Essay: Someplace Between the Damned and the Dreaming: Narrative Mode and the Rendering of Consciousness in Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport and Mathias Énard’s Zone
But are not all novels about the writer’s self, we might ask? It is only as he sees people that we can see them; his fortunes colour and his oddities shape his vision until what we see is not the thing itself, but the thing seen and the seer inextricably mixed.
—Virginia Woolf, “George Moore”
In the strictest sense, all the contents of consciousness are ineffable. Even the simplest sensation is, in its totality, indescribable.
—Susan Sontag, “On Style”
Who are we, when alone with our
thoughts? The philosophers differ. More importantly, perhaps, what are
we? What do we sound like, how does the world with its endless errata of life
find its way into cogent being, dialectically opposed to that ghost we call the
self? What, in short, does it sound like in our minds? This a central question
to realist fiction written in both the third- and first-person[1], albeit it in a rather
different formulation than is typically found. For to frame the issue another
way, we might ask how the thoughts of a character in a life-like novel should
sound to us as reader. We might ask how the narration could best portray a
verisimilar sense of interior life, to mind and close the gap between hero and
audience. We might even ask about point-of-view.
There are many disquieting trends in
contemporary (let’s say twenty-first century, even if the new millennium begins
to feel rather far off) fiction, none of which we will explore here.[2] The overall slide and
stumble towards accessibility and ease of consumption in the literary novel,
mirroring the worst of society’s impatient whims, can be viewed as either a
top-down or bottom-up problem, and is probably a bit of both. Mainstream
presses are loathe to publish, and readers are frightened to open (and, most
alarming, writers are intimidated to attempt) novels that take chances in form
and style[3], that command and apply
advanced concepts in literary theory, that demonstrate bold and original
interpretations of fictive elements. However, before we go on too long and risk
meeting the definition of ‘explore’, let us shine a light on a corner of the
literary cave, which we can barely see from our spot amongst flames and
shadows, but which nonetheless offers respite, even break, from the chains.
This essay will dissect with a hope for
elucidation the narrative methods used in two remarkable 21st-century
novels: Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019) and Mathias Énard’s Zone (2008, trans. 2010 Charlotte
Mandell). There is quite a bit the two works have in common: both rightly
received critical praise upon release, both are major achievements within
accomplished literary careers[4], both are (ostensibly)
written in a single sentence, and both have been given more attention across
the Atlantic than in the United States (this last point tends to be true of
most accomplished, risk-adept, ‘unconventional’ fiction). The are large,
voluminous, ambitious novels, distilling, in the great and long tradition of
modernist fiction and its progeny, mundane, ordinary, quotidian happenings into
literary art. They are extended considerations of the everyday, rendered with
skill and precision. But such platitudinous generalities don’t an essay make.
There’s another (dis)similarity between Zone and Ducks, Newburyport,
grounded in that first question of fiction—how is it done?
Énard and Ellmann craft, it seems at
least, analogous first-person narrations in order to tell their respective
stories and accomplish their novelistic goals. At this point the wary reader
may be, in their own minds, asking questions of our essay: two books with the
main character talking right at us—how complicated can it be? There are,
however, compelling and illuminating contrasts between these superficially similar narrative modes, one of which will be the
principle focus here—the freely-associative interiority of Ducks,
Newburyport vs the directly-associative interiority of Zone.[5] The difference, that is, between the uninterrupted rendition
of a story by that story’s central figure and the display of a raw, accessed
mind artfully shaped into narrative—between Énard’s guiding the
reader and Ellmann’s causing cogitation to happen in view of the reader. This
question, one encompassing where the narration is aimed—be it towards an
implied reader, as in conventional first-person, or ‘nowhere’, into the void of
consciousness, as in (very) close third-person—is another of point-of-view’s
protean manifestations, and thus essential to the literary novel. Who are we,
what are we, and to whom do we talk? Perhaps by considering such issues in two
titanic, audacious novels of recent vintage, we can come nearer to
comprehending them in those rambunctious Dioscuri, art and life.
