Desire corresponds to the condition of water

I finished Maureen O'Shaughnessy's The Truth about A faster than I thought I would, reading through her bright red-bound collection of poems as I would a novel. It took me little more than a day. But all this is only to admit that what -- to anyone else -- would be nothing to boast about at all (the reading through of a book from beginning to end in a single sitting, or even in several sittings), is becoming increasingly rare for me. The more I gain from what I am reading (as it seems), the more I become fearful of losing it -- and this is enough to precipitate a sudden reluctance to finish the reading. Which turns the book into yet another salted pillar that I stack in precarious piles on my side of the bed. Robert Walser might have been describing something like this when he writes about what "little children do with their delicacies, which in their desire to eat they are unable to eat" -- yes, Walser, of that long, institutionalised, writing-less end.

The small euphoria, then, of getting to the last pages of The Truth about A and still, somehow, in possession of something.

(And yet, see the way that my mind intervenes on it all the same: being prompted here to write about how the A of O'Shaughnessy's title -- the Antigone of myth -- had obsessed me for a time when I was a teenager. I still don't know why I had decided to spend days -- week -- months -- preparing a series of drawings at school for a staging (possibly) of the Sophocles play which, of course, never saw any kind of fruition, except that I know that it was intended to be in fulfilment of an assessment task, and that there had even been an obscure but intensely felt meaning in my choice of Antigone for this project -- a meaning that I associate, for some reason, with the shadowy end of the long ceramic room in my high school, and particularly, the section with a huddling of kilns in it and a set of open-backed shelves of crude orange pots that had been dunked in pastel glazes, ready for the fire. Perhaps it was only that I was ambitious for these drawings. I think I was wanting to suggest an immense but unfamiliar world with them -- and one that would swallow me whole. But of course, I also remember how I had soon grown bored and annoyed with what I was doing, because instead of being able to summon something large and strange with the drawings, I had become caught in the supposedly necessary task of shading in the folds of each of the characters' floor length robes with a 2B pencil I was holding, carefully, on its side.)

And so, to celebrate the way that O'Shaughnessy keeps so expertly to the single, gleaming thread she casts into the dark of the paradoxically "over-lit" rooms of Palis in Oyster Bay, Sydney: first pulling Antigone into view, and then taking us through the fluorescent memories of trips to an unlovely office in the city, to the chilled haven of shopping arcades during the fierce heat of summer, when Oedipus, charmed to silliness in the company of his daughter, smiles and smiles at her, "forgetting to hide his teeth". Then the cataclysm of Teresias's text on the evening of the Spring Carnival in 2015, and the brothers' brutal "usurping" in a basement, with a blinded cctv camera failing to record the blood. In a subsequent session with her analyst, we are faced with what might have been the supreme disappointment of a contemporary Antigone: a rich young woman who parries questions about happiness -- whose most bitter complaint against her father is that her life is a "Letdown". And yet, like the plethora of "pets" that surround her in Palis -- the finches, the cats, the dogs -- when "the brightness, the balmy air, gave them an extraordinary summer-afternoon weightiness" -- the strength at the core of Antigone's indolence soon uncoils, "a hole of negativity so vast it becomes a positive space,/ spreading;/it expanded in her body, like smoke unrolling across a bushfire sky".

When Antigone takes Haemon to see the snakes -- those "shadows looping in the dark" -- after the mutual homicides of Polyneices and Eteokles, he is struck by one, called Sylvester Stallone

holding a mouse carcass in its throat,
and the slick blond-brownish twists of its body, and a spook of a
mouth hinged with teeth like a picket fence along its jaw.

Haemon might well have been disturbed by this image of familial menace reduced to the domesticity of a "picket fence", since he tries to goad Antigone into admitting to her complicity in the bloodshed. Her response by now, however, is sharp: "Listen, you're hardly the RSPCA". After Creon arrives "[s]crewing coloured cables into white wall mountings with deadly speed" -- and after Jocasta "falls forward over the ledge into the white window of air" -- Antigone orders her father to pack, and then takes him out onto the wide, open ocean in the family yacht, managing the entirety of their precarious, bitter survival herself. Hence it is that, by the end of the book, even the vulnerability of her "foal-like body" that her father still sees in her is entirely adequate to hauling him -- the most burdensome of the remnants of her family -- as the "hours disappear over the hills and the ocean" -- into something like safety. Because, it is the determination of Antigone that we are left with: her determination to resist anyone else's take on her -- even and especially that of her mother, who preferred Antigone to sing on X-factor, no matter than her own face grew "rigid" whenever she saw the younger woman "getting attention".

