Roland Barthes Archives

Of Literary Bondage: Essay — Andrew Gallix

Aug 132013

We live in a culture at war with itself, and I don’t mean the War on Drugs. I mean the thousand-year war between the rhetoricians and the dialecticians (as McLuhan had it), between the Ciceronian, elaborated style and the plain style of Peter Ramus, between writers who believe in the aesthetic joy of linguistic play over those who think words are just for communication (how dull and, well, Soviet that word can sound). Andrew Gallix offers here a dazzling and provocative note, a report from the front, on literary Modernism and Paul Valéry’s famous sentence “The marquise went out at five” conceived as a critique of the traditional, conventional, realistic, well-made (pick your own epithet) novel, or, really, anything that smacks of the prosiness of prose, of mere communication. Valéry’s line cleaved to the centre of the debate: Would you write a novel or a story or an essay containing a sentence as mundane as “The marquise went out at five”or not? As Gallix points out, the marquise has become a shibboleth in France for a certain kind of traditional (dull) writing. Not so much over here where prose dominates the market place. Something to think about. Andrew Gallix is the brilliant founder of 3:AM Magazine, he teaches at the Sorbonne, he writes for the UK Guardian. It’s a great pleasure to present his work here.

How is the marchioness? Still playing Alice in Rubberland?
– Adam and the Ants, “Rubber People”

Surprising as it may seem, “The marquise went out at five” ranks among the most famous quotes in modern French literature. It could have been tossed off by some Gallic Bulwer-Lytton type, and in a manner it was, albeit a fictitious one. These hapless words were first recorded in the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, midway through a rant against what Barthes would dub the “reality effect“. André Breton recalls the time when Paul Valéry assured him he would never write a novel, adducing his aversion to opening sentences à la “marquise”. Referenced by numerous authors, from André Gide to Nathalie Sarraute through Francis Ponge, the marchioness and her teatime peregrinations, came to embody everything that was wrong with a certain brand of conventional fiction.

It was not just the insipid incipits of well-made novels that Valéry objected to. He believed that writing always betrayed the complexity of human thought. “The more one writes,” he wrote, “the less one thinks.” Valéry’s Monsieur Teste — a close cousin of Melville’s Bartleby and Musil’s Ulrich — is particularly scornful of novels and plays, in which “being is simplified even to stupidity”. Like his character, the reluctant author felt that prose was essentially prosaic — a communication tool as pedestrian as a peripatetic marquise in a potboiler. Poetry, on the other hand, was conversant with the ineffable, and could therefore be regarded as a true art form. The fact that some of the greatest novels of the last century merged prose with poetry, and that some of the greatest poets of our time (Gary Lutz) are fiction writers, seems to invalidate this dubious theory. Nonetheless, Valéry’s quip tapped into a growing sense of disillusionment with the novel, which, despite some very notable exceptions, already seemed to have ossified in its Victorian incarnation. Compared with the avant-garde movements’ attempts to bridge the gap between art and life — chief among them, Breton’s Surrealism — the novel’s “puny exploits” (Beckett) seemed risible.

Above all, Valéry objected to the arbitrary nature of such perfunctory preambles, anticipating Knausgaard‘s recent crisis of faith: “Just the thought of fiction, just the thought of a fabricated character in a fabricated plot made me feel nauseous”. Here, the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief is tested to breaking point by the nagging feeling that the marchioness could just as well have been a duchess on a different timetable, or an alien on another planet. What is lacking, to quote Dylan Nice, is the sense of “a text beyond the writer to which the writer submits”.

The refusal to submit to external constraints was key to the emergence of the novel. Gabriel Josipovici analyses this trend in What Ever Happened to Modernism?: “Genres were the sign of submission to authority and tradition, but the novel, a narrative in prose, was the new form in which the individual could express himself precisely by throwing off the shackles that bound him to his fathers and to tradition”. The flipside of this emancipation of the writer (or privatisation of writing) was, as Walter Benjamin pointed out, isolation. No longer the mouthpiece of the Muses or society, novelists could only derive legitimacy from themselves. It is this crisis of authorial authority that Valéry’s marquise throws into relief.

In Reading Writing, Julien Gracq took Valéry to task over the alleged randomness of his imaginary opening sentence. “Everything counts in a novel, just as in a poem,” he argues; it just takes longer for patterns to emerge. Quite. Even at a micro-level, any minor amendment can trigger a butterfly effect. Should the marchioness morph into a princess, for instance, we might suddenly find ourselves slap bang in fairy-tale territory. Should she pop out, say, instead of simply going out, the register, and perhaps even the meaning, would be altered, and so forth. The point, however, is not whether everything counts in a novel, but whether a novel of this kind counts at all.

“The marquise went out at five” parodies all those narratives that aim for verisimilitude whilst inadvertently advertising their fictive status. In so doing, the sentence conjures up a quantum multiverse of alternatives. It haunts itself, begging to be rewritten over and over again, until all possibilities have been exhausted, and it can finally be laid to rest. The most recent example of this repetition compulsion is Jean Charlent’s Variations Valéry (2011) — a series of pastiches of 75 different authors, riffing off the famous phrase (which Claude Mauriac had cheekily used as the title of an early novel). Significantly, the marchioness made an appearance in One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, Raymond Queneau‘s famous collection of ten sonnets (1961). Composed as an antidote to a bout of writer’s block, it comes in the singular — but fittingly ludic — shape of a flipbook. The fourteen lines on each page are printed on individual strips, so that every line can be replaced by the corresponding line in any of the other poems. By the author’s reckoning, it would take someone 190,258,751 years to go through all possible combinations. Queneau thus succeeded in producing a work that was at once complete, always in the process of becoming (with a little help from the reader) and necessary (on its own combinatorial terms). It was also the founding text of the OuLiPo — Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Potential Literature Workshop — which Queneau launched with François Le Lionnais, in 1960.

Queneau parted company with the Surrealists over aesthetic, as well as political, differences. He increasingly objected to their experiments in automatic writing, premised on the idea that freedom was “the absence of all control exercised by reason” (Breton). “Inspiration which consists in blind obedience to every impulse is in reality a sort of slavery,” countered Queneau, “The classical playwright who writes his tragedy observing a certain number of familiar rules is freer than the poet who writes that which comes into his head and who is the slave of other rules of which he is ignorant.” Italo Calvino concurred: “What Romantic terminology called genius or talent or inspiration or intuition is nothing other than finding the right road empirically”. It is, paradoxically, through the observance of rules that emancipation takes place. “I set myself rules in order to be totally free,” as Perec put it, echoing Queneau’s earlier definition of Oulipians as “rats who build the labyrinth from which they plan to escape”.

Historically, the importance of the Oulipo is to have provided an escape from the Romantic cul-de-sac of unfettered imagination (or its Surrealist avatar, chance) through the reintroduction of external constraints.

—Andrew Gallix

Andrew Gallix teaches at the Sorbonne in Paris, and edits 3:AM Magazine. His work has appeared in publications ranging from The Guardian and Times Literary Supplement to Dazed & Confused. He divides his time between Scylla and Charybdis.

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Using Everything: Pattern Making in Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha,” Robert Walser’s “Nothing at All,” and Sam Lipsyte’s “The Wrong Arm” | Essay — Jason Lucarelli

Aug 122013

Jason Lucarelli follows his brilliant essay on Gordon Lish, composition and consecution (published on NC in February) with an equally brilliant and challenging piece on Stein, Walser and Lipsyte and the use of repetition in constructing narrative prose. In many ways this is an extension of his earlier essay since it seems obvious that Gordon Lish and Gertrude Stein emerge from the same stream of American Modernism and play somewhat similar roles as inspirational figures in their different generations. Lish’s influence on Sam Lipsyte goes without saying. And Walser is a European avatar of that same tradition. Jason’s essay, based on a lecture he gave at Vermont College of Fine Arts in July, is cogent, erudite, intuitive and compulsively readable. He teaches you how to read.

