Spurious

Narrative Eternity

Was that really a book? Is it really over? Naipaul's A Bend in the River ends uncertainly. Oh, not because the story was unresolved in any important way: we know the protagonist will go to England to marry the daughter of his friend as he promised (as was an informal arrangement). He'll get out of the new Africa that grew up all around him - around this son of an old Muslim family on the East coast of the continent, a family who had moved there generations ago from India, and had kept their traditions intact.

In the opening chapters, the protagonist-narrator allows himself to speak from those traditions, to speak corporately, collectively, in the third person plural. Why, I asked myself as I read, is he writing? Why the necessity to write? He doesn't tell us (the composition of the novel plays no part in the novel); but I suppose because his voice had to coalesce from the new uncertainty that had shaken up those traditions.

His family had to move from the East coast, just as he, in the end, will have had to leave his shop and his business in the town in the bend of the river. And not just his family: the Big Man of the capital, the new President has turned his poor country, post-independence, upside down. All the old certainties are gone. Then our narrator speaks from this overturning. Speaks as an individual who was at first an onlooker, and then fell victim to it. The novel, which begins slowly, happily, gathers pace. At the end, everything happens at once, all in a rush. Salim, our narrator, now a man alone, has had to escape. He departs on the steamer, upriver, the Big Man having commandeered the available aeroplanes.

But though the narrative speeds up, its coolness and detachment does not change; its careful 'brown style' (a measured, unelaborate prose, still and reserved) remains unruffled. The events in question did not disturb it. Even when Salim finds himself without a business, even when he's lost in a crowded prison, nothing changes its coolness, its detachment. The prose flows on. And I wonder whether it was this that I wanted to continue, as I put the book down.

The mood of a book (its many moods) remain for a while after reading. I'd finished A Bend in the River at the airport. On the way home, in the taxi, still the mood (the many moods). And still the desire to be sustained by that tranquil prose, by the same calm continuity that allowed everything to be spoken, whether slowly or quickly. Initially, Salim spoke in the third person plural - collectively, corporately, in the knowledge of who he was and what he could expect. Then as the book moved on, this shifted to the first; Salim was a man alone. But there were passages, nonetheless, where something else spoke, or another voice inhabited that of the narrator. These were the transitional passages, the literary equivalent of the 'pillow shots' of Ozu: descriptive moments that might seem to have been intercalated between narrative episodes.

Another 'we' speaks: but who speaks? Not the 'we' of the eternal Africa, the jungle and the river. The narrator wants to note the changes in the vegetation - the new hyacinths the river carries along. He wants us to know the bush is changing. His is not an eternal Africa, then. Not the Jungle without variation. Things are happening, changing, just as a narrative - A Bend in the River itself - opens its wings in the ramshackle town in the bend of the river. Why did I want to remain there, in the river's bend, where the 'we' had not resolved itself into an 'I'; where the bush spoke, the ramshackle town, and the foreigners Salim found stranded there? Why in that narrative eternity, in that eternal noon that, in my memory, burns everything else away?

A lovely sentence from Brody's book on Godard,

Duras herself recognised that 'the film was made at the same time as it was filmed; the film was written in step with its unspooling', and criticised directors who did not understand 'that the making of the film is already the film'.

And now a passage which makes me think of Tarkovsky's Mirror:

For Godard, Duras represented a model of integrating his own private experience with the work of art without sacrificing any of its political or vatic power. He had criticised Sartre, in the wake of 1968, for having distinguished his writing of the time (his biography of Flaubert, The Idiot of the Family) from his political activism - for having two separate 'drawers': a 'Flaubert drawer' and a 'class struggle' drawer. Duras made no such distinction: Le Camion, a story of a woman who hitches a ride with a pair of truck dirvers, is dominated by the political delusions of the twentieth century, fascism and communism, without yielding to dogma or diluting the film's artistic immediacy - and Duras told that story herself, on-screen. Adapting Duras's strategies, Godard, beginning with Sauve qui peut, would approach politics by other means, creating feature films that reflected his first-person implication in their subjects, however great or abstract.