Towards A Mimesis of the Mind:
Heterodiegetic and Homodiegetic Narration
When evaluating a novel along technical
lines—the stuff done, across varying strata of rigor, from book reports to
monographs of literary theory—there are two elements running alongside each other
that must be taken into account. These creatures have many names and many
manifestations, but I tend to prefer narrative and textual functions,
which are somewhat broader terms that I use to mean the book relating a series
of fictive events, in the former, and ’acting as a book’, as a crafted piece of
art, in the latter.[6] Essentially, we have a two
sided coin, what and how; of the effectively infinite number of
ways to tell a given story, what method does a novel (and writer) choose, and
why, and what does that mean for the final result? One could retell Ulysses in
about a page, if plot were the only concern.[7]
So our question comes down to the manner of telling, a concern that has been
with human storytelling since the beginning.
Realist fiction, at its heart, looks to
show a world in a manner that resembles lived experience. The how of
fiction should match the what of life. This is of course distinct from
the what of fiction; the narrative function of a novel is not equivalent
to whatever inspires or compels its author, but rather something more like
Athena offering disguised direction. When Plato spoke of art as a mere
imitation of an imitation, he was referring (pejoratively, to be sure) to the
idea of mimesis, which has voyaged its way through two millennia of philosophy
to end up, for our purposes, meaning the presentation of narrative events. This
preoccupation with an accurate depiction of the world and the people runs
through Western literature.[8] Dickens is painstaking in
painting his factories and London streets; Jane Austen is meticulous in her
compendia of dances and walks round the park; Tolstoy offers a vivid recreation
of entire armies and social milieus. In short, driven by an understanding of
mimetic representations of common human life, the Regent-Victorian-Edwardian
novel is greatly concerned with correct descriptions of parlors and housecoats.
Since the great revolution of Modernist fiction, however, the novelistic world
has become increasingly (albeit replete with reversals) comprised of not only
the exterior but interior world—the workings of the mind. Mimesis, then—the
concern with a verisimilar representation of reality—must not only show a
living room as living rooms look when we walk into them but must also show
consciousness as it seems to us when we think, and live, and exist.
And so we come to the rendering of
consciousness in fiction, as good a touchstone as any for the success of a
novel written in the last century, and the impetuous, insurrectionary child of
point-of-view. The angle of reflection by which we are given access to a given
character’s inner world defines how a novel moves, its construction, and to the
degree it accurately reflects and then artfully portrays lived experience.[9] The two grand families of
narrative mode—third- and first-person—both offer myriad options to accomplish
fidelity of consciousness in fiction; although due to its enormous flexibility,
the third-person offers far more possibility and therefore complexity in this
respect than does the first. For our purposes here, however, sticking only to
these terms—and the concepts they signify—would be fatally limiting. Both Zone
and Ducks, Newburyport are written by and large in the first-person;
there is little ground, grammatically, to argue otherwise. Perhaps when viewed
another way, however, we can explore more deeply how these novels work.
Gérard Genette, the esteemed
narratologist, kindly comes to our aid. In his study Narrative Discourse (an
extended treatment, of course, of the quintessentially first-person À la
recherché de temps perdu), he classifies the ‘person of the narrating’ into
two broad types: homodiegetic (a narrator who is in the story) and
heterodiegetic (a narrator who is not in the story).[10]
His concepts are more complex than this simple definition implies, but at a
basic level we can see how this vantage point might turn our usual manner of
looking at the novel on its head. We have moved away from grammar and syntax as
dispositive in textual analysis; rather, we must peer through the mists of
voice and tone—those ineffable fictive elements that are nonetheless
omnipresent. Is the narrator (or narrating entity, when not in the body of a
character) a person speaking about herself? Or is it a creation of narrative
intent, looking down from above, standing outside the room and letting us know
everything that takes place within? By and large these appellative categories
match up quite well with the traditional grammatical ones—if a novel uses I, the
narrator is probably within the story, and it is both first-person and
homodiegetic.
Determining the locus of the narration
relative to the narrative, then, is not typically difficult. Genette’s
terminology often lines up with first- and third-person, and the vast majority
of novels do not attempt anything all that unusual with respects to the more
nuanced aspects of narrative mode. But every now and again an odd exception
emerges from the borderlands of the novel, and as they constitute the whole
point of this essay, let us hope there are some interesting beings among them.