“The whole idea is that there is the pattern.”

– Diane Williams, “D. Beech and J. Beech”

Lately I have been thinking a lot about repetition.

More specifically, I have been thinking about patterns of repetition and compression and ways to compose a narrative so that certain words and phrases carry the burden of motion or narrative momentum.

This all started after I read Roland Barthes, a French literary theorist who published a book in 1953 called Writing Degree Zero. In an essay titled “Is There Any Poetic Writing?” Barthes says that written language has a “relational nature” and that “words are abstracted as much as possible in the interest of relationships” (44). Barthes continues, saying, “no word has a density by itself, it is hardly the sign of a thing, but rather the means of conveying a connection.” According to Barthes, words extend toward other words, forming, what he calls, “a superficial chain of intentions.” As a word stands for itself, it also points to other words in a “relational network” that drives narrative intention and momentum. Barthes suggests that a reading of these relations might function similarly to a mathematical language expressing either “operative equality” or “difference.”

As I thought about patterns of repetition, specifically word patterns, this seemed very interesting to me. I started thinking about the inter-textual connections in narrative form and the need for readers to be able to derive meaning from those relationships since it is always necessary to understand where we are going, why we are going there, and what the relational elements of a narrative mean within the context of the work as a whole (47).

Barthes says that our function as writers is “not to find new words, with more body or brilliance, but to follow an order of an ancient ritual, to perfect the symmetry or conciseness of a relation,” and because I was thinking about word patterns, I took Barthes quite literally (45). I thought, what could be more concise or symmetrical than a relational network of the same words and phrases repeating throughout a narrative?

So my journey into the world of word patterns began, and I will attempt to construct that same tour for you by examining word patterns from three stories: Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha,” Robert Walser’s “Nothing At All,” and Sam Lipsyte’s “The Wrong Arm.”

First, I would like to introduce a working definition of word patterns from the mouth of Douglas Glover. In his essay “The Mind of Alice Munro” from his book Attack of the Copula Spiders, he says, word patterns “begin with mere repetition and accumulate meaning by association and juxtaposition, splinter or ramify, sending out subsidiary branch patterns, and…discover occasions for recombination or intersection of the various branches…in tie-in lines” (95). As portions of a pattern repeat, each repetition conveys its relationship or connection to the pattern. Glover separates word patterns into categories of root pattern (identified as such by its connection to a story’s protagonist) and split-off patterns.

In an echo of the Barthes passage mentioned earlier (“no word has a density by itself…”), Glover says, “No word sits by itself; instead, each word vibrates in a dozen relationships with other words, repeating, competing, dominating, wrenching, transforming, shading, and subverting” (98). Similar to Barthes, Glover emphasizes the relationships between words and the nature of those relationships. In this way, repeating word patterns are charged with a variety of structural and thematic functions. Word patterns, for example, can initiate motive and intention, develop conflict and characterization, convey desire and resistance, action and counteraction.

Glover’s words are a contemporary explanation of word patterns, so before examining a portion of one of the many patterns in Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha,” let’s take a step back and see what Stein herself has to say about her process since she wrote and lectured on it so extensively. In her lecture “Portraits and Repetition,” published in 1935—eighteen years before Barthes, sixty-eight years before Glover—she says “…if you like repetition, that is if you like the repeating that is the same thing, but once started expressing this thing, expressing any thing there can be no repetition because the essence is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis” (167). In her own way, Stein is saying that repetition alone is not enough, for how can one say anything by merely repeating oneself? Rather, Stein stresses the importance of how that repetition is positioned in relation to its prior utterance. Stein unpacks this idea later in her lecture when she says, “the repetition consists in knowing that that one is a kind of one” and “each sentence is just the difference in emphasis” (198). Each repetition with variation carries its own emphasis, its own context, and as a “kind of one,” points back to the whole of where it came. As a rule, each sameness should carry its own difference.

In an examination of the work and life of Gertrude Stein, scholar and literary critic Fredrick J. Hoffman writes, “Repetition is an essential strategy in composition; it guarantees similarity and forces the consciousness upon the nature of the thing seen while at the same time it provides the avenue along which movement and change may occur” (Stein, 20). The momentum of Stein’s stories—published in the early 1900’s until the time of her death in 1946—do not rely on discernable plotlines, but rather, as Hoffman says, “subtle gradations of change” and “slow accretions of variant meaning” achieved through a careful balance of repetition with variation (21).

In “Melanctha,” published in 1909, Stein builds a relational network of patterns that, as Douglas Glover might say, “controls development and meaning within the text” (96). Stein repeats a variety of words with varying emphasis as a way of progressing the emotional battle experienced by Melanctha throughout the story. The patterns in “Melanctha” are too numerous to name now in every instance, but some of the repeating words and phrases can be easily integrated into the following summary: Melanctha is a girl of mixed race who often feels “blue,” loves “too hard,” “too fast,” and can only find “new ways to be in trouble.” She “wanders,” and in her “wandering,” searches for “wisdom” and “understanding.” But poor Melanctha is “full of the excitement of many men,” and can “always only find new ways to get excited.” When her mother becomes ill, Melanctha meets Dr. Campbell. Melanctha and the doctor begin a relationship of “talking” and “listening,” and Melanctha pushes Dr. Campbell to do less “thinking” and more “feeling,” but Dr. Campbell believes Melanctha’s way of “feeling” is much too “hard” and “too fast.” Eventually Dr. Campbell comes to a new “understanding” and a new “feeling” about Melanctha, even though Dr. Campbell believes he is moving “fast” and ahead of his own “feeling.” Yet Melanctha only “suffers” and remains unsatisfied because Dr. Campbell still seems so “slow” in his “feeling.” This struggle of conflicting emotions continues between them, their “minds” and “hearts” never agreeing, until they finally end their relationship.

“Melanctha” is told in the third person by an omniscient narrator who narrates closely beside Melanctha and other characters in the story, like Rose Johnson, Melanctha’s best friend, and Dr. Jeff Campbell, Melanctha’s love interest for most of the narrative. Much of the tension in “Melanctha” develops from and is controlled by word patterns, and I would like to look at a few patterns, a few examples, slivers really. The word patterns of “trouble,” “excited,” and “courage” are all connected to Melanctha’s character development, though these same word patterns also control aspects of the conflict between Melanctha and Dr. Campbell. The first instance of “trouble” is tied to Melanctha: “Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and quiet, and always she could only find new ways to be in trouble” (3). To give you a sense of its frequency, the word pattern “trouble” occurs 97 times throughout the story. The function of the pattern here is to reveal one of Melanctha’s flaws. The pattern continues on in other instances, though, most importantly, it appears in the sentence introducing Dr. Jeff Campbell: “Jeff Campbell had never yet in his life had real trouble” (14). Already, it’s easy to see the difference, the conflict, between the two characters: Melanctha is always in “trouble” and Jeff Campbell has never known “real trouble.”

Let’s look at a few instances of the intersecting patterns of “excited” and “trouble”: “Melanctha Herbert was always seeking peace and quiet, and she could always only find new ways to get excited” (3). For Melanctha, getting into “trouble” and getting “excited” are connected. One leads to the other, and Stein conveys this relationship in a sentence whose structure is parallel to that of the one with “trouble”: “Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and quiet, and always she could only find new ways to be in trouble”. Again, to give you a sense of its frequency, the pattern of “excited” along with its split-off pattern of “excitements” is repeated 27 times throughout the text.

During a conversation between Melanctha and Dr. Campbell early in their courtship, Melanctha suggests that Dr. Campbell do less “thinking” and more “feeling.” Dr. Campbell replies, “…I really certainly don’t ever like to get excited, and that kind of loving hard does seem always to mean just getting all the time excited. No Miss Melanctha I certainly never have mixed myself up in that kind of trouble” (18). Here, the patterns of “excited” and “trouble” intersect to reveal complication and growing tension in the relationship between Dr. Campbell and Melanctha. In this example, the patterns of “trouble” and “excited” indicate opposing viewpoints, alternate lifestyles.