Pauline Kael in The New Yorker on one of my favourite Godard films, Sauve qui pert (la vie), called Slow Motion in the UK and Every Man for Himself in the USA:

More than the fat has been burned out of Every Man For Himself: the juice has gone, too ... If it were possible to have lyricism without emotion, that might describe the film's style ... I got the feeling that Godard doesn't believe in anything anymore; he just wants to make movies, but maybe he doesn't really believe in movies anymore, either.

What would it mean to write without believing in writing? Doesn't Godard say elsewhere he intends to make cinema rather than films (writing rather than books)?

... after making For Ever Mozart, he contacted Otchakovsky-Laurent again to say that he now wanted to create a book of 'sentences' from that film and to do so the same for other works of his. The publisher prepared a manuscript of For Ever Mozart, and Godard removed all descriptions and stage directions, 'everything except what is said in the film'. Then he rearranged the spoken text in a process which Otchakovsky-Laurent described as 'an authentic work of versification'. The result did not resemble a published script; the sentences, broken into short, unpunctuated lines, without attribution to the characters, indeed resemble poetry. Godard expressed his satisfaction with the result, declaring, 'These are sounds and phrases which correspond to a type of diction, my own'. The genre under which the book is listed is also Godard's pown - 'phrases', that is, sentences, - although many of the book's phgrases, or sentences, were not his own: the book features a list of sixteen cited authors, including Georges Bernanos, Marguerite Duras, James Agee and André Bazin.

(from Richard Brody's admirable Everything is Cinema.)

Now isn't that beautiful: the idea of a voice that occupies every particular voice in a work of art? Of a narrative voice that even gathers up what is quoted. Phrases - to be capable of a book of sentences written by no one and by everyone.

Passage

No easy way to get back to writing. I had made a mental note to look up Scott Walker's words (at the time of Tilt or The Drift?) of wanting no separation between music and his life, thinking, that's it, that's the beginning of something. ('Is there an element of putting on the work clothes when it's time to record, then?' - 'I'm trying to get rid of that. I'm try to reach a state of neutrality where I'm living my work, existing within it and for it. I'm trying not to make a separation between the two.') What would I have said? No separation between writing and life. The two absolutely equivalent. To write, to live, and both at once.

And another note, this time from Balthus: 'I wanted to paint a dreaming young girl and what passes through her, not the dream itself. The passing therefore, not the dream'. To write about the passing of writing itself, not of what might be written, that's what I would have said. Beginning from the living room, here, the new printer to be used for printing wedding invitations, the dresser, the antique brass lamp brought back from Lisbon. Beginning only to have said it was writing of which I wanted to write - the passing of writing over these and other objects, touching them without disturbing them. Writing as it stays with them, these objects, when I am away.

Then a scribbled note to myself on an old notebook: difficulty of reaching a blank page. Even reaching it. What did I mean? That to bring oneself to the edge of a beginning is already a great deal. That it's enough to mark that beginning, to write to say - nothing in particular. And finally, a thought last night: the impossibility of writing a diary. Of allowing one voice to still itself and speak, usurping all the others. To speak from one voice - it's not enough. The beginning is at the brink of all voices, of any possible voice. And just because it is at that brink, the voice of writing, of writing writing itself, as it allows those voices. Stay close, then, to the possibility of a voice, of writing, where anything you might say will be arbitrary.

From an interview Beckett granted to a French newspaper:

- I never read philosophy.
- Why not?
- I don’t understand it.
[…]
- Why did you write your books?
- I don’t know. I’m not an intellectual. I just feel things. I invented Molloy and the rest on the day I understood how stupid I’d been. I began then to write down the things I feel.

I could add a hundred more, two hundred more shades to my personality ... each one independent of the others, following a path of its own.

Of what literary expression would I be capable? How could I fend for myself in these conditions?