Although we had learned earlier from Teresias that Antigone "wants to play every part on her stage in order to find the part that is truly her", in that same poem we are also reminded that "[d]esire corresponds to the condition of water". It flows, as we might say, downwards only. And yet it is here, at the bottoming out of her ironbarked and "duney" forested world at the edge of the ocean, with her father "like a crackpot", her head "full of bleak thoughts", that we discover that Antigone is also inscribing, "in the margins of her postcards to her analyst", how she is now "writing songs". And that "the songs are alive".

The substance of all writing lives

To read Brian Castro's piece in the Sydney Review of Books on W. G. Sebald's A Place in the Country is to be filled with a rapt anxiety, as if you've just been given what turns out to be a nestled series of semi-transparent boxes that you have to hold onto with your fingertips in case, just by trying to keep the pieces from falling out, the whole thing breaks in your hands. Of course, I will have to read the essay again. I imagine it was the lepidopterist in Nabokov that understood rereading to be the only way to keep such shells from getting crushed. It is enough that Castro's prose is as shaped by the slow-developing beauties of 'scribal-ambulism' that he identifies in Sebald, Walser, Rousseau (the boxes could well be infinite):

Sebald’s beginnings have a sinuous resistance to beginning. After all, if writing is such a compulsive burden, then at least walking exercises a different compulsive faculty that exorcises thought. Scribal-ambulism then, may have a curative effect on melancholia, but one that Rousseau found was, in the end, untenable. The clarity of the world, for which this ultimate autobiographer yearned, the transparency he sought, could not be sustained. As Jean Starobinski asserts, the inner life and external reality cannot be compatible. Interiority is essentially a failure in relating to reality, and this is the substance of all writing lives.

That is why the beginning of each ‘walk’ taken by Sebald, by Walser, by Rousseau, embodies anxiety. It is a preparation for meeting the shock of the real and its resistance to being possessed by the mind. Anyone aware of sensible seeing would understand the furtive nature of writing, its opposition to clarity and transparency, its irrational refusal to speak for its author, its invention of a negative dialectic. There is a lot of fiddling about in order to get into a place, and that ‘place’ is ultimately a place in the language which will not yield to a universal historiography – Starobinski, for example, avoids dates in his study of Rousseau.

I will ask: is it possible to (re)read and walk at the same time? I would like to do that.

In the unsettling of narratives

It is appropriate that I should first write about Samuel Frederick’s new book, Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter, on this blog, which itself is nothing but a collection of many digressive acts. In fact, I'll start with one: The Oxford English Dictionary credits Chaucer with being the first to use the term in English, in the sense of ‘[d]eparture or deviation from the subject in discourse or writing’: ‘It were a long disgression Fro my matere’, Troilus & Criseyde i. 87 (143). Almost from the very beginning of vernacular English fiction, then, the digressive possibility is noted and taken up in the very same breath: ah, the delight of breaking the fine crystal of one narrative illusion just as you are spinning the glass of another; the joy of fashioning a story from nothing more than a narrative voice. Of course digression is not exclusive to English and, as Frederick points out, neither it is confined to any particular literary period. In his Introduction, in an evocation of a small shuffling (digressive) dance, he describes the way his study has been organised to cover the work of three writers in their three distinct but not sequentially arranged moments in Germanic language literary history.

Although this is Samuel Frederick’s first book-length publication, Narratives Unsettled draws on his earlier research into the narrative strategies of Robert Walser, and read together, develops a carefully argued engagement with assumptions about the equivalence of plot and narrative inherent to much of narratology but particularly to Peter Brooks’ influential work, Reading for the Plot: Design and intention in narrative. These are the very assumptions that seem to dog every do-it-yourself novel writing discussion, from kitsch online advice pages to university workshops. Perhaps the most questionable aspect of Brooks’ approach is his placing at the defining centre of narrative a model of narrative plotting that is predicated on an expression of masculine desire which expects nothing more, despite Brooks' own excellent analyses of the ‘perversions’ of Flaubert and the ‘unreadable report’ of Conrad, than tumescence and release. In this model, digression becomes a way of extending Barthes’ dilatory centre – as if only through some leather clad sex toy whose purpose is to increase the longing and capacity for ejaculation. In his notes to an earlier paper, ‘Re-reading Digression: Towards a Theory of Plotless Narrative’, published in Textual Wanderings: The Theory and Practice of Narrative Digression (2011) Frederick writes that his own critical approach draws on Susan Winnett’s critique of this male sexualised model ('Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and the Principles of Pleasure', 1990). Frederick’s important contribution to this discussion is to explore what he considers to be the inability of this way of figuring narrative desire to account adequately for the unique narrative properties of digression. In both that earlier paper, and now more extensively in this book, he proposes a theory of digression that allows for its independence from plot: one that is based, not on serving a teleological figuring of narrative desire, but a more playful desire or impulse to tell beyond the significance of the things to be told in themselves. Narrative, he argues, is not identical to plot, and he demonstrates this claim by analysing the narrative strategies of Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard and Adalbert Stifter: three writers in the German language whose writings span more than a hundred years, from the mid nineteenth to the second half of the twentieth century. He is concerned to emphasise the essential narrativity of these writers’ highly digressive fictional works, arguing that their digressive modes of proliferation, rupture and dispersal are fuelled by narrative energy. To describe such works as ‘antinarratives’ or even just ‘experimental prose’, he writes, would be to capitulate to the very assumptions about the equivalence of narrative and plot that he is seeking to critique and hence to elide the aleatory and seemingly trivial aspects of everyday lived experience which plot, with its goal-oriented desire, is constituted to ignore.