What makes Melanctha so prone to finding “new ways to be in trouble” is revealed in the following sentence: “Melanctha had always had a break neck courage…” (4) The relationship between “break neck courage” and “trouble” is defined in a later conversation between Dr. Campbell and Melanctha when she says: “…I mean real courage, to run around and not care nothing about what happens, and always be game in any kind of trouble” (37). Dr. Campbell replies, “…its all right being brave every day, just living regular and not having new ways all the time just to get excitements…I ain’t ashamed ever to say I ain’t got no longing to be brave, just to go around and look for trouble…” and, he continues, “that kind of courage makes all kind of trouble…” (38) Dr. Campbell’s idea of “brave” reflects “wisdom” that knows to keep away from certain “excitements” and “trouble.” Alternately, Melanctha’s idea of “courage” is one that leads to new “excitements” and “trouble” of all kinds. This succession of contexts forms a battle of opposites and, as Douglas Glover might say, “the competing points of view strive for interpretive primacy” (97). In other words, whose conception of love will supplant the other: Melanctha’s or Dr. Campbell’s?

Stein constructs the avenue for this struggle along threads of repetition and variation, sameness and difference, through the use of precise, complex word patterns. On “Melanctha,” Frederick J. Hoffman says, “Each of the significant phrases is repeated, again and again, in slightly new contexts, until one is aware of change within a central pattern of conscious experience” (30). Ultimately, the desired effect of Stein’s patterns, of all word patterns, is to produce some sort of change, or, in some instances, an awareness of staying the same.

In Robert Walser’s “Nothing at All,” published in 1917, the pattern making is even more transparent. Walser was a German-speaking Swiss writer who published short pieces of prose, novels, plays, and essays throughout 1901 to 1953 during the height of the Modernist period. “Nothing at All” (700 words) is much shorter than “Melanctha” (50,000 words), and while Walser’s patterning and use of repetition is equally interwoven, the compression of his narrative has much to do the transparency of his patterns.

“Nothing at All” is told by a first person narrator who narrates the story of a woman, a little “flighty” and a little “absentminded,” who goes shopping for something “good” for her and her husband to eat for supper that night. In town, the woman cannot keep her “mind on the matter,” a result of her “absentminded”-ness. Between her inability to keep “her mind on the matter” and being a little “flighty,” the woman comes to “no decision” and goes home with “nothing at all.” At home, she explains to her husband how the “choice was too difficult,” and because her “mind wasn’t on the matter,” she bought “nothing at all.” The “good” husband accepts his wife’s explanation and that night they have “nothing at all,” which, ironically, tastes “exceptionally good to them.”

The transparency of Walser’s patterning lends itself more easily to categories of root pattern and split-off patterns. Walser even tips off readers to the main pattern of “nothing at all” by initiating the pattern in the title of the story. Instead of tracing each pattern separately, I will trace the root pattern of “nothing at all” and its connection to the split-off patterns of “good” and variations of the phrase “mind on the matter.” As in Stein’s “Melanctha,” “Nothing at All” contains other patterns that carry all other prior utterances to the pattern they came from while relating to other patterns at work throughout the narrative.

The intersection or tie-in of all three patterns (“nothing at all,” “good,” and “mind on the matter”) occurs at the juncture, or climax, of the wife’s decision-making: “It isn’t good when minds aren’t on the matter, and, in a word, the woman finally got disgusted, and she went home with nothing at all” (110). When the woman gets home, her husband asks what “delicious and good” food she bought for supper, to which the wife responds: “nothing at all.” The woman explains: “‘I went to town and I wanted to buy something truly delicious and good for me and you, I wasn’t lacking in good will, over and over I considered, but the choice was too difficult and my mind wasn’t on the matter, and therefore I didn’t succeed, and therefore I bought nothing at all.’” Walser constructs this sentence using the ancient repetitive structures of polysyndeton and asyndeton. Asyndeton is the omission of conjunctions between phrases in favor of rhythm and speed, as in the first half of the sentence: “‘I went to town and I wanted to buy something truly delicious and good for me and you, I wasn’t lacking in good will, over and over I considered…” The final half of the sentence uses polysyndeton, a repetitive structure relying on excessive conjunctions also in the favor of rhythm: “‘…but the choice was too difficult and my mind wasn’t on the matter, and therefore I didn’t succeed, and therefore I bought nothing at all.’” In both cases, asyndeton and polysyndeton focus on the way clauses (or words and phrases) are linked. In other words, Walser uses these repetitive techniques to establish concise connections between three separate patterns: “good” and its split-off pattern “good will,” “mind on the matter,” and the root pattern of “nothing at all.”

Throughout the story, “good” is used in relation to the “something good” the wife wants to buy for supper. “Good,” in this case, represents intention or character desire. In other instances, “good” had the effect of characterization, like in connection with the “good intentions” or “good will” of the woman during her supper-search, and in the use of “good upright husband.” The woman’s motivation carried by the line, “A woman…went to town to buy something good for supper for herself and her husband,” receives its fulfillment in a tie-in line between “good” and “nothing at all” toward the end of the story: “And so they ate nothing at all and were both satisfied, for it tasted exceptionally good to them” (110). The husband is “in no way angry,” and this irony seems to suggest a resolution, because, in a way, the wife succeeds, at least until the final line of the story, which contains the final instance of the root pattern “nothing at all”: “Many other things would probably have tasted better to him than nothing at all” (111). This line reveals the only instance of judgment from the perspective of the “good” husband in the story, and extends the root pattern of “nothing at all” by complicating the narrative. This final instance also completes the circular momentum of the pattern—and the movement of the piece as a whole—as “nothing at all” moves from its connection of “good” into an implied connotation of “not good.” While “good” is a split-off pattern, it occurs more than any other pattern in the text, 17 times in all, 7 more times than the root pattern “nothing at all.” Here, the root pattern drives the avenue of progression, while the enriched pattern of “good” and all its variant meanings helps to elicit deeper meaning from the root pattern and the narrative overall.

The same kind of transparent pattern making is evident in Sam Lipsyte’s “The Wrong Arm,” a contemporary short story from Lipsyte’s collection Venus Drive, published in 2000. Lipsyte’s root pattern of “the wrong arm,” initiated in the title of the story, controls the development of the narrative while the split-off patterns and repetitive phrases in the narrative initiate change.

“The Wrong Arm” is told in the past tense from the first person point of view of an adolescent genderless narrator, who, for the sake of simplifying pronoun use, I will refer to as “he.” A family—consisting of a father, a mother, and three children—sets out on a road trip to see “the boats of the world” sailing up a river somewhere, but during the course of the trip, the narrator overhears his father and mother talking, and the narrator realizes there’s more to the trip than seeing “the boats.” The father says the boats are one thing and that there is another thing that they all need to talk about once they reach “the boats.” The narrator believes that what his father and mother have to tell the children has something to do with the “wrongness” in his mother, who has an arm with a visual history of “all the scars from all the times something tried to kill her in that arm.” Through the years, the mother’s arm has come to be known as the “the wrong arm.” There are strict rules against touching “the wrong arm”, or leading the mother anywhere by “the wrong arm.” Once the family arrives at the river to see “the boats,” in an effort to prove that “the wrong arm” is just like “anybody’s arm,” that they are “making it wrong by saying it was wrong,” the narrator suggests they “go closer” to the boats, and then he does “the wrong thing.”

As with Walser’s “Nothing At All,” “The Wrong Arm” contains a root pattern that centralizes the progression of the story by creating conflict, increasing narrative tension, and tying into the desires of multiple characters in various ways. The root pattern has branching associations of split-off patterns that, in one way or another, relate back to the root pattern. In Gertrude Stein’s words, each repetitive phrase, in connection to the root pattern of the story, helps to provide new insistence, new emphasis to the pattern. Lipsyte uses patternmaking as a way to compress the history of “wrongness” done to the mother’s “wrong arm” while also progressing the pattern in the present moment of the narrative.

