Narration

What is required to tell a story?

Jean Fremon's novel (novel?) The Botanical Garden, translated by Brian Evenson and published this year by Green Integer (the French original was published in 1988) answers the question: very little, if we're talking plot.

What happens in the book? The narrator gathers thoughts, his own and others', into little groups. The narrator proposes catalogues—of penises, for example—and admits to a fondness for taxonimies. The narrator relates details from the lives of an old woman, of a feared and beloved thinker, of his lover, of a camel, of a playwrite. The narrator thinks about narration:

"He said: to tell stories is to ratify the social. To take part in its game. Since childhood we have been constituted by stories that we have to believe in, take part in, that we have to reproduce, mimic. A cunning joining of stories fabricates the temporality into which we are thrown and gives to the arbitrary or sleight of hand the semblance of natural causes.

"To shatter narration is to kick against this, he said"

There is change over time, as befits a novel. The narrator's lover leaves him for the playwrite. The narrator's friend Karl falls ill and can communicate only by writing on a slate (the book is like a series of notes on a slate):

"Karl is doing better. He had them bringing him chalk and slate and that's how he communicates with his visitors now. It suits him well: he retains the initiative. No general conversation, useless to clarify.

"The slate is serene but absent. Far from everything. Today it told me: 'Values dislodge facts.'"

The camel, who has been acting in a play, gets pregnant.

There are conundrums:

"A rat eats of a consecrated wafer. Does he ingest the Real Body?

"If yes, what is to be done with the rat?

"If no, what has become of it?"

There are—and this is the fragmentary essence of the fragmentary book—lots and lots of interesting thoughts:

"It's as if the sentence were capable of extracting what happiness there is in unhappiness and filling our heart with this extract, just like how a very pure, very beautiful, very profound and very sad melody fills us at the same time with happiness and sadness, and the more profound the sadness is, the more the happiness flares up. . . ."

The narration, finally, puts us in the mind of the narrator and the plot is the sequence of the narrator's thoughts. There are lots of commas.

I read the book slowly, a few pages each morning over the course of a couple of months. The reading matched the writing—fragmentary, unconcerned, tenuous, patient, surprised, concerned, amused, uncertain, bored, delighted.

The Austrian playwrite is named Thomas Narr. Narr means fool in German. Narr is the beginning of narr-ation.

What does a story require? A kind of sly foolishness.

p.s. Thomas Narr reminded me, in a couple of places, of Peter Handke. His attitude towards literary awards given by people who misread his work for their own purposes, for instance, or his play "composed principally of insults directed at the spectators."

Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 10

The fifth chapter begins with a nice play on the book's title, the double meaning Michael Roloff and I have discussed as he translates the title as "The Major Case" and I as "The Great Fall."

The actor is, for a second, "the other," the man he has just left still screaming "shut up!" Like him (and he has, the narrator writes, become the other, is not just acting like the other), the actor feels his ordered life disintegrating, starting with his shoelaces that come undone and trip him so he falls to the ground "to never stand up again." Then comes the urge to to throw off his clothing and to throw away his keys and to sit on a hydrant stinking while passersby give him a wide berth.

Luckily for him ("luckily for him -- 'why luckily for me?'") the moment of being the other passes, "is past, 'in this case at least.'"

Along with the play on falling and case, again the presence, the strong presence of both narrator and actor. In his comment on part 9, Michael Roloff adds an interesting twist to that notion:


no end of detail that make me believe that handke is having his fun with a lot of personal routines: the mere dab of shoe polish, putting the shoes in the fridge so that they will be fresh...  the way these details are described, too, have that quality of discociation, self-conciousness about them. however, by transferring to a/ the woman's place some contradictions and odd emphases slip in: a few times too often for my taste he mentions that he found an object as though sleepwalking - if he has been with the woman umpteenth # of times? he ought to know where, say the vaccum cleaner is in the meanwhile. etc.