One area that can give some pause is in the depiction of consciousness,
especially the ‘lower’ levels—what is called ‘stream-of-consciousness’. This
complicated term is best understood as referring to a family of literary
techniques rather than a single approach, but they all deal with the direct
exploration and presentation of a character’s interiority.[11]
When inner thoughts are on display in the text, especially the lower (and
closer) we get to the mind, narrative frameworks are increasingly stripped
away, leaving us at times bereft of landmarks.[12]
And so at times we find ourselves in a bit of a quandary, determining exactly
whose voice it is, telling tales of the wild underworld of the mind.
enter, engender, copulate, populate,
propagate: Free-Association in Ducks, Newburyport
As most readers will surely be familiar
with the idea of free-association to be found in Ducks, Newburyport,
we’ll start here, before moving to Zone’s more direct approach,
reversing course against the descent of grammar. As noted above, in determining
the positioning of the narrator in a work immersed in consciousness, the first
question is over the direction of the language—to us or to no one? As is
typically the case in profound and proficient literature, the infinite
possibilities of the sentence contain the answer within.
Lucy Ellmann’s hammerblow to modern
novelistic convention was meet with a Booker Prize shortlist in 2019 and an
onslaught of critical agitation. An enshrined member of the praised-but-unread
Pantheon, Ducks, Newburyport winds through the mind of an Ohio housewife
as she makes pies and contemplates her family and modern America. Unlike Zone,
as we’ll see, our heroine is never named—the narration is far too close to
her thoughts to organically provide it. The key element that makes the
narrative mode work is that lack of external act—much like Ulysses’ “Penelope”[13]—which allows time and text
to be devoted to the winding thoughts that make up the book’s central concern.
There are a number of iterations taken
on by Ellmann’s freely-associative style in Ducks, Newburyport. While no
linguist, I find at least four separate types of association present at
intervals throughout. With one notable, recurring exception (which we’ll come to), the
entirety of the 988 pages is a single unbroken sentence, save for a few
instances of catalogued lists, themselves embedded in the flow. By analyzing
these in turn, we can not only come to a richer understanding of how Ducks,
Newburyport makes use of free-association to question and perhaps cross the
boundary between hetero- and homodiegetic narration—despite the grammatical
indications of the first-person—but also more fully appreciate the scope and
scale of Ellmann’s vision, an ambition nonpareil in the twenty-first century.
X
The first selection will serve to
provide a general introduction to the overall read of the book, as well.
Virtually the entire novel takes place in the aforementioned kitchen, and so
from here on out any contextualization of the ‘plot’, as such, becomes rather
obviated. Let us instead simply dive headlong into the stream.
the fact that Mary Todd Lincoln may have
had a vitamin deficiency, anemia, chicken, the fact that people just can’t stop
eating chicken, Chick-Fil-A, the fact that sixty or seventy billion chickens
die a year to make chicken and dumplings, chicken à la king, chicken gumbo,
chicken Kiev, chicken Vesuvio, chicken Stroganoff, chicken tetrazzini, chicken
cacciatore, chicken
fettuccine primavera, garden chicken with wild rice medley, chicken chilaquiles, grilled chicken pouches, stove-top one-dish chicken bake, blueberry chicken breasts, chicken and pickled pepper fajitas, chicken lo mein, chicken nuggets, chili powder chicken nuggets, Italian chicken packets, smothered chicken, chicken Boston, chicken spiedies, chicken biscuit bake, Cornell chicken, smoky buffalo wings, King Ranch chicken casserole, easy no-guilt chicken pot pie, chicken ’n’ peaches picante, fire precautions,
the fact that there’s nothing for breakfast around here except raw cinnamon
roll dough, the fact that I’m hungry but not that hungry[14]
Dominated by our heroine’s
ever-present social conscious and her wealth of contemporary references and
asides, here we can see the type of manic pace and rapid movement that defines Ducks,
Newburyport’s narrative mode; I extended the quote through the entirely of
what can only be called the chicken progression in order to give a sense of the sheer overwhelmingness,
must be the word, that is the salient feature of the novel. Much like Molly
Bloom—as clear a case of literary ancestry as one could hope to find—our
contemplative heroine has quite a lot on her mind, made all more apparent by
the relatively automatic task at her hand.[15]
We can also see in detail the first of the free-associative iterations that
appear in the work, what I’ll call itemized association: an ‘accompanied’
running of items from a category or subject that takes over for stretches at at
time. The accompanied bit requires clarification—part of the genius of Ducks,
Newburyport is the fidelity it achieves in representing the mental process
of its protagonist; this is manifest in the many instances where her thoughts
seem to leap form idea to idea without her direction—much in the way that
happens in real life. As we’ll come to, this reflexive, automatic cognition is
the defining feature of free-, as opposed to direct-association. However, again
like life, at times she actively ushers her thoughts—while not reaching the
full intentionality of direct-association, as in Zone—working through
everything she knows on a given topic, resulting in moments of itemized
free-association such as this one.
