In fact depth does not matter

It is through our writing that we see this a little more clearly, or so we kid ourselves, as Bernhard's Rudolph observes:

I might call myself relatively independent. But shackled and imprisoned like everybody else. Impelled by disgust rather than possessed by curiosity. We always spoke of clarity of mind, but never had it. I don't know where I got this sentence from, perhaps from myself, but I've read it somewhere. Perhaps it will turn up among my notes sometime. We say notes to avoid embarrassment, although we secretly believe that these sentences which we blushingly call notes are really more than that. But we believe the same of everything to do with ourselves. This is how we swing ourselves over the abyss, not knowing how deep it is. And in fact the depth does not matter if everybody falls to his death, which we know to be the case. (Concrete)

Rudolph also reflects on some of the words his maternal grandfather hated or loved. 'Thought process' was an expression that he hated; 'cacophony' one that he loved.

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 complex symbolic rendering of emotional life

While, in my memory of Susanne Langer's work on symbolic form, she seemed too quick to assign certain aspects of experience to one art form or another, her ideas on 'livingness' in a work of art -- as opposed to the quality of the 'dead' in an unsuccessful piece -- still explains so much about what is worth having and keeping in writing. In Philosophical Sketches, she writes that works of art are 'forms expressive of human feeling' and, for her, form includes 'a permanent form, like a building or a vase or a picture, or a transient, dynamic form like a melody or a dance, or even a form given to imagination, like the passage of purely imaginary, apparent events that constitutes a literary work.' I would only add that some literary works -- for example, those by Borges, Bernhard, Sebald, Murnane -- somehow spill beyond her event-focussed definition of a literary work.

Kenneth Wright, in Mirroring and Attunement, describes her approach:

For Langer, then, the work of art is a complex symbolic rendering of emotional life in a form that enables apprehension of its being rather than comprehension of its meaning. Its non-verbal symbols articulate the shapes and textures of living experience rather than its cognitive definition, and because they present this semblance in analogical form, she called them presentational symbols. Art does not, in the manner of language, describe experience but offers it directly to our senses through iconic forms. It is not an alternative means of expressing emotion but a means of revealing its forms in a concrete, yet quasi-abstracted way.

I have to admit my fondness for this definition, if only because it resonates with my very first thought on this blog.

goes a little something like this

It is nearly a fortnight ago now since I saw Chris Mann perform live as part of Machine for Making Sense -- that is (this time) with Amanda Stewart, Jim Denley and Rik Rue. There were perhaps two or three sheets of paper in front of him and from these he performed what must have been thousands and thousands, if not always words, then phonemes and utterances and deliberate, highly musical hesitations. Playing with the dots on his website -- even clicking on one and then another -- you can get a sense of passing by someone who has spun himself into buzzing solitariness on a street. Now imagine this in a band. And yet you have to watch him perform to understand to what extent his gestures are essential to the experience. I thought I might have been able to find a video of him or the whole ensemble afterwards, somewhere on the net, but apart from his website, and the iTunes app. of the same name (you have to persist if you want to find it), there is nothing -- or perhaps, not nothing, but what there might have been has been coloured over by a U.S. idol of the very same name, who will hold the microphone as he doesn't, will close his eyes with passion, exactly as he doesn't, and deliver a song which, if described by the other, might have been the occasion, say, for 'goes a little something like this'.

Faithful to the library

Last month, when Milan Kundera accepted the prix de la BnF at the same venue, the National Library in France, he revealed that for several years now he has added to all his contracts a clause stipulating that his novels can only be published in 'traditional' book form. Pierre Assouline, blogging for Le Monde, quotes from this speech (an extract which you can also hear being read aloud by Alain Finkielkraut on Radio France). I'll attempt a very inexpert translation below:

Je n’ai aucune envie de parler de la littérature, de son importance, de ses valeurs. Ce que j’ai à l’esprit en ce moment, c’est une chose plus concrète : la bibliothèque. Ce mot donne, au prix que vous avez la bonté de m’accorder une étrange note nostalgique ; car il me semble que le temps qui, impitoyablement, poursuit sa marche, commence à mettre les livres en danger. C’est à cause de cette angoisse que, depuis plusieurs années déjà, j’ajoute à tous mes contrats, partout, une clause stipulant que mes romans ne peuvent être publiés que sous la forme traditionnelle du livre. Pour qu’on les lise uniquement sur papier, non sur un écran. Cela me fait penser à Heidegger, au fait apparemment paradoxal que, lors des pires années du XXème siècle, il se concentrait dans ses cours universitaires sur la question de la technique, pour constater que la technique, son évolution accélérée, est capable de changer l’essence même de la vie humaine.