Let’s look at an example that outlines the boundaries of the relationship between “the wrong arm” and the other family members: “All we knew about the wrong arm was that it was wrong to touch it, to pinch it, to rub it…The wrong arm was not for us to take her by and lead her. The wrong arm was not for us to tap it for her to turn” (117). This portion of the root pattern containing its split-off pattern of “wrong” wrenches with tension, and provides a source of conflict in the story. The fact that “the wrong arm” should never be touched acts as an obstacle for the narrator in his quest to discover the truth behind his mother’s mental and physical state. The root pattern of “the wrong arm” and all of its split-off patterns of “wrong,” “wronger,” and “wrongness” repeat 27 times throughout the text.

Lipsyte slowly unravels the history of hurt behind “the wrong arm” and its history of hurt through split-off patterns like “bees,” “bad nails in the porch door,” “porch-door nails,” and “scars.” Split-off patterns relate back to the root pattern in other ways, like the way “the boats” functions as the motive for the scene and the way “waste a wish” functions in the narrator’s evolving line of desire. Of course, there’s not enough time to look at examples of these patterns in any real detail, so instead, let’s look at possibly the most important connection to be drawn from the history of “the wrong arm” as seen in this example of the root pattern: “The wrong arm would never heal right.” Not only is it “wrong” to touch “the arm,” but the narrator also understands that “the wrong arm” would never heal “right.” This portion of the pattern is constructed on sameness and difference, or, as opposites, like in the instance of “good” and the implied “not good” in Walser’s story.

The next example of the split-off pattern “wrong” reveals a change in the narrator’s line of desire when the narrator says, “We were making it wrong by saying it was wrong. We should be holding it and rubbing it and taking her by it to lead her somewhere. To lead her by it to the boats” (121). This is the climax of the story, a turning point in the narrator’s understanding of his mother’s arm as he begins to form a new association in his mind. At the same time, this example recalls an earlier utterance of “the wrong arm” root pattern: “All we knew about the wrong arm was that it was wrong to touch it, to pinch it, to rub it…The wrong arm was not for us to take her by and lead her.” The change in the narrator results from his desire to deny the entire history of “the wrong arm,” to move beyond the prior association that touching “the wrong arm” is “wrong,” and so the story ends on the action of his following through: “And then I did the wrong thing.” All at once, the narrator’s actions extend the split-off pattern of “wrong,” complicate story action, and complete the circular momentum of the plot.

Throughout this essay I have looked at small examples of word patterns for the ways they function in narrative through a relational network of connections. On the relational nature of written language, Barthes says, “connections lead the word on, and at once carry it towards a meaning which is an ever-deferred project” (47). In these stories by Stein, Walser, and Lipsyte, the connections between words do not point immediately to one meaning, but rather, defer meaning through the act of repetition. This effect is something that contemporary British literary theorist Gabriel Josipovici, in his book Whatever Happened to Modernism?, calls the “playing off” of “forward movement against stillness and repetition,” an effect that has long been prevalent in poetry (Modernism, 87).

On the making of Three Lives, the book in which “Melanctha” was first published, Stein says, “In the ﬁrst book there was a groping for a continuous present and for using everything by beginning again and again” (3). Stein’s “using everything,” her reliance on repetitions, and the varying of those repetitions allowed her to construct Melanctha out of a succession of contexts instead of a scene-by-scene based pattern of conflict. The resulting narrative seems temporally odd with a constantly churning, elliptical momentum. As readers, we move through the narrative without seeming to move at all.

In Walser’s “Nothing at All,” a story of only 700 words, 331 words span the arc of the woman’s journey into town for something good to eat, while 182 subsequent words amount to her re-telling of that journey to her husband after she returns home, a movement that is, essentially, a repeating of, or, using Stein’s words, a “beginning again.” Walser dilates the situation and achieves a complete deceleration of forward movement, or, as Josipovici might say, the staving off of forward movement in favor of “stillness” and “repetition.”

Roland Barthes says that narrative “is an act which necessarily implies a duration,” and by “duration” he means an “oriented and meaningful time” (38). In an essay by Ben Marcus in the June 2003 edition of The Believer, Marcus says, “One basic meaning of narrative [is] to create time where there was none” (2). He also says, “Fiction is the production of false time for readers to experience. Most fiction seeks to become time.” The stories by Stein, Walser, and Lipsyte are all concerned with influencing the way readers experience narrative time through using repetition and word patterning as orienting devices to compress time (in the way Lipsyte compresses a history of hurt into “the wrong arm”), or to subvert our narrative-based notion of passing time (in the way Stein carries out her concept of a “continuous present,” or in the way Walser decelerates the forward momentum of his narrative).

As writers, there’s no way to escape time, but there are alternative ways for building narratives outside of using an events-with-consequences based pattern of conflict. In word-pattern based stories, the duration of the narrative persists as long as the dominating or root pattern remains open, and in this relational temporality, the tension between a set of words behaves similarly to the way consequences separate events. Causality and consequence will always be concerns for fiction writers, but the contingencies that result from the textual connections between repeating words and phrases can also provide narrative movement or momentum, and new opportunities for finding ways in, around, and out of story.

—Jason Lucarelli

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Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. New York: Hill and Wang. 1968.

Glover, Douglas. Attack of the Copula Spiders. Biblioasis. 2012.

Josipovici, Gabriel. Whatever Happened to Modernism?. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2011.

Lipsyte, Sam. “The Wrong Arm.” Venus Drive. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2000.

Marcus, Ben. “On the Lyric Essay.” The Believer. July 2003.

Stein, Gertrude. “Portraits and Repetition,” Lectures in America. New York: Random House. 1935. “Melanctha.” Three Lives. 1909.

Walser, Robert. “Nothing at All.” Selected Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2012.

Jason Lucarelli lives in Scranton, PA. He is a recent graduate of the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. This is his second appearance on the pages of Numéro Cinq.

Numéro Cinq at the Movies: Amorous Delays, Cyborg Women, Writing, and Traveling Trains of Longing — R. W. Gray

Feb 162012

Wong Kar Wai’s 2046 is the story of Chow, a writer and Casanova in 1960s Hong Kong who writes a science fiction serial titled “2046” that he publishes in a newspaper. Several of the women Chow has known, loved, resisted, and spurned appear as androids in the vast, glittering, futuristic yet nostalgic science fiction serial he writes. Chow connects these two narratives and so writing and desire, space and time, imbricate and refer back to him.

When the protagonist of Chow’s serial, Tak, proclaims his love to one of these androids and asks her to leave with him, she does not respond until many hours later when she is alone. Critics like Mitsuda and Martin read this delay as the absence of emotion, as a cold, embittered detachment. Against this, the delay the androids experience does not negate the emotional response. They are not impervious to emotion, just slow to express. This delay is a precondition for the preservation of desire, and, ultimately, this delay refers back to Chow’s originary unrequited desire and the secret he will never know.

2046 opens with Tak, the protagonist of Chow’s serial, a man on a train traveling through a futuristic cityscape. He wonders how long it will take him to leave 2046, a place, he explains, where people go to “recapture lost memories . . . [ where] nothing ever changes . . . Nobody knows if that’s true . . . because nobody’s ever come back . . . except me.” Tak, then, is a man who is trying to escape memory and, it seems, is choosing or desires forgetfulness. He confesses that he has chosen this path because 2046 didn’t give him what he wanted:

“I once fell in love with someone. After a while, she wasn’t there. I went to 2046. I thought she might be waiting for me there. But I couldn’t find her. I can’t stop wondering if she loved me or not. But I never found out. Maybe her answer was like a secret . . . that no one else would ever know.”