X
This control is not always found,
however, as our next few examples will show. To illustrate our next iteration,
two excerpts will be useful. The first follows a thought on the recent death of
an old woman found in her home amid tubs of margarine and cobwebs, as reported
on the news:
the fact that the good news is she kept
those tubs so long they can now be recycled, which maybe wouldn't have
been possible when she first started collection them, the fact that I think she
should get a posthumous award or something, for saving so much plastic from the
landfill, or the ocean, the fact that “posthumous” is a kind of scary word, the
fact that it makes you think of exhuming, exuberant, exuberant exhumation,
extruding, estranged, ex, humungous, humus, hummus, halloumi, the fact that
what’s also scary about it is that she ate that much margarine, the
fact that I hope she had it on a cracker, the fact that we’re a butter family,
the fact that I’m with Julia Child on that issue[16]
And a second, branching off the rescue
of a dog:
the fact that the main rescuer guy kept
working on him though, with the beef jerky, calling him “sweetheart,” and
finally they got hold of him, manhandled, mandible, Mandela, mandala, manna,
mañana, Manhattan, the fact that Mommy liked a Manhattan once in a while, with
a maraschino cherry, the fact that why didn’t I make her one, but I think she
only liked them when she was out, just for fun, the fact that she really
preferred whiskey and soda, the fact that later, on the news, the dog-rescuer
said it took twelve bucks’ worth of beef jerky to get that dog off the car,
Guadalupe, Guadalajara, Guanabana, Guantánamo, Geronimo, Open Sesame, the fact
that there were other dogs too[17]
Along with the dry humor that Ellmann
subtly weaves in, this excerpt shows what we’ll call phonic association, the
first of two ‘spontaneous’, as opposed to accompanied, iterations of
free-association in Ducks, Newburyport. The name perhaps gives it away:
three examples can be seen, the second rather more fully realized than the
others.[18] At times our heroine seems
to slide off on a tangent, like a record skipping over a line, of words with
auditory similarities—principally those featuring rhyme, alliteration, and
assonance. Exhuming and exuberant have no definitional
relationship, but are joined phonically and therefore begin a short chain of
inner speech that runs though a range of like-sounding free-associative words.
The pattern holds: manhandled and mandible; mañana and Manhattan; Guantánamo and Geronimo. This type of thought pattern—which, again, is quite true to
life, and therefore in keeping with our first principles surrounding an
authentic display of interiority—strikes the reader as being not fully purposefully,
or in the control of the protagonist. This sense is heightened by her return to
the original branch of thought—the tubs of margarine found with the old woman
and the rescue of the dog, respectively—after the phonic digression. A slight,
somewhat involuntary, aside, fulled by the wonderful texture of words, and back
to the matter at issue.
X
Along similar lines comes our third
iteration of the free-association in Ducks, Newburyport, and the second
of the ‘spontaneous’ pair.
