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."

CLASSIFICATION: The Botanical Garden #3

More this morning from Jean Fremon's book, as translated by Brian Evenson:


Obviously all my interest resides in the act of classification. Classification is gaze and understanding. Without it, the thing is nothing, amorphous, without connection in the world. The gaze discerns it, creates it, gives it contrast, identity, it belongs to this family, is related to that other one, not to be confused with this one here from which it is distinguished from notably by small a, small b, small c...


In the end, I collect, but through writing, the painter is interested in his painting not in his model; as for me, I'm interested in the indexes I invent, in the categories I arrange, in the catalogs I draw up, in the measurements that I record. Each like a new stone erected across slack time.


Thus memories. Range poles, boundary stones, discoveries. . . .


However, it is not toward the real past that the search for detail is oriented, but toward a conception of the past, the past as subject-object of what is written, is invented. . . this past is the future.


......................................


And my own experience with indexes after having seen a fine film by the Berlin filmmaker Harun Farocki:

22 May 1988, Tübingen

Midmorning, sitting in the Brechtbau.  I look out a window and watch a woman approach the building through a courtyard.  Thick legs encased in blue stockings.  A green coat covering a black blouse.  Long, stringy, dull hair.  A stout body—skin stuffed with flesh and fat, like a sausage.  A joyless hunk of flesh carrying a bulging pigskin briefcase stiffed with notes for an infantile dissertation.

Zarko, who got up early this morning and came to work in the peace of the Brechtbau library, shows me a passage from Repetition:  "thus traveling became my home, waiting at bus stops and in train stations, being underway in general."  This describes the last few days, Zarko says.  From one place to another, always moving, rushing around in the car, never a moment of peace.

My experience has been almost the opposite.  After the hectic arrival and two days in Frankfurt a peace has been growing in me deeper than I have known, a dark-green and earthy-brown stillness, a deep creative well sunk into my center from which I can draw sweet cool water forever.

In a bookstore I find a German Filmalmanach for 1989.  I'm not sure how the book can foretell this year, but that's what it says on the cover.  I look up "Harun Farocki" in the index of the thick book.  There it is, with a single page number.  Excited to read about the man whose film I saw last night and with whom we then had a lively discussion, I flip through the book to find page 576.  I am surprised when it seems that it will be part of the index.  In fact it is the very page of the index where I found the name "Farocki."  I read through the page and discover that the index is correct.  On page 576 one can indeed find the name "Harun Farocki" -- immediately preceding the number 576.  
Stimulated by my little adventure, I plan a book, an index of an index.  Not an index of an index of a book, but a book that is wholly and only an index, with each entry the singular self-referential occurence of the word.  Perhaps I will create the words as well.  And then, at the end, like a normal index, a number index: the number 1 to be found on page one and on the page of the number index, the number 2 on page two and in the number index, and so on.  I will title my book Index "Harun Farocki" in honor of the occasion of my adventure.

Coincidence: Jean Fremon's The Botanical Garden, Part 2

It's a small book—handy.


It rewards even momentary attention.


I carry it into the bathroom, read it on the toilet:


It's true that I have always found suspect the scorn that one claims to hold for that waste which we didn't succeed in nourishing ourselves upon. I like how the chain which joins us to nature doesn't suddenly end at our stomach, that we are not altogether an impasse, an oubliette where all is accumulated and digested, but the site of a transition, a transformation.

Jean Fremon's The Botanical Garden

Green Integer has just published, in Brian Evenson's translation, a fine little book (books in the series are 5" by 3 1/2") of exquisite thoughts, aphorisms of a sort that occur in sequence, hints of a narrative in the context of thoughts about narrative.








Just a few examples:


The phrase subverts the thing.
What is right, the word, the memory
the raw, unformed thing
And what is right?


The unfiltered true, without armature
the animal


generalized oversight


the whole as it comes


yappings of a dog, the road white with fog


its lesson: no lessons