Tak the traveler is seeking to leave 2046 and choose forgetfulness, but he cannot give up on the lost beloved’s answer, one he describes as a secret “no one else would ever know.” It is unknowable, but he fantasizes that it might mean she answered him back.

“unshareable secrets”

When Tak, in order to keep warm on the train, embraces one of the android attendants and finds he desires her, he seeks escape, forgetfulness and answers. All this distills down to one luminous desire: to tell a secret. He explains this to the android: “Before . . . when people had secrets they didn’t want to share, they’d climb a mountain, find a tree and carve a hole in it, and whisper the secret into the hole, then cover it over with mud. That way, nobody else would ever discover it.” His android responds by making a circle with thumb and forefinger, holding it out to him.

She offers, “I’ll be your tree. Tell me, and nobody else will ever know.” But as Tak tries to tell the secret to her outstretched hand, the android keeps moving the tree, the witness, teasing. Until the site of listening becomes her mouth. A kiss.

“secrets as questions”

For Tak, the secret he seeks to tell and the android he seeks to tell it to are related: “I once fell in love with someone. I couldn’t stop wondering whether she loved me or not. I found an android that looked just like her. I thought the android might give me the answer.” For Tak, the secret is a two part question: first, does the android know the secret of this other woman’s desire, this woman she resembles; second, does the android desire him back. The android promises the return of the secret, the possibility that the unknowable will become known, the unrequited might become requited.

But when he asks the android to leave with him, he discovers that the android does not respond. The conductor of the train explains that, “When [androids have] served on so many long journeys, fatigue begins to set in. For example, they might want to laugh, but the smile would be slow to come. They might want to cry, but the tear wouldn’t well up until the next day. This one is failing fast. I think you’d better give up.” The declaration given in the moment of the kiss, the secret given to the tree, receives no immediate response, but still holds the promise of a delay.

“literary intentions”

To understand the meaning behind this delay, we need to look at how Tak is a protagonist in a work of fiction called “2046” created by the true protagonist of the film, Mr. Chow. Chow writes this fiction at first for Miss Wang, the daughter of his landlord who he finds next door in the room numbered “2046.”

When he meets her she is heartbroken, longing for her Japanese lover. Chow says he writes the fiction to explain for her the perspective of the Japanese man she loves:

She was always asking if there was anything at all that never changed. I could see what was on her mind. I promised to write a story for her based on my observation. Something to show her what her boyfriend was thinking. . . . So I began imagining myself as a Japanese man . . . on a train for 2046 . . . falling for an android with delayed reaction.

Tak, then, is both a version of Miss Wang’s Japanese lover (which Wong indexes by having the two roles played by the same actor), but he’s also a literary avatar for Chow, enabling him to get closer to her, to pose as her beloved.

“the delay of letters”

The delay that occurs between the android and Tak mirrors two obstacles between Miss Wang and her Japanese lover in 1960s Hong Kong. It is, perhaps most obviously, the delayed communication between the two lovers who have to communicate via letters because Miss Wang’s father has forbidden their love. The act of letter writing involves a delay we are barely familiar with in an era in which we can text message the beloved and he or she receives our words in mere seconds. The Japanese lover expresses sentiment on the page one day and Miss Wang receives and experiences an emotional response weeks later. Letters can bridge the lovers and overcome distance but only by creating a delay where the beloved waits to respond.

This delay then is a question of waiting and waiting is about desire. Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse meditates on this waiting and connects it to desire: “Am I in love? – Yes, since I’m waiting.”

“delay and waiting”

Barthes adds a small tale about the lover and waiting:

A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. “I shall be yours,” she told him, “when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window.” But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away (40).

Similarly, Anne Carson in Eros: the Bittersweet points out that “A space must be maintained or desire ends” (26). Miss Wang’s letters from her Japanese beloved, and by extension the android’s delay in responding to Tak’s declaration of love, on one level signify separation, distance in time and space, but on another create and perpetuate desire. Waiting is the point.

In addition to the space between Miss Wang and her Japanese lover and the time it takes for their words to reach one another, other obstacles of time and space interrupt, contribute to the train of desire. Because even their correspondence has been forbidden by her father, Miss Wang asks Chow to intercede, to help by sending her letters and by letting the Japanese lover write to her via Chow’s address so her father won’t know. Miss Wang and her lover’s words and letters must traverse Chow as agent, as constituent, as conduit. The amorous epistle is further delayed.

“delay and translation”

This delay is exacerbated by the space between languages and the difficulties of translation. When the Japanese lover asked Miss Wang to go with him, her response was delayed much the same way the android’s response to Tak is delayed. When Chow first meets Miss Wang she is in the room next door, the room suitably numbered ‘2046,’ pacing and rehearsing the response she never gave:

“Let’s go . . . I’ll go with you . . .I understand” she repeats over and over in Japanese. The specter of language difference emphasizes the possibility of miscommunication and mistranslation between lover and beloved.

“the lover’s discourse”

So even if the letters could arrive directly, immediately, without delay, there would be the problem of language for the lover. As Barthes asserts in the opening to A Lover’s Discourse, “the lover’s discourse is of an extreme solitude . . . it is completely forsaken by the surrounding languages: ignored, disparaged, or derided by them, severed not only from authority but also from the mechanisms of authority” (1). Miss Wang’s delay, her inability to respond to the Japanese lover might too have been an effect of this obstacle for the lover seeking to declare love. All declarations of love in 2046 then are part of a system of delays and inescapable obstacles. The lover has to wait, for this is what makes him or her a lover.

For Chow, though, this delay that he imagines and writes into the serial fiction called “2046” is partly a representation of his own growing interest in Miss Wang and her apparent indifference. When in the serial fiction Tak rhetorically asks the conductor on the train, “Who’d ever fall for an android?” the conductor replies, “Who can say? Events can creep up on you without you ever noticing. It can happen to anyone.” This is precisely what Chow himself confesses in the voice over that frames Tak on the futuristic train when he realizes he is falling for Miss Wang: “Feelings can creep up on you unawares. I knew that, but did she?”

“promise of reciprocity”

Chow writes a complementary secret into the narrative where the Miss Wang android not only weeps in her cabin on the train, but also goes to a space on the train reserved for secrets.

This circular shaped object with a space in the centre recalls the tree Tak told the android about. So the android not only has a delayed emotional response, she also has her own unknowable secret. This stands as the promise of reciprocity, but, as unknowable, remains forever uncertain.

These two secrets – Tak’s told to the android’s hand, and the android’s told to the futuristic tree on the train – both intertextually reference one originary secret in Wong Kar Wai’s previous film In the Mood for Love.

“the originary secret”

In that film, another character named Chow, also played by Tony Leung, also recalls the mythology of unshareable secrets and at the end of that film he whispers his secret to a hole in some ruins and covers it up.

This secret recalls the first narration of 2046, when Chow’s voice explains why Tak went to 2046: “I can’t stop wondering if she loved me or not. But I never found out. Maybe her answer was like a secret . . . that no one else would ever know.” For Chow, then, traveling to and away from 2046 is not just about his growing desire for Miss Wang. It is also about this other unrequited desire, for Mrs Chan, the unobtainable married woman he loved in In the Mood for Love. In an odd and perfect turn, Mrs Chan from also appears in 2046 as an android.

His secret declaration, whispered into the ruins, desires reciprocation, an answer, the possibility that Mrs Chan’s desire was also declared in a secret. Thus, she might still respond, the unrequited might still be requited.

“love letters”

What the delayed response draws attention to, then, is not the android’s delay, something we might analyze in her circuitry, but instead the nature of these secrets. Tak’s declaration, the secret he presses to her as a kiss, and the android’s own secrets whispered into the futuristic tree on the train are in essence love letters.

Barthes points out that “Like desire, the love letter waits for an answer; it implicitly enjoins the other to reply, for without a reply the other’s image changes, becomes other” (158). Here, what is essential, is that the reply not other the beloved for that would in effect end the amorous discourse.