A Frenchman or an Englishment never experiences such lack of harmony - at least not to this extent. Whatever a Frenchman or an Englishman might feel individually, even if he is profoundly torn within himself, he will aways seek refuge in a certain national, English or French form, which has been elaborated over the centuries.

I was Polish.

Gombrowicz's Polishness, his disharmony means any beginning is an arbitrary one, and the attempt to finish a book in the same style (the same shade) is only an arbitrary effort of will.

Toy Stars, Real Stars

There are books you have to stoop to read; you can't stand up straight. Kafka's aphorisms, say. Late Mandelstam poems. Tsvetayeva 's long poems. Books that are their own law, their own religion. That seem to press further into themselves, and all the same to have reached something - a solitary point, burning alone in the sky. A star that burns into itself, falling endlessly into its own idiom. And separated from us in so many ways, not least the great, burning catastrophes of the twentieth century. But it is not as if you have to part veil after veil to find them - learning German, learning Russian, learning the history of Prague, or the history of St. Petersburg. They burn through all veils and that is the point. They reach us somehow, and as themselves, absolutely themselves. 

Laughter. What nonsense! As though you could gather the 'treasures of world literature' around you like gems. As though that gathering, the act of looking for 'literature' - or the pretense that it actually came to find you, shining through all the veils - was not a horrible kind of acquisitiveness. Some books you have to lose to find. Some books will not tolerate being placed alongside others on the shelves. Nothing worse than a collector of books, than a sniffer after old editions. Nothing worse than the literary fantasist who dreams the classics burn around him like the toy stars on a child's bedroom ceiling.

Toy stars, real stars. I'm not sure what kind of constellation my bookshelf collects. Fake or real? What am I looking for as I read? What do I want to find?

'I have a Project'

It will never happen, that's what this day says to me. Never - but what, what isn't to happen? Behind every word here - or ahead of them, far out ahead like a sail: the 'project' - is that the word? I don't like that word. The project - something thrown out ahead. A fishing net? Can a sail be thrown out ahead? Ahead and catching the wind, dragging everything here behind it?

Now I imagine the spread parachute like sail of the land yachts that race along the sand. Ahead - but it's not even real, I don't think it's real. Ahead and uncertain, yet dragging everything along: what. 'I have a project': so says the character in Godard's Eloge de l'amour. Red Thread(s) quoted that a long time ago, just that, the character (Edgar?) saying, 'I have a project'. But do I have one? It will never happen, that's what this long drooping Sunday says to me. You'll never do it, never complete it. But what? Complete what?

This is it, I want to say. These words are what it is, and nothing beyond them. And yet the sense that there's a kind of shadow that they belong to. That their real sense lies beyond them, to something that has already happened, and can only make sense in that way. Ruined words - remnants - but from some disaster that will happen in the future, not the past. That is gathering itself in order to happen. That sucks the air away from the present as a tsunami is said to do, drawing the air into itself before the wave crashes on the beach. 

The Membrane

My Golding phase has run aground on Pincher Martin. Is running aground, because it hasn't defeated me yet; I'm a hundred pages in, and, like its central character, trying to get a grip - on a narrative, not on his rocky outcrop. A grip - but unlike him, I can find no purchase; the narrative, such as it is, runs on without me. Pages of closely printed prose (in a fifty year old Penguin paperback - what history did it have?, I wonder) like a shut door. His rocky island is my glass mountain.

Naipaul, instead, and on a whim, after idly reading some article or another. I selected A Bend in the River from Waterstone's shelves. The girl at the checkout desk she'd always meant to read Naipaul, and I said so had I. Of course, I'd gone 100 pages into The Enigma of Arrival - what defeated me? A lack of abstraction, I think - a lack of prose doing more than being a perfect, perfect mirror. The prose was too balanced! It made me seasick, those calm, calm waters of prose. The book fell away from my grasp as into a pool of water. Let it lie there forever, I thought.

