The Neurotic Writers

 

What can fiction be? Implicit in this question is a condemnation of—or at the very least a marked disinterest in—the well-worn path of realist fiction; fiction which presents itself as reality; fiction which fails to problematize its own telling. Sebald typifies this impulse nicely when, in an interview with the Paris Review, he remarks that

 

I have an aversion to the standard novel: ‘She said, and walked across the room’ — there’s something trite about it. You can feel the wheels turning.

 

Perhaps the most common form of resistance to this standard form of writing is what we might call neurotic writing; writing by the likes of Krasznahorkai, Bernhard, Drndič and the aforementioned Sebald: writing which loops in on itself; writing which becomes obsessive, which are “cripplingly aware of the trap of consciousness,” as one blog puts it.

 

The appeal of this particular strand of anti-realism always seems to elude me; the focus, clearly, is on creating an ambiance, on showing a particular form of obsession in all of its neurotic detail. My concern is that in doing so, the sense of a story is lost; these books are rarely fun to read, even if they are admirable, even if they approach brilliance at some point or another. (Krasznahorkai may be an outlier here; at the very least his book The World Goes On reminds me of the other authors I’ve mentioned.)

 

Take, for example, Bernhard’s Correction, which consists of a 200-odd page rant, and whose actual story can be summarized as follows: an unnamed narrator becomes obsessed with his friend Roithamer’s manuscript; the manuscript reflects Roithamer’s devotion to the construction of “the Cone,” a mathematically exact conic structure built in the exact center of an Austrian forest. Roithamer’s obsession with this mathematical perfection ultimately culminates in his suicide; we might recall Wittgenstein’s remark that “we have got onto slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk.”

 

Does this not sound like a Borges story? And if so, should we not reflect on what Borges calls the “madness” of “setting out in 500 pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes”?

 

I can clearly imagine a Borgesian version of Correction. Probably it would elevate the Cone to the level of one of Lovecraft’s objects, or of Cortazar’s cycladic idol, or of the Tlönian cone which closes off Borges’ titular story; the “cone of bright metal, the size of a die … [which] a man [is] scarcely able to raise … from the ground.” Probably the Cone would become—if it is not already—something weird, miradulous, otherworldly. Perhaps the detail that the Cone is a building, that it is a gift for Roithamer’s sister, that he means for her to inhabit it, is abandoned. Perhaps the cone becomes, following Borges, the size of a die. Perhaps Roithamer constructs a near-infinite series of cones in pursuit of perfection. Perhaps he only constructs a dozen. In any case, what is left is the essential germ of the story: a scientist who devotes himself to the construction of a mathematically perfect object, an object with a strange totemic quality, an object which will ultimately destroy him.

 

It is Borges, then, who charts the way out of neurotic writing; in its place he substitutes an aesthetics of the telling. The story for Borges is always a thing told, and told by someone with some sense of an economy of style. A story is not a laborious recounting of all the details but a distillation of one or two key ideas; it is an exercise in delaying the ending—and the ending is a gut punch.

 

Calvino makes a similar appeal to folktales, in which “everything that is mentioned plays a necessary role in the plot.” (Here we might think also of Chekhov.) “The chief characteristic of the folktale,” Calvino continues, “is economy of expression; the most extraordinary adventures are recounted in terms of their bare essentials” (Six Memos, 43).

 

It is perhaps for these reasons that I am drawn to the short story form; if we are to mimic the economy and focus of an oral telling, our narrative unit must be pared down as well. We must do away with all the exquisite set-pieces, the drawn-out scenes, the laboriously detailed characters, which neurotic writing retains from realist writing, and merely transposes into the psychological dimension. Above all, if we are to get away from both realism and neuroticism, we must cut away at extraneous material until nothing but the germ of the work remains. (For a particular example of this, we might point to the transition from Bolaño’s The Third Reich to Last Evenings on Earth.)

 

If the short story is king, what becomes of the novel? Can a novel be written in accordance with the aesthetics of the telling? The answer is, of course, yes; to my mind, the greatest novelist of the telling must be Roberto Bolaño. For his two great novels—The Savage Detectives and 2666—are both composed of narrative fragments which are capable of standing more or less on their own; his is a method of assemblage; rather than treating of one story in exhaustive detail, he links up multiple smaller stories, allowing them to resonate. I think something like this suffices to explain why I take The Emigrants to be Sebald’s best book; rather than a neurotic recounting of every little thing one might think of on a trip through, say, Italy, or England, it is essentially focused on the stories of four emigrants; this focus on particular stories, with particular endings in mind, lends the novel a degree of momentum which Vertigo and The Rings of Saturn lack.

 

In closing, consider this fragment from one of my own (perpetually unfinished) novels:

 

The trouble with the form of the novel is as follows: why should something happen rather than nothing? The problem is best felt in contrast; for the form of the short story, for example, is simple, governed as it is by a natural teleology: everything that happens happens only to motivate the last sentence of the work, the messianic sentence which justifies everything which came before. Not so with the novel, which is an ugly, sprawling thing, a mess of contradictions, of incomprehensibly loud and intolerably quiet moments, timid ellipses and pauses and stutters meant to evoke something, meant to bring us somewhere which is really nowhere at all—for the novel does not conclude so much as it disintegrates. It is for this reason that so many great novels­—those of Musil, of Gadda, of Proust, of Bolaño—end inconclusively, or never end at all, or are left unfinished at the time of the author’s death.