Chow writes “2046” to preserve the possibility of the answer and the beloved’s return. What is at stake here, though, is not reciprocation or the possibility of a requited love so much as it is survival. As Barthes argues about the lover, “language is born of absence: the child has made himself a doll out of a spool, throws it away and picks it up again, miming the mother’s departure and return: a paradigm is created” (16).

“there / gone”

Barthes borrows this metaphor of the child and the spool from Sigmund Freud’s analysis of his grandchild’s “fort / da game” (fort / da translated means “gone” and “there”) where he overheard the child calling out “Fort” and “da” – and interpreted this as negotiating the mother’s absence.

To master “there” and “gone,” the beloved’s absent presence, is core to Chow’s writing act with “2046”. This game, this evocation of the beloved as present though absent, Barthes argues, “postpones the other’s death . . .To manipulate absence is to extend this interval, to delay as long as possible the moment when the other might topple sharply from absence into death” (16).

Chow writes “2046” to keep desire alive, to postpone the perhaps inevitable end of desire and loss of both Mrs Chan and Miss Wang.

“Happy Endings”

This game of absent presence, this preservation of desire becomes most apparent when Miss Wang goes to Japan to be with her Japanese lover. She sends a message back to Chow through her father, asking for him to write a happy ending to “2046.” In the scene that follows, Chow remains frozen, his pen hovering above the page.

The titles tell us he sits there for one, ten, a hundred hours. Chow cannot write a happy ending, not even for Miss Wang. Further, how can he write an ending to a serialized fiction – the very form is about waiting, for the next installment and for the eternally delayed catharsis of an ending. This is what blocks his writing, leaves him paralyzed, the pen hovering over the page. For in essence to write that happy ending would be to foreclose on all his unrequited desires, would sever the myriad connections to his original loss, his original unrequited desire in In the Mood for Love.

In Wong Kar Wai’s 2046, the android Miss Wang’s delay does not indicate an absence of emotion. She must delay and hold the promise of return. To read her lack of a response without the delayed emotion is to miss the point, to not see how the android is in essence programmed to sustain the unrequited love and protect the lover from the possible loss of the beloved. If Miss Wang will ever reciprocate, if Mrs Chan will ever return and love him back, if desire is to continue on its unrequited path always away from oblivion and ending, the eternal delay must go on.

— R. W. Gray

Numéro Cinq at the Movies: Jane Campion’s “Passionless Moments,” introduced by R. W. Gray

Sep 292011

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8dF2fmb5rY
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From last week’s collision in an intersection to this week’s collection of small caught moments in Jane Campion’s series of shorts, Passionless Moments (1983). The series is made up of ten short films co-written by Campion’s then boyfriend Gerard Lee and is narrated by a BBC-type narrator giving the films a scientific or sociological flair (further emphasizing in a perhaps misleading or ironic fashion the importance of these moments). There is, in these shorts, a fetishization of minutiae. Each is smaller and less dramatic than the collision in And the Red Man Went Green. And these are “real” people, flawed and vulnerable; they do not anticipate the camera’s gaze. We catch them at their most vulnerable and unawares.

Taken individually, I feel these are moments that read you back: what small details of our lives have escaped film’s classical three-act structure and drive for catharsis? As Geraldine Bloustien points out in her essay “Jane Campion:Memory, Motif, and Music,” “Classical Hollywood cinema concerns itself with the heightened moments of passion of individuals with whom we identify in some way because of their bravery, humour, innocence, heroic qualities and so on. In traditional feature films and documentaries we are usually introduced to the characters’ backgrounds, motives and problems. However, in Passionless Moments the characters serve only to illustrate some quirky aspect of human nature and relationships.”

These moments cumulatively tempt me to universalize: that it might be the minutiae and /or our “quirky” aspects that connect us to one another, a humanity found in the small, quiet, sometimes embarrassing moments. Though in the actions of Campion’s characters it is difficult not to see something vaguely heroic. I am embarrassed for the boy named Lyndsay Aldridge, his explosive string beans, and his manic running, but I admire his commitment too. I recognize myself in him and don’t want to at the same time. Campion’s oevre is made up of such characters, from her exploration of the author Janet Frame in An Angel at My Table, to the complicated relationship at the core of Holy Smoke.

I have to confess that the title of the series confuses me. Are these moments truly passionless? Or is the title ironic? Passionless as in lacking suffering? Or passionless as in suggesting disengagement? In a sense it reminds me of Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, an at time dispassionate analysis of desire and passion. These films contain a similar tension / contradiction and perhaps the title participates in that. And I think there’s a similar undecidability to the shorts: what significance do they amount to? To whom do these moments matter?

I heard the writer filmmaker Miranda July introduce a screening of these shorts at the IFC in New York this summer. She said that when she first saw Campion’s shorts she saw a type of filmmaking she could do (my summary). I took this to mean that July felt the films provoked and read her back too. That to watch these “passionless” moments is an invitation to reflect on one’s own moments. I see further evidence in the several “Passionless Moments” shorts on youtube that pay homage. Explore at your own risk. And maybe dare to ponder your own.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXfQOZOk8dU

—RWGray

In Search of the Author, Barthes Be Damned: A Review of The Selected Stories of Mercé Rodoreda — Richard Farrell

Jul 282011

In Search of the Author, Barthes Be Damned: A Review of The Selected Stories of Mercé Rodoreda,

by Richard Farrell

The Selected Stories of Mercé Rodoreda
Mercé Rodoreda
Translated from the Catalan by Martha Tennent
Open Letter
ISBN: 978-1-934824-31-3

I have a confession to make: Until I began reading The Selected Stories of Mercé Rodoreda, I’d never heard of her. I knew nothing of her literary reputation, was unaware of her most celebrated novel (The Time of the Doves), and had read little (if any) Catalan literature before. This left me feeling both ignorant and eager. It reminded me again of the narrow and somewhat xenophobic breadth of my reading. How much time had I wasted watching television instead of studying world literature? But I was excited, too. It felt like standing on the edge of a literary terra incognita, encountering an unknown writer from a far-flung corner of Spain without any notions of style, taste or theme. This is something of a rare treat in an over-marketed, hyper-publicized world where books and writers are pre-determined for success and sales. Some of the best writing simply can’t be found on the shelves at Barnes and Noble. And here I was, poised to encounter a writer without context, without anything to influence me beyond words printed on the page.

I wondered how many of the thirty stories in this collection I could read this way. Could I trust only what was written? Could I render a fair judgment solely based on my reading? How long would it take before I went scrambling to figure out who Mercé Rodoreda was?

I’ll spare you the suspense. It took exactly four. Four stories before I went searching for more. Four stories before I leaned back on biography, criticism, and that missing context of someone else’s conclusions. Four stories before I reconstructed the narrative of the author. If you listen closely, you can hear Roland Barthes rolling over in his grave.

My need for context—historical, cultural, biographical—says much more about me as a reader than it does about Rodoreda’s work. It highlights the wobbly and tenuous integrity of my own mind. And this worries me. To have become so addicted to someone else’s opinion, to rely blindly on the vetting process of culture, to turn the meaning structure over to the ‘experts’, these are most troubling signs. But I’m a product of a post-literate, ADHD world, a mainlining junkie of shortcuts, useless data and recycled opinions. Someone else judges which writers are worthy of my time, which books I should read, which thoughts I should think.

Barthes, in his famous essay “Death of the Author,” objected to this type of thinking, calling it “the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author.”(1) Guilty as charged. I could beat myself up all day, but here’s the thing: In this case, the context really did help.

When I went back and read those first four stories a second time, then continued reading the rest, armed with some background about Rodoreda and about why her work mattered, I appreciated them more. It forced me to read her differently, with a keener sensitivity to what was happening in these stories. Context helped.

