Here in the midst of Georges Perec's Life: A User's Guide (and not quite clear where that means I am), I'm struck by the endless succession of stories that well up from any reference the author makes: a painting, a room, an elevator or set of stairs, the skeleton of a pig, and there's a story. Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night A Traveler had something of the same somewhat alarming fecundity of narrative invention. These minds!
Perec's stories contribute to a larger narrative very carefully plotted and only gradually revealing itself as I move through the chapters to the 99th and final. At almost exactly the half-way point he lists first lines of stories that he's actually already told or may, indeed probably will, tell:
A young trapeze artist refusing to climb down from his perch...
The lovelorn coachman who thought he'd heard a rodent mewing...
A famous old soldier killed by a loose Venetian chandelier...
The Swedish diplomat trying madly to avenge his son and wife...
Woodworms' hollow honeycombs solidified by an Italian artist...
The pranking student putting beef stock in vegetarians' soup...
The druggist spending his fortune on the Holy Vase of Joseph...
The anthropologist, failing to locate the ever-evasive tribe...
174 in all, self-contained, many quirky, most memorable (at least with the first-line prompt.) Once inside a story--one can find oneself at any moment in that situation--the characters develop, complications arise, time passes, a stopping point appears like a sign at an intersection, and Perec switches back to whatever he was doing before (about which, again, I'm still largely in the dark.)
What intrigues me as I contemplate this dragon's hoard of tales is, first, the strange allure of stories that keeps us reading, and second, the irrelevance of the kind of ending--triumphant or tragic, nailed-down or unresolved--to a story's ability to hang significant as a star against the backdrop of our thoughts. Perhaps, as Milan Kundera said in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: 'Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress.' Perhaps what we look for in stories are intimations of that beauty.
There are those who swig stories literary or cinematic as I drink coffee--pretty continuously. I enjoy but am not 'addicted' to narrative. Arguments, interviews, news reports, presentations of issues are equally interesting, but reading Perec (and listening to yet another story dramatized in the next room), I wonder makes narrative intrinsically worthwhile, apart from whatever excitement it stimulates or 'lessons' it teaches. There's a reason for this inquiry: I'd like to write stories (and they don't just pop into my mind; I have to deliberately seek or construct them) and want a better reason for doing so. (This sounds so pretentious, I cringe just writing it.) Apart from writing, I want a better takeaway from the stories I read.
Why authors write the stories they do, I don't fully understand. Some imagine compelling scenes and create a narrative context in which to embed them. Others conceive of characters they yearn to know better. Some love constructing plots like Rube Goldberg mechanisms and watching them spool out. Others see some event emblematic of a significant theme which they feel challenged to dramatize. All of these and other enticements motivate writers, bless them. I want to know what I am looking for.
This blog has been exploring the idea of 2nd person encounter as a fundamental unit of value. Is it useful to think of stories as histories of encounters? Vicissitude stories, confrontation stories, slice-of-life stories, lesson learning stories, huh? stories: may I not search them for indications or suggestions (in first or third person costume) of those occasions or episodes where one actually addressed another as You, or could have and didn't. May I not structure the stories I could write around such scouting?
Indeed, all this last year I've been looking for direct encounter opportunities in my rather unexciting life--and found them day after day. What about reported or imagined or contrived encounters? In what I read or may write, indeed in art generally, may I not find indirect encounters explicit or implied, which can extend the reach of my experience, expand what I conceive as possible? Not a substitute for the risking that direct encounters demand of me, may not reflection (even through writing) on encounters and the dynamics of encounter in the lives of historical and fictional characters be the deeper justification I'm interested in in narrative?
After dinner this evening, we talked about Rembrandt's versions of the sacrifice of Isaac, based on the story taken from the Jewish scriptures. We pulled up the images (or images--there seem to have been several versions) from the internet, commented on the design, and considered the interactions of the characters in the dramatic tableaux. The startled, old, bearded man, the unclothed, unresistant young man with bared throat, the urgent angel, the baffled ram represent a complex of encounters worth contemplating in terms of the existence (or not) of hospitalities, friendships and explorations; in terms of potentialities, energies, powers; in terms of agents and patients; in terms of histories of richness, and so on.
