Friday Column: Narratives

Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire was groundbreaking because it inserted a story where few would have looked to find one: scholarly footnotes. The novel consists of a foreword, a poem, notes to the poem, and an index--it is supposedly an academic work authored by a Charles Kinbote. Where is the story? Well, readers familiar with the book know that the story is mainly found in Kinbote's notes. Hinted at in the foreword and poem, the story emerges as Kinbote's annotations grow more and more personal, more and more narrative.

Stories are generally thought of as the meat of a book, the stuff that everything else hangs on to, but in Pale Fire Nabokov reversed that equation. The story was the errata that hung on to what was supposedly the meat. By reversing things, Nabokov drew attention not to the plot, but to the way it was conveyed to the reader. He cast the reader's eye toward the nuts and bolts and screws and gears that most authors are at pains to hide.

In doing so, Nabokov took the questions that normally lie beneath the surface of a narrative and made them too obvious to miss. All literature is concerned with more than just the narrative: wrapped up in each novel are ideas about life, love, the world, whatever, and a novelist probes at them elliptically while telling the story. With some books, you have to look very closely before you "get" what they're talking about, but with Pale Fire, that part was obvious. It was metafiction about how stories are told. That's not to say that Pale Fire didn't have extraordinarily well crafted characters, or a tight story that holds up to multiple readings--it had those things--but it was also quite clear that before all that it was a book that questioned what a narrative could be.

I happen to like books like Pale Fire, books that explore the different ways that a narrative can be told. Often I find that because of their unconventional format, they get at parts of our minds and our society that straighter stories are unable to pry at.

Over the past year I've read a number of quite good books like Pale Fire. They return to Nabokov's timeless question of what a narrative can be, but they also pose more situated questions about the contemporary world around us.

The first one is W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. The book doesn't tell very much of a story--an Englishman takes a long walk and thinks about several things. But, of course, if that was all there was too it I wouldn't be writing about it. The book relates the Englishan's thoughts as he walks, and in doing so The Rings of Saturn forms a sort of roadmap of the boundary between fact and fiction. The Englishman's thoughts range from stories about Joseph Conrad and the Congolese holocaust in colonial Africa to tales of silkworms in ancient China to present day England where the he encounters a man who is building an incredibly exact, tiny replica of the long destroyed Temple of Jerusalem. The question is, which parts of the narrative are "real" in the sense of belonging to our world, and which are Sebald's inventions? Sebald never gives us so much as a clue, and they all seem plausible.

Why does he do this? Early on in the narrative, Sebald references Rembrandt's "The Anatomy Lesson," a painting in which a number of learned men stand around a cadaver undergoing dissection. Sebald points out that Rembrandt made an obvious mistake on the anatomy of the corpse's left arm, such an obvious mistake that he must have done it on purpose. Perhaps Sebald is telling us that the artist forms her own reality, separate from the concepts of fiction and nonfiction.

Related to The Rings of Saturn is David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress. The book consists solely of the thoughts of the narrator typed out with a typewriter in one and two-sentence paragraphs. Like Sebald, Markson is interested in charting the paths of memory--the typewritten manuscript has numerous discrepancies and corrections, and from sentence to sentence Markson captures the rhythms of how someone's mind might leap from thought to thought. Also like Sebald, Markson is interested in what makes a story true. The book purports to be the thoughts of the last woman on Earth, but it could just as easily be the tappings of someone in an asylum. Since the novel never leaves the narrator's head, we have no sense of reality beyond her words. Is it enough for us to believe that she believes it's true?

Wittgenstein's Mistress explores how a narrator constructs a reality,  and so do a couple of very inventive, recently published fictions: 10:01 by Lance Olsen and Michael Martone by Michael Martone (that's not a mistake). Both are told in very small chunks--10:01 enters each of several characters' minds for 1-2 pages, whereas Michael Martone consists of about 20 1-3 page "authors notes," the kind of thing you might find in the contributor notes at the end of a literary journal. (In fact, that's exactly where the vignettes comprising Michael Martone were first published.)