These observations lead us to a new method for the novel: the method of decomposition. The novel reimagined as something to be broken down into constituent parts, into fragments; the novel as an arbitrary assemblage of materials; the novel as a resonance structure. The novel as a trash heap. The novel as wreckage.

 

Let this serve as a sort of manifesto.

 

 

 

 

The Hunter

 

In retracing these details,

I am unsure if they are real,

or if I have dreamt them

Gérard de Nerval, Sylvie

 

The premise of this story, which does not exist, is rather simple: a man rides along a dusty road on the back of a merchant’s cart. He bears a message for the emperor. The countryside is cold and barren. Here and there, peasant’s huts dot the bleak landscape. Soon the party reaches a gate. A line of peasant-folk stand before it. “What brings you to the gate,” one asks, a hint of derision in his voice. “A message for the emperor,” comes the response. Silence follows. Interminable hours pass. Finally the gates are opened; the party pass through. The countryside gives way to a lesser hamlet on the outskirts of the imperial center. The peasants stare in awe at these new sights and are filled with joy; they feel as if they have already arrived at the emperor’s feet. Then comes another gate, another interminable wait, on and on for an eternity. In all likelihood they all die long before arriving at the palace; the narrator remarks dryly that it would have sufficed to walk around the gates, for no wall stood to bolster them.

            So goes the story, whose discovery I owe to a stranger, and whose content I have improved ever so slightly with the addition of one or two minor touches.  

            The story came to me, as I’ve said, from a complete stranger, who, armed with nothing but the most jaundiced summary, came to me for help identifying it. It was not, he said, An Imperial Message, which charts the exact opposite course—from the emperor to the most distant distance. Nor was it Before the Law, which charts the desired course but without the conceit of a messenger. It was not, in fact, any story by Kafka; my stranger insisted that it had been written by Borges. Skimming through the table of contents of the latter’s fictions, I suggested The Parable of the Palace, featuring an emperor and a series of towers each of whose color, to the eye, was identical, “but the first of which was yellow and the last was scarlet, so delicate were the gradations and so long the series.” This, too, did not suffice.

I became desperate. I ran through all possible solutions. None satisfied this stranger, who remarked enigmatically that the voice was similar in certain places. Among those I suggested are the following tales, whose authors, it seems to me, are increasingly irrelevant:

 

-       The Great Wall of China – in which that famous and nigh-interminable wall is built piecemeal on the orders of a far-off and inaccessible emperor whose name and whose very existence are cast into doubt.

-       The Wall and the Books – in which the tale of the emperor to order the construction of the great wall is related, alongside his injunction to burn all books preceding his reign. The mysterious and incomprehensible grandiloquence required to order not one, but both acts is interpreted in various contradictory ways.

-       A Country Doctor – in which the titular doctor struggles to make his way to a patient on a snowy winter’s night. Suddenly he arrives; it is as if “the farmyard of my invalid opened up immediately in front of my courtyard gate.”

-       If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler – in which a series of novels begin but never end.

-       Homecoming – in which a man arrives at the door to his childhood home, and, with fearful trepidation, refuses to knock, listening for voices and hearing only “the faint striking of the clock passing over from childhood days.” He feels that the inhabitants are keeping a secret from him, and wonders whether, if they were to open the door suddenly, he too would not act as if he wanted to keep his own secrets.

-       The Knock at the Manor Gate – in which a pair of siblings, passing through a village, knock on a manor gate and are mysteriously hounded by the law for this obscure crime.

-       The Next Village – in which a man remarks “that I scarcely understand how a young man can decide to ride over to the next village without fearing that even the span of a normal happy life may fall far short of the time needed for such a journey.”

-       The Approach to Al-Mu’tasim – in which a man searches for the traces of another, holier man, only to discover, through a gradual approach which never quite dawns, that that man is himself.

-       The Secret Miracle – in which the last moment before a man’s death extends into an infinity, allowing him to complete his final poem, if only in his own mind.

-       On Exactitude in Science – in which an empire’s cartography becomes so detailed as to encompass the empire itself.

-       The Dialogues of Ascetic and King – in which various literary depictions of this type are related; “beneath the trivial surface of these tales beats a dark opposition of symbols; the magic in which the zero, the ascetic, may in some way equal or surpass the infinite king.”

-       The Hunter Gracchus – in which a long-dead hunter relates his fate: to wander aimlessly and eternally across the sea.

 

I am confident that none of these tales match the stranger’s story; and yet all of them seem to preempt it. I am confident that the story remains unwritten; and yet it has been all but written. It subsists in the space of the virtual; the space which is not actual but which is nonetheless real, and which exercises its ghostly powers, its unactualized potentials, on the firm and solid reality which stands before us.

Even this argument is prefigured by Borges, who writes of Kafka: “the fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.” So too does every writer write what he has not written.

 

(In moments of excessive despair, I sometimes pile up my books in patterns only I could understand. I like to imagine that my works, the ridiculous books which haunt my dreams and nightmares, are already written between the lines of resonance which I have thereby charted out.)