Born in Barcelona in 1908, Rodoreda’s literary light flared early. She established a promising writing career in the male dominated Spanish literary scene of the 1930’s. Before the war, she published novels and stories and was a member of a prominent literary circle in Barcelona (The Sabadell Group). But history quickly extinguished that flickering light of her early fame. As the brutal Spanish Civil War swept across the country in 1936, Rodoreda worked briefly for the Catalan government before the Fascists’ oppression of non-Castilian culture forced her to flee. She moved to Paris, but it wasn’t long before another war encroached. As the Nazis marched toward the city in the late spring of 1942, Rodoreda found herself again on the run. In what must have seemed a cruel joke of history, she evacuated, this time south toward the city of Orleans under booming German artillery shells. (One of the stories in this collection, “Orleans, Three Kilometers” is a fictional account of this evacuation.) Eventually, she ended up in Geneva where she settled safely within the shelter of Swiss neutrality, but utterly cut off from her language and culture. She remained in Switzerland until the mid 1960’s, when she returned to Spain and stayed until her death in 1983.

Picasso’s “Guernica”

>Geraldine Cleary Nichols, in “Exile, Gender, and Mercé Rodoreda,”(2) describes Rodoreda as a ‘double outsider,’ cast out because she was both a female writer in a dominantly male world and a Catalan writer exiled to places where her native language was exotic. Nichols compares Rodoreda with Rosa Chacel, another exiled Spanish writer but one who wrote in traditional (Castilian) Spanish. Chacel also left Spain during the Civil War but went to South America where she was able to keep writing and publishing. Rodoreda’s exile stopped her writing altogether for almost twenty years. Nichols described it this way: “As a Catalan outside of Spain, Rodoreda was cut off from her language and her audience in way that Chacel was not.” Even in exile, a Spanish language writer (no less an English language writer: Joyce, Hemmingway, Eliot, et. al.) retained a broad audience; almost half the world speaks the language. But to write in Catalan, in that beautiful amalgam of French and Spanish, was to be a rare thing. Separated entirely from her community, she shut down.

Rodoreda explained her exile this way: “Writing Catalan in a foreign country is the same as hoping for flowers to bloom at the North Pole.”(3)

The stories in this collection were all published long after the war and after the two decade long silence which marked the time she spent away from her native soil. They are quiet and subtle, socio-psychological tales short on verbal pyrotechnics and long on character development. They sketch images of brooding lives, the outsider, the downtrodden, often living far from home. They hark back to the spirit of the great Russian writers of a century before her, Gogol and Dostoevsky. The word modest comes to mind. Not modest in scope or ambition, but modest in the rendering. Modest in the old-fashion sense of the word: humble, thoughtful, stories which seem to beg your pardon for taking the time to read them. These are stories best read on a Sunday afternoon train ride through the rolling Spanish hill country, a café con leche steaming next to you as white villages pass your window. They whisper about the horrors of the war but eschew bloodshed and scenes of battle. They offer poverty and crushing despair by presenting characters filled with hopes and dreams. They break your heart by making your root for the underdog who doesn’t stand a chance in hell.

One of the first stories in the collection, “Threaded Needle,” tells of a seamstress, Maria Lluïsa, who stitches a bridal gown for a fat bride-to-be that she’ll never meet. It will take her thirty-six hours to complete the gown, but Maria Lluïsa will charge for forty-two. She mocks the bride-to-be’s taste and dress size. “I wonder what she’s like? Blond? Brunette? She only knew the woman’s size: forty-eight. She must look like a sack of potatoes.” There’s humor here, a cutting tongue and a street-savvy sensibility, traits which helped ensure survival during the ruthless Civil War. (The war is only mentioned once in this story, understatement being a frequently deployed technique.). But there’s also sadness and dreams of a better life. “She loved her job for many reasons; it allowed her a glimpse of a world of luxury, and because her hands worked mechanically, she could dream.” Maria Lluïsa imagines starting her own company, one where she will actually meet the brides, where she will be the boss and treat her employees fairly.

In addition to her work, Maria Lluïsa tends to her sick old cousin, a priest who has promised her his fortune after he dies. (The priest never actually appears in scene, but only in Maria Lluïsa’s thoughts and memories.) They were childhood friends, and she once dreamed of marrying him, but now she fantasizes about poisoning him. “He wouldn’t suffer at all. It would really be for his own good.” Rodoreda juxtaposes the images of murder and love and ties them together in the object of the wedding dress. At the climactic moment in the story, Maria Lluïsa holds the dress up in front of her:

She glanced down at the bridal nightgown. I wonder how it would look on me. She stood in front of the mirror on the wardrobe and tried it on. She was thin, and the nightgown was much too large for her. She tied it at the waist, held out the skirt with both hands, and spun around.

>If I had married my cousin, I would have made myself a white, white nightgown. Just like this one.

Notice the subtle tones, the muted images, the controlled pacing. Most of the emotion in this small scene comes from the repetition of the word ‘white.’ For Rodoreda, this is equivalent to a scream. A murderous fantasy, crushing poverty, and the humiliation of dreaming of a better life coalesce into image of the wedding dress she sews for the fat bride, beautiful and profane, elegant and sad.

Throughout this book, we are given little hint of a better life awaiting the characters. Instead, only the warming light of Rodoreda’s having noticed them shines. She sanctifies their dreary destinies by writing down their stories.

The most remarkable thing about Rodoreda’s biography, apart from the altogether mundane madness that was universal across Europe during the war years, is that for two decades, her writing went dark. A twenty year hiatus from writing splits her career right in its prime. What should have been, by all rights, her most productive years is shrouded in a mysterious silence.

It’s not surprising, then, that the characters which populate her stories are like echoes of that time, voices crying out across that mute chasm of war, exile and isolation. Meager lives shackled to powerful forces and grander destinies. They wander landscapes like lost souls, with their ineffable longings, powerless against the mighty forces of politics and power which repressed.

One of the longest stories (and my personal favorite) in the collection is “Carnival.” It tells of a chance encounter and unrequited love in the streets of Barcelona the night after a huge festival. Titania is heading home after and encounters Pere, a boy who immediately and hopelessly falls in love with her. He becomes her knight-errant, determined to see her safely home through rain, muggers and the drunks of Barcelona. But in pure Quixotic fashion, everything he does turns out wrong.

“The wind’s bringing us the scent of gardenia, isn’t it?” Titania says to Pere. She spots her favorite flowers in a nearby yard. “If I could have just one,” she says. Pere, of course, climbs over a fence to retrieve gardenias for her. He snags flowers out of the garden but a dog barks and chases him. As he scrambles back over the fence, he rips his trousers. He presents the gift to his beloved but is forced to admit that the costume he has just torn is rented. “These aren’t gardenias” Titania says to him. “They have no scent at all.”

Pere tells her that he dreams of becoming a poet, of leaving the city and travelling the world. Titania tells him she has a married lover and that she is moving to Paris in the morning. Later, she tells him that these things aren’t true. For her this courtship is a game, but for Pere, it matters on a much more existential level, a glimpse of a better life he will never have. Rain falls and their costumes begin to disintegrate. Two men rob them in the street, shoving Pere to the ground and taking Titania away from him. His one chance for a memorable evening is being crushed by the universe. They begin to shed their masks and tell each other the truth: that he is no longer studying and that he supports his family. “‘I wanted to make this evening…I don’t know how to explain…a night like this! I wanted a memory, something I could cling to, to keep for the future. Because I will never take any trips, or write poetry.’”

With undertones of Joyce’s “Araby,” these young characters wander through the dizzying, nighttime city streets, trapped by love and shattered desires and the mystery of the life that awaits them. The story ends when Titania closes the door to her house, Pere left on the street to ponder the meaning of it all.

The boy stood for a moment before the house, hesitating, suddenly feeling restored to the night, the street, to his most naked reality, as if the sound of the door banging had cut him off from another world. He had nothing left, only that silken touch on his fingertips, perhaps a bit of golden dust, the kind butterflies leave. I’ve fallen madly in love, he thought. Slowly he began walking beneath the trees. A gust of wind stirred the leaves around him. He felt the cold nipping the back of his thighs and instinctively felt for the rip. He started to walk faster.