But this rainy morning, I thought to advance a little further into A Bend, having begun it yesterday in the gym. And I'm almost immediately upset - seeking to open the spine a bit wider, to give myself room to read the end of each line, too cramped against the central margin, I fold it open instead and - it cracks. The glue of the book has failed; it's come apart from itself. A broken book. It seems at odd with its calm, calm prose.

I like narratives in the first person, and like it when it is not the protagonist who is the centre of action, but whose presence asserts itself gently nonetheless. Who is there, with you, the reader, watching it all, reliving it all, for doesn't the narrative depend upon an act of writing, a retelling?

I like the way that voice seems to withdraw back from the story, seems to be much more than a frame. The voice seems to speak from a voice deeper than any reported one in what follows. It becomes an echo chamber, a space of resonance, having hollowed out an unexpected interiority because of the power - a controlled power, very measured, in Naipaul's case - to tell.

But an interiority that is not quite a soul, not a private recess set back from the world. A kind of membrane instead, infinitely delicate. A membrance between inside and outside, and that, as it quivers, speaks of what we do not ordinarily call personality but should - the way the world registers with us. The way it affects us individually, absolutely alone.

This is what gives itself as style. This is what can make a voice, reading a voice, hearing it as you read, absolutely essential. I think of the Richard Ford trilogy, for all its uncertainties (the weak satire in the third volume, the overlong second volume), and, in particular, of The Sportswriter. That voice, that voice, what I wouldn't do to feel close to it again, Frank Bascombe's voice, that membrane between the world and himself that gives itself as style.

Naipaul's narrator is cooler, more distant. I do not feel an immediate love for this voice, and wonder whether it will come. It reminds of Radio 4, of the calm voice of the radio announcer. A calmness not on the side of style, but of a studied neutrality - the stylelessness of a ruling class, of an unchallenged middle class. Certain, self-certain, but so certain it does not need to draw attention to itself. It simply is what it is, calm and unruffled.

Brown prose, I think it's called sometimes. Measured prose. The prose of rulers, resounding with the voice of rulers. Will I finish Naipaul's book? It cost eight pounds, so I will make sure to. Eight pounds! From Waterstones! And this for a paperback whose glue does not hold its page batches to the back cover! But it is not an essential book. Its calm, calm voice is not necessary.

Now, fool, I say to myself. Now - what makes Richard Ford so different? The Sportswriter? Because that space of resonance, that stretched eardrum has a kind of density, I reply, a thickness. It has been infested with itself - it is thick. It has style - or has accrued style to itself, attracted it like a fly to stick flypaper. This is not the style of a ruler-writer. It is in lieu of itself, it looks for itself, as Frank Bascombe lives in search of - what?

I read the three Bascombe volumes after one another. What happiness! I miss them. I miss that thickened voice, looking for itself in the narrative. Looking without knowing what was to happen, what must happen. It knew nothing of plot. What happened - happened. The interminable house-selling episodes in the third volume. The interminable drive in the second. Ah but what happiness in the last chapter of The Sportswriter - a miracle, when the narrator catches a train on a whim to 'Gotham'. A miracle, because here the plot, in its detour, thickens as wonderfully as the prose. Chance, contigency here doubles the contingency of style, style's adventure, as it accretes itself in darkness and silence.

What are you on about, idiot?, I ask myself. What are you trying to find? Sunday morning. The wet yard. Flowers in pots, there for one season only. And a flowering plant - bright light purple. And the trimmed down Hebes. And the big tubs bought for salad, new sprouts poking up. The wet concrete. The bench my sister painted 6 years ago that needs painting again, detritus beneath it in piles beneath the gaps between slats above. A day like any other.

I was reading in the other room. Reading on the bed, as I never do when my Beloved is around. But she's not here and nor is that measure of reality she brings. Am I becoming 'dreamy' as Bascombe says happens to him? Dreamy ... a membrane stretched out like a hammock. A living style, that does not know itself. An idiom that thickens into life. To read is also to write, isn't it? To be written in some way? To find oneself written?