If this is a realistic novel, then there are many details that make a reader think "this is not believable." We're left to think a) this is sloppy writing or b) something else is going on.

Playfulness, as Michael points out, is one of the things that is going on. Narrative playfulness in which the author and the narrator and the actor and the man in the woods the actor sees and the character in the book the actor is reading and the character in the film the actor is to play in all blend together as the same character and then are ripped apart by breaks or discontinuities in the text, only to blend together again (as when, on page 124, the actor, who has reached into his pocket for his keys, remembers the character in the book he was reading earlier who "while reaching into his pocket, for nothing really, his hand remained in his pocket and when the reader closed the book a few pages later the hand in question was still in the pocket in question."

Michael used the word "unterschwellig" earlier in response to some of these breaks. The book is constantly subverting itself as real or natural, asserting itself as book. Ceci n'est pas une pipe!

And now the actor leaves the woods and stands in a place where he overlooks the city of cities, a city that is, the narrator writes, "ein Daliegen," a lying there. From the actor's "Standort," standing place, the city pulses and he finds a hearty pleasure in the sight in this standing moment/nunc stans: "und was gab es Herzhafteres als das Jetzt."

The sight heartens him so thoroughly that he works against the ravages of entropy that have come during his walk through the woods: he ties his shoe, tightens his tie, cleans his shoes, and tucks in his shirt. The act of tucking in his shirt reminds him of a film scene in which a man about to be executed stops to tuck in his shirt and then is killed. After wondering why that image came to him right then, he pulls his shirt back out: it would have come untucked anyway while he walked.

Order/disorder. Standing/falling. The created Now as the threshold between?

Peter Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 9

What a beautiful evening it was! Utah Valley, as seen from our deck over the course of several slow and swiftly changing hours.

Up at the crack of dawn this morning. Chapter 4 of Peter’s book eases me into the morning.

The actor is leaving the clearing while walking backwards. "I had often noticed that about him," the narrator writes, inserting himself into the story again. The actor, the narrator says later, “expressed all of that only with his walking, as his walking was in general a variety [Spielart] of speaking. His walking, it spoke, it narrated.”

I finished the chapter and then headed up the mountain on my bike, trying to beat the heat. Just as I left the house the first rays of light slipped up from the notch in the mountain to the east.

The first 20 minutes are on the asphalt streets of the town that lies up against the mountain, nothing technical, just a steep set of streets that finally lead me to the tangled trees still down after the avalanche of several years ago. From here the switchbacking trail is dirt, cut by the rains of many years. There are sometimes walkers on the trail, and once or twice a year a motorcycle or an all-terrain vehicle, and in the winter people on snowshoes. The only other mountain bike I’ve ever seen here was ridden by my son Ben. He made the ride look effortless. I ride this trail; but the years are adding up (or perhaps it’s simply the geological upthrust that makes the trail a little harder each year).

There’s a first climb to the first switchback, not too hard. Around that switchback is one of the toughest stretches, hard because it climbs quickly and is steep for a long time. I ride it carefully, paying attention to the one place where I can ease off for ten seconds and get my breath back, making sure I don’t hit a root or rock that will stop my momentum.

But today, before I even note that I’ve started that climb, I’m past it and breathing harder than usual. What happened?

What happened is that I had Peter’s book in my head. I was thinking about the backwards-walking actor and the man he comes across. He has seen the man before in these woods. He counts him among the homeless woods dwellers, although he has always worn bright white shirts and creased pants. On this day the man is sitting at the edge of the woods next to an exercise path [Trimmstrecke]. He looks terrible, so ragged and bedraggled that it seems clear that “he would never stand up again by himself.” Besides that, he stinks to high heaven.

The “actor crouched down to the man who had been his friend, let himself fall down next to him, took on his posture. . . .” As this man succumbs to entropy, as he falls from an ordered life, the actor joins him in solidarity, acting as if he is falling as well.