the fact that I think people with kids
automatically waste a lot of time, what with all the tending, the mending, the
helping, the yelping, decluttering, opening cereal boxes, combing heads of hair
and answering messages from the teachers, the fact that loving them takes up time,
and I feel guilty about the time that takes too, the fact that I need a
good shakeup, Shaker boxes, chores, Pillsbury Doughboy, Jolly Green Giant, Aunt
Jemima, Sugar Creek, the Swartzentruber Amish, purple martins, martinis,
Proctor & Gamble, the fact that they’re experts in contentment, the Amish,
not Proctor & Gamble, or so they seem to me…the fact that if I get any more
stressed out they’ll have to Baker-Act me, baker act, mesocyclone, the fact
that speeding up doesn't make my job more fun, or safer even, the fact that
there aren’t all that many shortcuts to peeling, coring, chopping, beating,
kneading, mincing, mixing, grinding, pulverizing, frying, grilling and baking
that doesn’t risk injury, and our medical bills are already up the wazoo, Single
Payer, Phoebe, chenille, chamois, sheep, chassis, carburetor, vibratory
finishing, the fact that the Amish don't have to worry about crime all the
time, I don't think[19]
Coinciding with her observations and
anxieties over the state (and ills) of modern America, our protagonist finds
her thoughts often preoccupied with motherhood, marriage, and the balance she
attempts to strike between living for herself and for her family. We can see,
too, the circular thematic patterning and hits of the phonic method quoted
above, and to be sure these approaches often bleed into one another, in keeping
with Ducks, Newburyport’s overall fluid, immersed construction.
But what predominates above are two
strings of free-associative thought marked by links in like terms, ones that do
not necessarily share either a phonic relationship or show an intentional
inventory of itemization, but which instead are grouped together based, it
seems, on the images formed in our heroine’s mind. This is conceptual
association, and shares traits with the previous two—the spontaneity of phonic
and the idea clustering of itemized.[20]
(While too much to quote here, the interested reader is encouraged to look up
the sterling example of conceptual free-association occupying the entirety of
pp. 423-5.) Their effect is such that she seems to again become stuck,
record-like, but now it is on an idea—cooking and baking, which constitute her
only remunerative work—instead of a sound. A somewhat overburdened housewife
and mother, who makes money on the side by selling baked goods, her mind at
times latches onto concepts of domesticity and becomes stuck, exhausting a subtopic
before being able to move on. It is again a striking verisimilar approach,
especially given that Ellmann employs it to explore an area of the
protagonist’s expertise, mimetic of anyone who’s felt unable to, as it were,
avoid taking their work home with them.
X
In this way, the narrative method in Ducks,
Newburyport is not only a realistic display of interiority, but works
towards furthering the underlying thematic and plot concerns of the novel—a
unification of the book’s textual and narrative functions. Our final
free-associative iteration is the strongest of the four in this respect, one
we’ll therefore call narrative association.
the fact that you can’t assume a kid’s
related to both parents anymore, and what does it matter, when they all secretly
wish they were adopted anyway, Jane Eyre, the fact that maybe
they should teach divorce-coping skills in school along with First Aid, food
hygiene, sex ed, how to make chocolate chip cookies, and how to do your taxes,
stepmom, stepdad, Stepford wives, the fact that I kind of spoiled Leo when we
first got together, I know, and maybe concentrated on him too much, and left
Stacy out of things, without ever meaning to, the fact that all I wanted
was for us all to get along as a family, the fact that I was so darn happy
though, euphoric, so bowled over by him, the fact that I just assumed Stace
would love him too and things would all work out, which I see now was kind of
simplistic, the fact that Leo’s the most loving guy in the world though, so I
never thought it would be difficult, and she liked him from the start, but she
held back, the fact that I think she was still hoping Frank would
somehow return, the fact that I thought it would be all right once she’d had
time to get to know Leo better, Stepdad Day, and saw how great he is, seesaw,
the fact that then Ben came along, and maybe she felt even more left
out, though I know Leo did everything he could to prevent that, the fact that
we used to talk about it, Leo and me, not Leo Stacy and me, we, the fact that I
guess I was in my own dreamland, Candyland, the unconscious mind, the fact that
none of this is his fault, that is for sure, the fact that he’s tried so
hard to be a good stepdad, the fact that he always loved Stace, the fact that
Stacy said in our session that I defer to him too much and it drives her nuts,
the fact that I guess it’s a habit of mine, the fact that I don’t know where I
got, oh yeah, from my mom[21]
Our protagonist’s mind is now running,
not thoughts categories or sounds, but the prevailing thoughts and anxieties
she holds about her family, residual issues from her own childhood, the guilt
she feels surrounding her eldest daughter and the protagonist’s second husband,
and the worry she has for the future of their relationship. This is clearly a
more controlled thought process—while still retaining the fundamental synaptic
connectivity that is the hallmark of all free-association—and is the second of
our accompanied iterations. The odd sporadic social reference (Stepford wives,
Candyland) has not been excised, allowing the passage to retain an elemental
sense of uninhibited cognition, but there is a clear development of narrative
progression.