Both books use their unusual format to highlight questions of reality. With its quick jumps and frenetic narration, 10:01 implies that as our world grows faster and faster, all we see of others are quick bites of representation. The book takes place in a movie theater, and Olsen implies that our own perceptions of reality are becoming more like  movies.

Although some of Michael Martone's multiple authors notes refer to the same person, others clearly don't. Others are unclear: is their similarity due to the fact that that the lives of two Michael Martones happened to pass for a moment? What can we, all armed with our resumes and letters of recommendation, really know about a person from a few pages of text?

James Wood may prefer his "realist" fictions, but I think that many of these more experimental works far better catch a hold of what life is really like these days. Their authors haven't simply considered what will be a good story--they've considered the form of the novel itself, and in doing so they've invented new tools for describing the world. Not only that, but they've each posed a direct question at the reader. "I've chosen to write my book this way," they say, "now it's up to you to figure out why I did it." Of course, that's not to say that the authors of these books know any better than the readers why they formatted them as they did. It may have been a serendipitous discovery, or it may have just felt right.

Regardless, these books stand like questions, ready to be answered, and I for one am eager to take up their challenges. So much so, that I'd be happy to have anyone's recommendations of more of this sort in the comments field.

Comments

[Steve Mitchelmore]

Just a quick question before my main point: where does it say in The Rings of Saturn that it is an Englishman walking? It seems fairly plain to me that it's Sebald himself. In other novels, he is identified as the narrator (e.g. the passport photo in Vertigo, I think).

Whatever, I think you're right about his work though perhaps you leave him too soon. James Wood got it right in referring to the "tragedy of fact" revealed in the digressions and the captionless photographs of Sebald's novels. The emerging subjectivity is also a tragedy, one that can perhaps be best opposed by patient consideration and observation, such as that in the narrative we're reading.

All this would make the opposition of fiction and non-fiction more problematic, yet would also not allow the glib destabilising of the two we see in more jaunty writers - hence perhaps the relief to which many turn to Sebald.

[Dorothy W.]

Thanks for a great post -- I've added a few books to my to-be-read list based on it. I put Flaubert's Parrot in the same category. Also, for something older, Tristram Shandy.

[dcnahm]

Vanishing Point by Markson is also very good, if you liked WM. And also and old one: The Confidence Man by Melville.

[renee]

Thank you so much for this post! Pale Fire is one of my favorite novels, so I will definitely check out your other suggestions. I was also going to offer Flaubert's Parrot, but Dorothy beat me to it.

[Sandra]

I would make a recommendation of Moo Pak by Gabriel Josipovici - a book originally recommended to me by one Steve Michelmore. A wonderful book and a good one with which to follow Rings of Saturn.

I tried to give a flavour of it here http://bookworld.typepad.com/book_world/2005/07/moo_pak_by_gabr_2.html
and here http://bookworld.typepad.com/book_world/2005/07/moo_pak_by_gabr_1.html

I read both books within a few months of each other last year and they still stand out as highlights of the year's reading.

If that doesn't appeal, try Iain Sinclair - another mixer of autobiography, fiction, fact and all points in between. Ditto James Hamilton-Paterson's "Loving Monsters".

[Scott]

Steve,

Come to think of it, you're right. I think the identityof the narrator remains ambiguous for most of the novel, but toward the end there's a photo of Sebald that seals it.

[dcnahm]

I forgot to add: Hell by Kathryn Davis--very excellent, very strange.

[fausto]

If you know a bit about Sebald's life, it's rather obvious that he is the narrator - and there are many direct or indirectallusions to Germany in the book.
Anyway, I read the book recently and at some point - maybe after 150 pages of so- it struck me as similar to Markson's Wittgenstein mistress in some respects and I'm quite bemused to discover that you had said as much 6 months ago. Great post.