The man, it turns out, is responding to every noise – human noise, machine noise, even the noises of nature – with shouts of “shut up!” The narrator says he is shouting in his native language and late in the description alternates the French “Ta gueule!” with the German “Halt’s Maul!” As far as I remember, this is the first reference to the fact that the city must be in France. All along, I’ve seen the actor walking through the woods outside Paris, the same woods feature in “Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht,” so this is no surprise.

The actor understands, after a while, that the man is trying to scream himself to death. He tries to be an audience for the man (Der Schauspieler neben ihm gab den Zuschauer.”). The man doesn’t notice him.

I think the following: 0) Peter Handke is writing a story about 1) the narrator who is writing this story, 2) the actor is the story’s hero and performs/acts the thoughts and actions of the story, 3) the shouting man is performing his own thoughts, 4) the actor is acting like an audience for the shouting man, 5) I’m reading, as a kind of audience, this story.

To say that this story is about an actor who wanders through the woods having some experiences misses the point entirely. This is a story about the narrator, about narration, about the construction of a story that in turns reconstructs the narrator.

Although he assumed the man would never again stand up, suddenly the opposite is shown to be true: “What, the actor’s visual acquaintance would never again stand up from his place in the middle of the exercise path? He was already standing, and that was no standing up but a snapping up.” The man has stood up, it turns out, to attempt to destroy the exercise device next to him on the path. It is the peeled trunk of a tree that rests on supporting posts and meant to act as a balance beam. The man has no chance of doing it any harm whatsoever, especially, the actor thinks, because he is in no way a violent man. But the act of attacking the device results in a change in the man’s face. The actor sees a child’s face. The narrator writes: “There he stood and let himself be seen.”

There’s something odd about trying to topple a tree trunk that is lying horizontal. But the earlier tree trunk that turned out to be a man (p. 66), and the fact that men and trees stand erect against the falling, felling forces of entropy, makes this, I think, an attempt to do what has been done to the man: to bring him low.

So that’s why I suddenly found myself at the top of this section of the trail breathing harder than I usually am at this point. I was thinking about the book and didn’t slow down where I might have.

Riding this trail is a variety of speaking. My riding, it spoke (and has spokes), it narrated.

Handke's "The Great Fall": Part 2

I ended the previous post with the claim that this novel will be about narration. That was on the basis of the first few sentences, each of which alerted a reader to the the textuality of this story, to the fact that this is language about language.

This morning I remembered Peter's preface to the American edition of his "A Journey to the Rivers": "I wrote about my journey through the country of Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, my literature: a slow, inquiring narration; every paragraph dealing with and narrating a problem, of representation, of form, of grammar -- of aesthetic veracity."

So I read the second paragraph.

Quickly the narrator revisits something he wrote in the first paragraph: "Frightened out of sleep: that wasn't exactly the case for the man lying there either." Rather, it was a mundane event, that storm with lightning and thunder, an everyday happening that woke him suddenly and naturally into a complete presence of mind, into a readiness.

The restatement reveals the narrator as a meticulous searcher for aesthetic veracity.

Why is that important?

So that we, at least to some extent, speak language rather than surrendering to language that speaks us.

The consciousness that is related to that kind of inquiring narration comes to the man who continues his enjoyment of the storm by reaching out to find that he is not in his own bed, not even in his own country. It's like Gregor Samsa waking up to find he has become a bug -- the disconcerting consciousness will change how the events and things of the day are experienced. And on this day, the day of his Great Fall, he feels at home in the strange place (although, the narrator assures us, the bed is not strange).

And, he hasn't yet opened his eyes. A pleasing rain follows the lightning and thunder he has enjoyed and then a third good sensation courses through him: he has awakened in the bed of a woman who is good to him. Who loves him? the narrator asks. Even though she may have indicated something like that during the night, the narrator writes, the man "would not have agreed to have that written so literally here. She was good to me: that was it, that was what he could say."

Who writes this carefully, so attentive to each sentence, to each assertion?

Peter Handke.

And that's why I read him.