These progressions are the best examples
of Ducks, Newburyport’s emotional resonance in a more traditional
novelistic sense, elements which, while not the focus here, are incredibly
strong. Ellmann’s ability to offer a total portrait of her character via such a
method is outstanding, and yet another piece of evidence in support of the view
that challenging, bold, fearless literary styles—in the hands of a gifted
writer—offer an unmatched ability to render in arresting detail human life.
X
We have seen how Ducks, Newburyport makes
sweeping use of a range of free-associative iterations to capture and render the
nuances of consciousness, the many ways our minds work, subject varying degrees
of our will. Two types of free-association—accompanied and spontaneous—are
further broken into a total of four iterations: itemized-accompanied
association, narrative-accompanied association, phonic-spontaneous association,
and conceptual-spontaneous association. These terms, as stated, are simply my
own product of analyzing the text; another reader may find more, less, others,
or have different appellations altogether. They surely show, however, how
thoroughly free-association defines the narrative mode of Ducks,
Newburyport, and, ultimately, that this narration is of a heterodiegetic
nature.
Returning to our notion of the direction
of the language, this breakdown of style demonstrates that it can not truly be
said that the heroine of Ducks, Newburyport is speaking towards ‘us’,
the reader. Rather it seems clear that this is case of a narrative
entity—typically a third-person creation—having access to the ongoing cognition
of a character, mental activity that is not intended to tell a story or provide
information but is instead, we say, directed to the void of the mind, simply
pure consciousness existing as such. It is the very essence that defines this
type of narrative mode as free-association, differing from what will
come below in Zone, that marks the narration’s locus as outside the
book. The thought patterns of the protagonist move freely, loosely, without
necessary plot-based reasoning or, at times, even fully intention, across the
memories, musings, and moments that constitute her inner world. In this way,
despite the comprehensive use of first-person grammar and syntax, Ducks,
Newburyport is narrated by something outside the story itself, a
third-person entity that achieves the rare feat of total narrative
self-abnegation[22], and in terms of literary ancestry is
far more closely related, from a technical-mechanical standpoint, to the prodigious
close-third person novel of the Modernist tradition—such as Ulysses, The
Sound and The Fury, U.S.A., or To The Lighthouse—than a Proustian
first-person approach.
This point is arguable, perhaps, as writers don’t
write to critical definitions (nor should they; although theory has a place in
workshop, despite reports to the contrary), and the narration of Ducks,
Newburyport, with its trademark ‘the fact that’ serving as something of a
mantra of cognition[23] is certainly of a more
debatable nature than ‘Penelope’. Indeed, Joyce allows his narrative entity to
move significantly closer to Molly’s thoughts than Ellmann does hers, and the
close of Ulysses is a far messier (and thereby more completely realized)
narrative mode than what we’ve seen here. But in its totality it seems
difficult to seriously contend that the narrative mode of Ducks, Newburyport
is representative of the protagonist thinking towards an implied reader, with
the intent to elucidate and narrate. Instead it seems, to this critic at any
rate, a far more defensible position to argue that what we’ve explored here is
a remarkable creature of ingenuity and energy, a truly innovative and
risk-adept approach to heterodiegetic narration that, like the close of
literature’s most famous day, plunges so far into the depths of that enigmatic
stream as to drown out its voice altogether. It is a being not of the world it
renders through its narration, but one that looks down into the consciousness
of its creation, that awesome power so often invoked by the gods of fiction.
une dernière
plongée de main avant la fin du monde: Direct-Association in Zone
Mathias Énard’s fourth book is an
interrogation of power. The power of an individual against history, of the
state against the people, of place against time, of the novel against the will
of the reader. This in no way should be interpreted negatively—Zone is a
compelling, ingenious, furious novel, one that manages to be utterly readable
while retaining those elusive ‘literary’ credentials that high-minded critics
are so quick to reserve.[24] If this was a book review,
I would go on to Zone-esq lengths; suffice to say, read it.
