre a little earlier where, in an essayistic digression on the 'free indirect style' and the technique of improvisation, the narrator expands on the playful conceit of the book being a 'historical reconstruction' of Varamo's consciousness while the future poet plays domino solitaire and and his mother cooks the poisoned and mutilated fish that we will soon forget for, in this kind of narrative, the fish doesn't need to be fired in the the final scene.

On the back of both of these volumes from the new Giramondo series, Giramondo Shorts, I read the following:

it is time perhaps to cherish
the culture of shorts

This is a reference, as I learned last week, not so much to the short attention span that I have heard referred to so often that it has ceased to have any meaning, but to the sometimes humorous, humble fey of Les Murray as given creased and stretchy form in his poem: The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever -- the whole of it an image of being in this country that I recognise, if only from certain quirk-loving books and films that must have drawn their sustenance from Patrick White's Mrs Poulter and Mrs Dun and their less wordy men down Terminus Road over four decades ago in The Solid Mandala. I'm not sure what Les Murray would make of either Varamo or Recluse. Perhaps he would see them as relying too much on the webbing of words and not enough on the loved, worn edges of the dominoes themselves. And yet he might surprise me. After all, I, who never ordinarily wear the sartorial sort myself nor read his poetry more than rarely, bought this pair of shorts last week with Les Murray lines on the back.

A fundamental desire to tell over the contents of what may (but may also not) be told

Narrative digression, perhaps because of its very association with wandering off-topic, going astray, loitering around, failing to get to the point and beating around the bush (or um den heißen Brei herumreden, as we learn from reading Samuel Frederick on the writings of Robert Walser -- 'to talk around the porridge'), actually seems to be a highly contested literary concept. In Textual Wanderings: The Theory and Practice of Narrative Digression, the last of the contributors to this book of excursions, Christine Angela Knoop, even asks whether this narrative feature is a viable concept for literary studies at all.

J. J. Long, in his introduction to Textual Wanderings, cites Susan Sontag's conclusion to her essay 'Against Interpretation' (1964) -- where she states that in 'place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art' -- as the call that prompted a shift in the discourse of narratology, after which narratives came to be read in terms of desire. He then goes on to describe what appears to have been a reappraissal of the dynamics of plot through the smeared lens of a Freudian, phallo-centric notion of desire, and lists Roland Barthes's S/Z (1970), Ross Chamber's Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (1984) and Peter Brooks's Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (1984) as key texts in furthering the steam. While J. J. Long himself is alert to the possibilities and intricacies of digression -- and has written extensively, for example, on the work of such writers as W. G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard -- he seems to hold very closely to the Brooksian idea of narrative, where digression is a means for prolonging the pleasurable anticipation of a consummation of desire at the end of a narrative. He maintains that even Sebald's digressive writing in The Rings of Saturn, which tries to resist this end impulse, as he argues, is finally unable to detach itself from its exigencies, as the narrator's walk comes to an end, the narrative ends, and even the last word in the German text is Heimat, or 'home' and as such finds its comfortable end; in other words, digressivity, as he writes, 'can never fully detach itself from teleology'. It might try but it will always fail.

I can imagine that the first contributor to Textural Wanderings would very likely have wanted to challenge J. J. Long on this point. In his essay 'Re-reading Digression: Towards a Theory of Plotless Narrativity', Samuel Frederick rearticulates what J. J. Long had described as digression's resistance to plot, but goes on to question the validity of any assumption of plot as being identical to narrative, and therefore comprising its resistant core. He then, through a close reading of the proliferation of possible beginnings and refusal of endings in the work of the Swiss writer, Robert Walser, suggests that digression can actually become 'an alternative mode of narrative movement' to plot in radically digressive texts. Frederick concludes by identifying a different figuring of desire in narrative: 'a fundamental desire to tell over the contents of what may (but may also not) be told' [Frederick's emphasis].

In his 'Reflections on the Fruitful Error', Richard Hibbit, the next contributor, expands on an obsolete meaning of 'error' -- that is, an act of wandering, as derived from the Latin 'errare' (to wander) -- to explore chance and accident as intrinsic and positive components of the writing process as a whole. Quoting Naomi Leibowitz, he describes how Montaigne's ability to embrace what seem to be imperfections -- 'disease, defect, digression' -- is essential to any understanding of the achievement of his work. He even cites Nietzsche in attributing Goethe's strength as a writer to his 'digression through error': that is, Goethe's non-literary activities in the sciences and visual arts. Hibbit finishes his essay with an implicit loosening of J. J. Long's end-tied reading of Sebald's The Rings of Saturn as 'an archetypal digressive text: a text about digressions which was created by a digression, or a text about error as wandering which was created by error as mistake'.

The third contributor, Jena Habegger-Conti, unfurls John Bath's capacity for infinite story generation and infinite expansion in resistance to telos in ''On with the Story!' John Bath's Theory of Narrative Digression'. She argues that in Bath's works, 'digression is not only equated with the storytelling, it is the story' [Habegger-Conti's emphasis]. This kind of narrative -- obviously and explicitly aligned to the Scheherazadian model of infinitely postponing the end -- draws our attention to the slips and tucks that achieve this illusion: to the Mobius band, the arabesque and the Mandelbrot set, as well as to Lewis Richardson's study of the English coastline, where the shoreline could be said to be infinite in terms of the infinite possibility of increasing the degree of what is measurable in every cove, every rock, every grain of sand, its microscopic structure and so on -- an image which could not help but tug at the residue of Sebald's excursion along a section of the English coastline in The Rings of Saturn elsewhere in this volume, distorting it beautifully as perhaps it would wish to be distorted.