Maybe new things can be learned about living a life of presence, adventure and lastingness. Kundera also said, 'A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.' Maybe through what I turn up, you may informed and enriched, God-in-love.
Perec's stories contribute to a larger narrative very carefully plotted and only gradually revealing itself as I move through the chapters to the 99th and final. At almost exactly the half-way point he lists first lines of stories that he's actually already told or may, indeed probably will, tell:
A young trapeze artist refusing to climb down from his perch...
The lovelorn coachman who thought he'd heard a rodent mewing...
A famous old soldier killed by a loose Venetian chandelier...
The Swedish diplomat trying madly to avenge his son and wife...
Woodworms' hollow honeycombs solidified by an Italian artist...
The pranking student putting beef stock in vegetarians' soup...
The druggist spending his fortune on the Holy Vase of Joseph...
The anthropologist, failing to locate the ever-evasive tribe...
174 in all, self-contained, many quirky, most memorable (at least with the first-line prompt.) Once inside a story--one can find oneself at any moment in that situation--the characters develop, complications arise, time passes, a stopping point appears like a sign at an intersection, and Perec switches back to whatever he was doing before (about which, again, I'm still largely in the dark.)
What intrigues me as I contemplate this dragon's hoard of tales is, first, the strange allure of stories that keeps us reading, and second, the irrelevance of the kind of ending--triumphant or tragic, nailed-down or unresolved--to a story's ability to hang significant as a star against the backdrop of our thoughts. Perhaps, as Milan Kundera said in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: 'Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of great distress.' Perhaps what we look for in stories are intimations of that beauty.
There are those who swig stories literary or cinematic as I drink coffee--pretty continuously. I enjoy but am not 'addicted' to narrative. Arguments, interviews, news reports, presentations of issues are equally interesting, but reading Perec (and listening to yet another story dramatized in the next room), I wonder makes narrative intrinsically worthwhile, apart from whatever excitement it stimulates or 'lessons' it teaches. There's a reason for this inquiry: I'd like to write stories (and they don't just pop into my mind; I have to deliberately seek or construct them) and want a better reason for doing so. (This sounds so pretentious, I cringe just writing it.) Apart from writing, I want a better takeaway from the stories I read.
Why authors write the stories they do, I don't fully understand. Some imagine compelling scenes and create a narrative context in which to embed them. Others conceive of characters they yearn to know better. Some love constructing plots like Rube Goldberg mechanisms and watching them spool out. Others see some event emblematic of a significant theme which they feel challenged to dramatize. All of these and other enticements motivate writers, bless them. I want to know what I am looking for.
This blog has been exploring the idea of 2nd person encounter as a fundamental unit of value. Is it useful to think of stories as histories of encounters? Vicissitude stories, confrontation stories, slice-of-life stories, lesson learning stories, huh? stories: may I not search them for indications or suggestions (in first or third person costume) of those occasions or episodes where one actually addressed another as You, or could have and didn't. May I not structure the stories I could write around such scouting?
Indeed, all this last year I've been looking for direct encounter opportunities in my rather unexciting life--and found them day after day. What about reported or imagined or contrived encounters? In what I read or may write, indeed in art generally, may I not find indirect encounters explicit or implied, which can extend the reach of my experience, expand what I conceive as possible? Not a substitute for the risking that direct encounters demand of me, may not reflection (even through writing) on encounters and the dynamics of encounter in the lives of historical and fictional characters be the deeper justification I'm interested in in narrative?
After dinner this evening, we talked about Rembrandt's versions of the sacrifice of Isaac, based on the story taken from the Jewish scriptures. We pulled up the images (or images--there seem to have been several versions) from the internet, commented on the design, and considered the interactions of the characters in the dramatic tableaux. The startled, old, bearded man, the unclothed, unresistant young man with bared throat, the urgent angel, the baffled ram represent a complex of encounters worth contemplating in terms of the existence (or not) of hospitalities, friendships and explorations; in terms of potentialities, energies, powers; in terms of agents and patients; in terms of histories of richness, and so on.
Maybe new things can be learned about living a life of presence, adventure and lastingness. Kundera also said, 'A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel's only morality.' Maybe through what I turn up, you may informed and enriched, God-in-love.
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