We’re here for a more specific—and much
more fun—purpose, although again a basic introduction may be useful. Zone tracks
its (anti-)heroic narrator, Mirković, on his train ride from Milan to Rome,
carrying an attaché case with documents of an illusive nature and thinking of
his life, one that spans an astonishing array of experiences, places, and
knowledge. Like Ducks, Newburyport, much has been made of Zone being
written in one 500 page sentence; while this is not strictly true, it comes
close, and it is testament to Énard’s imaginative abilities that the book never
suffers for a lack of momentum.
The narrative conceit is rather
simple—Mirković is at something of an inflection point in life, and takes the
completive mood offered by those remarkable creations, European train cars, to
do just that. There is, to follow the pattern, very little external action in
the fictive present that needs narrating; beyond the occasional trip to the bar
car and glance at the woman across the aisle, our man doesn’t do a whole lot.
This frees up the narration to focus inward, weaving personal memory, European
history, and classic literature into a remarkable tableau of reference and,
above all, association. An early example of Zone’s narration will serve
as introduction to our ideas:
now I’m hungry, a little, maybe I should
go eat or drink something we’re traveling very fast it’s drizzling a little
this December evening I remember the long nights of the Croatian autumn, the
corn fields are the same the rain too in Slavonia around Osijek in 1991 we were
freezing in our hunting jackets and despite all my military training and my
alpine exploits I was afraid, I was the most experienced of my companions and I
was afraid, in the name of well-greased Achilles I trembled from fear[25]
This quote is among the more obvious
examples, showing nicely the links Énard forges between his hero’s ideas. The movement from
fictive present on the train to a memory in his deep past is brightly marked,
providing geo-temporal landmarks and introductory phrases. (It should not be
overlooked, too, that this excerpt offers a hint of the poignancy and emotion
that infuses Mirković’s story, along with a look at the type of classical
reference he rather adores). We can and should, too, compare with the protean
free-association of Ducks, Newburyport—these two novels, for their
superficial similarities, are not written in anything like the same narrative
mode. Énard’s method here, at
the extreme end, is so direct to be nearly conversational; the reader,
especially at these more noticeable points, is in little danger of being lost.
Another early case, to more thoroughly
illustrate the discrepancies between Énard’s approach and that of Ellmann. After a line of thought
on Napoleon’s campaigns in Egypt, we come to an excellent instance of
directly-associative narration.
in Egypt the flies are innumerable, not
far from the Fertile Valley, on the slaughtered cows hanging in covered
markets, irrigated by putrid ditches where the blood of sacrificed animals
calmly flows, the smell of dead flesh must have been the same after battle, the
flies always win, I rest my head gently against the window, pressed by the
speed in the half-light, sleepy from the memory of the dense heat in Cairo, of
the dusty mango trees, the shapeless banyan trees, the dilapidated buildings,
the pale turbans of the porters and the boiling fava beans that made dawn stink
as much as the livestock hanging in the sun[26]
Beginning with Mirković’s thinking on
his time in Egypt—itself stemming from his thoughts on the early Napoleonic
Wars—we dash back into the fictive present for a moment (I rest my head
gently against the window), before carrying on to a personal memory of
Egypt, explicitly linked by sleepy from the memory of the dense heat in
Cairo. The is direct association, this is moving the reader from station to station via an
ongoing rendering of consciousness. It is the type of direct A-to-B-to-C connection categorically not found in the
free-associative world of autonomous monologue and the like.
Finally, a prototypical selection will
give us a little more to work through, and allow for a deeper examination Zone’s
narrative mode.
I glance at the suitcase, I’m afraid I
won’t manage to sleep or I’ll be pursued as soon as I lower my guard they’ll
interfere with my sleep or get under my eyeballs to raise them the way you open
shutters or Venetian blinds, its been a long time since I thought of Venice,
the green water by the Dogana, the fog of the Zattere and the intense cold when
you look at the cemetery from the Fondamente Nuove, back from the war, hadn’t
thought of the shadows[27]
Here is a prime exhibition of Énard’s method, one rather more nuanced
and therefore representative than those above. The narration—well and truly
within the SOC lineage, being comprised as it is of nearly pure consciousness—is,
for so raw and unabridged an approach, remarkably cogent. There is none of the
sporadic, nearly untraceable movement between ideas as seen in ‘Penelope’ or,
indeed, Ducks, Newburyport. Instead, Mirković takes pains to be explicit
over implicit, to squawk at us to keep up as he leaps from notion to memory and
back again. The shift from the fictive present observation of the briefcase and
his associated worries to his memory of Venice is clearly made, with the
referents made visible.