“What will they say when I return the costume?”

A stray dog spotted him from a distance, ran over, and started following him. An alarm clock rang on the opposite side of the street, disconsolate, as if trying to awaken a corpse.

*

Open Letter Books has produced an expansive collection of Rodoreda’s stories here. The first twenty are pulled from her earliest collection, Twenty-Two Stories, published from Geneva in 1958. (One wonders why only two stories were omitted.) The remaining ten come from two later collections and express a wider range of style. She leaves behind the strict realism of the early work and flirts with different techniques and structures. In “Paralysis,” an unreliable narrator recounts a trip to the doctor in a vertiginous stream of consciousness style. “It Seemed Like Silk” tells of a woman who visits a local cemetery. Since she can’t afford the train fare to visit the actual grave of her dead lover, she picks a gravestone at random and imagines it to be his. An angel descends and takes her inside his wings. In the Kafkaesque “Salamander,” an adulterous woman is burned at the stake, but as the flames begin to singe her body, she transforms into a salamander. The salamander/narrator spends the rest of the story wandering around in the village and spying on her accusers. The collection is ambitious and comprehensive. It provides the reader with an extensive sampling of Rodoreda’s short fiction with a vast array of styles and themes.

Barthes said that writing begins when “the author enters into his own death.” I’m not going to argue with many of the wonderful points that he makes in his criticism. His post-structuralist line of reasoning that says story should reign, not biography, and this makes sense. Yet reading a collection such as this, some half a century after the stories in it were penned, leaves a contemporary reader at a disadvantage. Maybe some writers do benefit from context. Even if this means that as a reader, I’ve lost the ability to wander in the wilderness without only my wits to guide me. These stories mattered more once I understood where they came from.

In 1983, Gabriel Garcia Marquez published an essay in El País titled: “Do You Know Who Mercé Rodoreda Was?”(4) Marquez wrote the essay a week after Rodoreda died in Girona, Spain. He was saddened to find that such an important writer’s death was barely mentioned in the Spanish press and was ignored entirely by the international community. He implied (maybe even implored) that if we understood who she was and why her work mattered, we’d return to appreciate her work anew. In spite of widespread critical acclaim, she was often forgotten in her homeland. “Apparently few people outside of Catalonia,” Marquez wrote, “know just who this invisible woman was who wrote some wonderful and enduring novels in a splendid Catalan rarely found in contemporary literature.” Her anonymity puzzled Marquez because he believed Mercé Rodoreda to be one of Spain’s most important writers.

That it took nearly forty years after the death of the Spanish dictator, Francisco Franco, for Rodoreda’s work to be recognized by a wider audience reminds us how minority cultures and voices are continuously shaped by the echoes of great violence and repression. It also reminds that Rodoreda’s reemergence is a tentative thing. It begs the question: how many other unknown, marginalized writers have been squelched? Without context, without the author resurrected, these marginalized voices may remain silenced and these stories lost for good.

—Richard Farrell

Notes:

1. Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” http://www.deathoftheauthor.com/

2. Nichols, Geraldine Cleary. “Exile, Gender, and Merce Rodoreda.” MLN, Vol 101, No. 2. March, 1986, (pp. 405-416).

3. ibid, p. 417

4. Marquez, Gabriel Garcia. “Do You Know Who Merce Rodoreda Was?” Trans. by David Draper Clark. World Literature Today, Vol. 81, No. 3, May-Jun 2007.

The Haiku and the Novel, is There a Difference?

Feb 172011

Here’s a fascinating review of an even more fascinating book. All of you are familiar with Barthe’s essay “The Death of the Author.” I like here the potential contrast between the haiku and the novel, which contrast never actually eventuates apparently.

Part II returns both author and work centre-stage. Barthes investigates the emergence of writing as an intransitive activity, determined not by its object but by a “maniacal” urge in the author’s body. It focuses on the “operations” by which he (the writers considered are all male: Flaubert, Kafka, Mallarmé, Chateaubriand, Proust, etc) passes from the desire to write to creating the work. We learn about the minutiae of authors’ habits: where they write, when, at what rhythm or speed (“at a gallop”, in Proust’s case). For the writers Barthes discusses, the space of writing offers a retreat from worldly preoccupations: Flaubert asks for no more than a quiet room with “a good fire in winter and a pair of candles to light me at night”, whereas Proust favours the bed: “you can work, eat, and sleep in it”. Similarly, the time at which they choose to write often suggests a withdrawal from the world. While Barthes cites Paul Valéry as an example of an early morning writer, he devotes most space to those who wrote at night: Flaubert (sometimes), Rimbaud (once), Kafka (joyous at having written “The Judgment” in one night-time sitting) and, of course, Proust (always). The latter’s “complete inversion of day and night” leads on to a broader discussion of inversion in general as the source of a “perverse pleasure”: perhaps the reason why night work enjoys such privilege in Barthes’s imagination.

via The Preparation of the Novel by Roland Barthes reviewed by Mairéad Hanrahan – TLS.

The Subjectless Subject and the Death of the Author

Feb 032010

Funny how ideas seem to develop threads of their own. The theoretical subject is important to writers because it has an impact on ideas of self, soul, character, and society. The subject here is what we used to call the self, Descartes’ thinking self, that which is conscious (of something). More and more it is thought of as a relation and not an thing itself. That’s because it is difficult to imagine being conscious without being conscious of something. Hence consciousness (the subject) somehow resides in the object (the thing you are conscious of). I come into focus the moment you (the Other) are on the scene. This is much like what happens in a story or an essay in which characters come to life as soon as they are in action (relation, conflict) with other characters or society (or some force or rule which begins to define the subject in opposition).

“I don’t think there is actually a sovereign founding subject, a universal form of subject that one might find everywhere. I am very skeptical and very hostile towards this conception of the subject. I think on the contrary, that the subject is constituted through practices of subjection, or, in a more autonomous way, through practices of liberation, of freedom, as in Antiquity, starting of course, from a number of rules, styles and conventions that can be found in the cultural setting.”

Michel Foucault. (1996) [1984]. An Aesthetics of Existence. In Foucault Live. collected Interviews, 1961-1984. Sylvère Lotringer (Ed.). New York: Semiotext(e), p. 452. Translation modified.

In this regard, here’s a link to the famous Roland Barthes’ essay about the Death of the Author.

I got set onto this little meditation looking at Andrew Gallix’s blog. See the blogroll for the site.

I also realize we seem suddenly to be descending into Theory in a big way. Not to worry–it is a temporary fever that will pass.

Shklovsky and Lish

Jan 312010

Now think about how Shklovsky and Lish fit together. Lish is a child of the stillborn American avant garde (postmodern) of the 60s and 70s. I mean people like Gass, Coover, Barthelme and Hawkes. Hawkes was famous for having said that plot, character, setting and theme are the enemies of the novel. Shklovsky’s Russian Formalism evolves out of Futurism and Don Quixote and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. (Cervantes and Sterne invented most of the techniques of literary experiment; we just keep rediscovering them–note the blank pages in Lish’s novel Arcade and then go and look at the famous blank chapter in Tristram Shandy.) He says art is about technique (not about its subject matter). But the techniques he discusses are delay, stepped construction, deceleration, repetition, parallelism, differential perceptions and baring the device. His novels, even his essays for that matter, are strange, discursive, tangential, experimental narratives that include bits of memoir and literary criticism. Russian Formalism led through structuralist linguistics (Jacobson) and post-structuralism (Saussure and Barthes) to European literary theory–Barthes, Derrida and after. Lately Lish has been quoting European theorists like Kristeva, Deleuze and Lyotard in his epigraphs. Though they talk and write quite differently, both Lish and Shklovsky believe that subject matter is secondary to technique. They both use the formal disruption of mainstream expectation to jar the reader into paying attention to the reading of the text.