Voici une image qui, de nos jours, est tout à fait banale : des gens marchent dans la rue, ils ne voient plus leur vis à vis, ils ne voient même plus les maisons autour d’eux, des fils leur pendent de l’oreille, ils gesticulent, ils crient, ils ne regardent personne et personne ne les regarde. Et je me demande : liront-ils encore des livres ? c’est possible, mais pour combien de temps encore ? Je n’en sais rien. Nous n’avons pas la capacité de connaître l’avenir. Sur l’avenir, on se trompe toujours, je le sais. Mais cela ne me débarrasse pas de l’angoisse, l’angoisse pour le livre tel que je le connais depuis mon enfance. Je veux que mes romans lui restent fidèles. Fidèles à la bibliothèque.

I have no wish to talk about literature, of its importance or values, and only have a mind to do so now for one very solid reason: the library. This word gives the prize that you have had the generosity to award me a strange, nostalgic note, because it seems to me that Time, as it continues its merciless march forwards, has begun to put books in danger. It is because of this fear that, for several years now, I have been adding a clause to all of my contracts stipulating that my novels may only be published in the traditional form of the book: that they can only be read on paper and not on a screen. This makes me think of Heidegger and of the seemingly paradoxical fact that, during the worst years of the twentieth century, he focussed his university lectures on the question of technology, observing that the rapid development of technology is capable of changing the very essence of human life.

Here is an image that is entirely commonplace these days: people walking in the street, no longer looking at their immediate surroundings, not even looking at the houses around them. With wires hanging from their ears, they gesticulate and shout. They don't look at anyone and no one looks at them. And I wonder, do they still read books? Possibly yes, but for how long into the future? I have no idea. We have no way of knowing what the future holds. When it comes to the future, we always err, I know. But this does not relieve me of fear, of fear for the book as I have known it since childhood. I want my novels to stay faithful to it: faithful to the library.

The Histrionic

It was entirely by chance that we were offered tickets last night to Thomas Bernhard's The Histrionic (or so it has been translated by Tom Wright for the Sydney Theatre Company and Malthouse Theatre production at the Wharf) -- in fact entirely by chance that I even got to hear of the production at all since, unlike Bernhard, I don't read newspapers from cover to cover every day, or whatever the online equivalent might be.

For its 1984 Salzburg premier the play had a 'real dunghill' on the stage, as Gita Honegger writes in her biography of Bernhard; at the Wharf here in Sydney there were wood shavings scattered over the small wooden stage on the stage, as well as a beautifully foul and bloodied stain at one edge of it and all the way down the steps that led to the kitchen, as if someone had vomited up blood sausages on the previous Tuesday and not yet got round to scrubbing the floor. We were treated, though, to the gratifying odours of frittata soup at an emblematic family meal that only Bernhard could have created, as nobody seemed able to eat but the one who could rant.

There is something of Gargoyles or Verstörung in the play (Honegger explains that the title of the US publication of this novel is misleading as Verstörung means 'perturbation'): something about its being set deep in the Alp-clefted centre of Austria, where illness and maiming and the shrieking and stench of blood-let animals in filthy stalls keeps reminding us that the apparent freshness and freedom of the glorious landscape all around is no more than yet another figuration of the claustrophobia. And such an impression, after all, is not so far from our own experience here on the edge of our wide, stained continent of dazzling sands, bush and beaches. As Billie Brown, playing Bruscon, retched the words Utzbach and Austria from the edge of his little stage, I could have sworn that the last time he did it, 'Austria' sounded like 'Australia'.

But as I had no powers of observation at all

Even though on the very next page he describes for us the patterned grey damask of the napkins at Gilberte's house, the narrator of À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs succeeds in making us believe:

Mais comme je n'avais aucun esprit d'observation, comme en général je ne savais ni le nom ni l'espèce des choses qui se trouvaient sous mes yeux, et comprenais seulement que quand elles approchaient les Swann, elles devaient extraordinaires,  il ne me parut pas certain qu'en avertissant mes parents de la valeur artistique et de la provenance lointaine de cet escalier, je commisse un mensonge. (p. 76)

But as I had no powers of observation at all -- as usually I would know neither the name or specific nature of the things that I happened to see -- and understanding only that when they had some connection to the Swanns they became extraordinary -- it did not seem by any means certain that, in drawing my parents' attention to the artistic value and the remote origins of the staircase, I was lying to them. (my very loose translation...)

Perhaps this is because, for Proust, the details of things are always mimetic, always expressive of somebody or a relationship to that somebody -- and so expressive too of the disturbing power of the mores that buffer them stiffly there, that the particularities of those objects are at the same time 'exigées par l'étiquette et particulière aux Swann'.