Frederick dedicates two chapters – almost an entire half of the book – to Robert Walser. This in itself is a delight. Here we read about how plots might proliferate to the point where there is no clear plotted line to follow, no tense pursuit of release, and how Walser saw his pieces all working together to comprise ‘one long plotless, realistic story’ where, by ‘realistic’, he is referring to the only entirely realistic aspect of any writing: that when we write, what we write is simply the product of our writing.

After Walser, Frederick writes about what he calls the ‘infinite continuum’ in Thomas Bernhard’s Verstörung (Gargoyles). As the conventional plot of the first part of the novel breaks down, the Prince’s monologue, taking over, enacts a passionate indifference, where the inchoate experience of the overwhelming, the mad, is wrest free from the limiting distortions of the plotted or what Frederick calls the 'narrative whole'.

In chapter four, we read about how Adalbert Stifter’s highly digressive, and as Frederick writes, ‘diffuse’ novel Indian Summer, so disturbed its readers that successive editions of the work radically reduced its three volumes of over 1,300 pages – one 1940 edition butchering it to less than 60 pages – as they were concerned to remove everything that did not pertain to the supposedly real story which, as Frederick demonstrates, is an insignificant aspect of the work: the entire novel having been focussed on the time after this story and its very texture dependent on the feel of the resulting narrative dispersal.

In his final chapter, the Coda, Frederick asks: ‘what are we left with in a narrative bereft of plot?’ To this he replies: ‘On the formal level, we are left with the raw impulse to tell that unsettles the plotted whole of conventional narrative. But from a hermeneutic perspective (especially one with an evaluative edge), we might say that we are left with something else, namely: the pointless and insignificant minutiae of everyday life.’ And yet, we well might ask now, aren’t so many current undigressive literary novels taken with these very kinds of unimportant-seeming details? Haven't we often read about protagonists touching their lips to stone or wondering at the lengthening of a shadow or the refuse blowing along a deserted road? The difference, I would argue, is in the way that the language of such books endows these details with a certain solemn significance so that the resulting moments are held and so become essential nodes in the narrative whole. Frederick’s analysis of the various editorial attacks on Stifter’s novel is instructive here. In one such edition – Weitbrecht’s apparent improvement on Heckenast’s 1870 version of the book – Frederick demonstrates how, in the section that includes Heinrich’s approach to the Rose House, the description of the blossomed covering of the house is retained, perhaps surprisingly given the editors' enthusiasm for the knife, while the sequence of actions and thoughts leading up to Heinrich’s discovery of the house – actions and thoughts that are essential to an understanding of the way Stifter arranges his work in a careful exploration of place rather than time – are excised. Therefore description of insignificant details per se is not considered anathema to a cherished view of the narrative whole. I would suggest that a piece of fiction might dilate all it likes on the significance of apparently insignificant details so long as these details can be approached with hushed and reverent literary words that might seem to respect this narrative whole. Even a seemingly disgusting or shocking object might be written about in this (w)holy way since it will then serve a greater narrative tumescence; but if a writer wants to convey the actual feel of the trivial, the foul, the meaningless, the overlooked, the digressive voice has a far better chance. Perhaps this is the very reason it is often excised. After all, who wants to be reminded? As Frederick concludes:

Digression is that distinctive and therefore indispensable mode of telling that undoes the plotted structures in which the pointless has no place, opening up a new narrative landscape where instead – as a reminder of our shared fate – it is allowed to be, without being neglected or overlooked. In this way digression rescues the insignificant, which is our fate, from being forgotten.

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.