Olivia Santovetti's overview of four major digression-inclined Italian writers in 'Italian Digressions' points out that what is generally regarded as the founding Italian novel in the nineteenth century, Alessandro Manzoni's  I promessi sposi, came about through an embracing of the looser possibilities of the new form as opposed to the strict requirements of the classical genres then in vogue in Italy, which enabled him follow his two main interests of poetry and history in the one text. For Manzoni, Pirandello and Gadda, we read, digression is an enabling feature in their narratives. For Pirandello, digression -- at least in his first-person narratives -- works against a naturalist distortion of what he calls 'bare life', becoming a tool that humour could exercise in the procedure of 'scomposizione' or 'dissection'; for Gadda, digression attempts to represent the impossible 'groviglio' or  'tangle' of reality. Santovetti then describes how Italo Calvino, famously noted for his love of 'linear writing', came to be fascinated by the possibility of multiplicity in digression after an encounter with a giant Tule tree in Mexico in 1976, where he was prompted to wonder whether its 'chaotic wastage of matter and forms' was the one thing that enabled the tree to 'give itself a shape and maintain it', and that the 'transmission of meaning' might depend on this 'excess of manifestation'.

In Will McMorran's chapter, ''I've started so I'll -- ': Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne', McMorran describes Marivaux's characterisation of a female narrative voice in this incomplete novel as one that deviates from plot on account of its more conversational, socially-inclined, epistolary style, and messily feminine reluctance to keep to the central concerns of the plot. Throughout, McMorran argues that 'the very idea of digression indeed only arises within the context of a progressive narrative: the more driven a plot appears to be, the more pronounced any deviation from that plot becomes in the reader's imagination'. He is concerned to argue that the digressive aspects of the book are inextricably tied to the progress of the narrative -- a narrative, however, that never realises the expected telos of the revelation of the narrator's identity due to Marivaux's failing to complete the novel (just as he failed to complete Le Paysan Parvenu): the serialised installments of the piece simply coming to an apparently arbitrary end.

The sixth contributor, Maebh Long, in 'Stepping Away: Radical Digressivity and At Swim-Two-Birds', engages with the fact that some narratives, in comprising, as Maebh Long writes, 'non-originary fragmentation whereby digressions proliferate to the point of wholly dissolving any stable centre or core', and where the text 'will fail as a unit to begin definitively and conclude categorically', achieves a disruption of what Samuel Frederick in his earlier chapter calls the 'totalizing... whole' constructed by plot. Long points out a significant aspect of many narratives of this kind: that the narrator's life often enacts a 'mimesis' of the author's and, through a series of what she calls 'contaminated frames', the 'author becomes a point of radical digression, as he or she is written into the text and becomes fragmented into author-self and text-self, creator and created'.

This interest in the figuring of the author in the radically digressive text is further explored by Rhian Atkin, in 'Tell It Again, José! Some Principles of Digression in Saramago'. Here she examines the idiosyncratic use of punctuation in Saramago's texts, which enables him to blur the distinction between the discourse of the narrator and the other characters (a technique whose effect made me think of Mikhail Bakhtin's idea of 'dialogism'...). Atkin concludes that Ross Chamber's notion of 'supplementarity' is crucial to a reading of Saramago's narratives since each of them is often presented as only one of a number of possible manifestations of a story that the narrator is always inviting others to tell in another way ('contá-la doutra maniera').

In the final essay of Textual Wanderings, Christine Angela Knoop poses a question in the title of her piece: 'Is Digression a Viable Concept for Literary Studies?'. Primarily a critical engagement with Olivia Santovetti's book, Digression: A Narrative Strategy in the Italian Novel, Knoop examines what she calls the 'excursus', or 'a temporary abandonment of the plot' in an attempt to question the boundaries of such a distinction and asks whether the 'suggestion of textual hierarchy' in the assumption of the plot as the place from which the existence and function of digression can be determined is useful for 'literary texts at large'. Through a reading of Milan Kundera's work that is informed by his focus on thematic integrity, Knoop points out that 'a digression from theme is harder to imagine than a digression from plot' and asks: 'What could a text digress from if its message derives from its final form, including that which in other interpretations would be called digressive?'. The greatest difficulty I found with Knoop's argument was that, in acknowledging the interpretive issues in any discussion of theme in a narrative -- which, as she argues, will always change with the reader -- after she concludes that 'novelistic digression' is a 'necessary oxymoron' and that its possibility is tied to the transitory reading of a particular audience, she still declares it to be 'a parallel narrative strategy' even as she continues to argue that it is not 'a textual feature that can be clearly discerned prior to interpretation'. 

On the whole, I would say, Textural Wanderings: The Theory and Practice of Narrative Digression is an excellent introduction to the key lines of thinking in this wanderingly digressive field. The engagement is fresh (I could imagine the intensity of the tentative small talk over the thick china cups during the conference tea breaks at the University of Leeds in 2007, from which, as we are told in the Preface, the idea for this volume of essays arose). Occasionally, though, with all the discussion of telos and narrative and story and plot, it wasn't always clear in some of the essays how exactly 'story' could be distinguishable from either 'narrative' or 'plot'. While Samuel Frederick defines 'story' as 'the meaningful whole that plot constructs', for example, there must still be an essential inclusion of 'narrative' in this term as, at the end of his chapter, our minds are sent spinning when he declares that 'digression, in freeing narrative from plot's control, can participate in generating a new kind of narrative, that is, a necessarily nascent narrative mode which appears in the form of a beguiling, because seemingly impossible, storyless story' -- an image which is nonetheless completely entrancing, as is the thought of a universe that, within its own limitless existence, includes sites of unmaking that cannot be contained.