Perhaps our point will be made
clearer by indulging in that sly critic’s trick of revision. What would this
transition look like in a free-associative style? How might Joyce—or, indeed,
Ellmann—have it? The bridge, so to speak, between two disparate ideas (concerns
over the briefcase, happening ‘now’, and long ago memories of Venice) is Mirković’s
articulated thought process, Venetian blinds, its been a long time since I
thought of Venice. This is the fragment that moves the reader in tandem
from the blinds (as analogy to his imagined pursuers) to the time he spent in
Venice. Without that guidance for the explicit benefit of the audience—without
the directness that differentiates direct-association from
free-association—the passage might read as follows.
glance at the suitcase won’t manage to
sleep or I’ll be pursued soon as I lower my guard interfere with my sleep or
get under my eyeballs raise them the way you open shutters or blinds, green
water by the Dogana, fog of the Zattere and the intense cold looking at the cemetery
from the Fondamente Nuove back from the war no thought of the shadows
Of course this is a bit of a conjure’s
trick—Zone isn’t written this way, and there’re myriad ways Énard might’ve handled this moment had
his overall approach been different—but one can see how much farther into the
deep waters of the mind one might be plunged. And this is the true distinction
between free-association and direct-association; in a free-associative approach (one
even messier than Ducks, Newburyport), we would move into details
of memory with scenic immediacy, without the transition making the connection clear.
Conversely, Zone represents true homodiegetic narration: Mirković is
directing his thoughts towards something; perhaps, given the present
tense and overall tone, one would argue that something is not the traditional
implied reader of first-person narratives, but the continual efforts to guide
whomever may be listening through his mental processes is a notable departure
from the heterodiegetic free-association found in the lower levels of SOC
narration. Next, we’ll turn to other questions and complications of Énard’s narrative mode, allowing us to
encompass a bit more than strict analysis of his directly-associative style
while still dissecting it further.
X
It is possible (I should be so lucky)
that someone reading this will think to themselves, ‘ah, but if the narration
in Zone is homodiegetic, does this not contradict the intractable rule
against first-person present tense that a certain critic has maintained with a
near-sacral ferocity?’ Indeed, it does. Another compelling element of Zone’s
narrative method, and one that allows us to further explore the nature of
direct-association, is its status as a first-person present tense novel, and
how and why it succeeds in such a thing when (so, so) many others do not.
In many ways Zone is the rare exception that proves the
first-person present tense rule. In so much of contemporary fiction this
approach, which has long crossed the Rubicon into mindless fad,[28] is an oddly distancing,
falsely authentic, franticly inelegant attempt to bring the reader close to the
protagonist in a confession of authorial unwillingness and inability to do the
hard work of true character development. The first-person present tense,
especially when used as it almost always is in the current literary
landscape—to force-fed a sense of urgency or, worse, ‘originality’ into a story
that would otherwise (and still does) utterly lack it—is nearly always the
wrong choice for a given work.[29] But nearly is not always,
and happily we have that most uncommon of POVs, successful first-person
present tense, in Zone.
I shift in the seat, I want to get up,
take a few steps to chase away the image of Stéphanie with the perfect body, the
perfect voice, the keen intelligence, Stéphanie, to whom I told the story of
Francesc Boix the photographer of Mauthausen during our trip to Barcelona, how
can you care so much about stories, she said, she was reading Proust and
Céline, nothing but Proust and Céline, which gave her, I think, the cynicism and irony
assistive her profession, she was re-reading the Journey and the Recherche she called him by those abbreviations,
the Journey and the Recherche, both in the Pléiade editions, of
course, and she filled me with a jealous admiration[30]
The two reasons for the success of the
approach are on display here. On the train, Mirković is recounting his sins, speeding
through his Purgatorio in a window seat, specifically and necessarily because
he is in a moment of profound change and expiation. Much of his trail, as it
were, consists not only of what he did professionally but personally, including
his fraught relationships with the women of his past, Stéphanie being one (and of whom, it must
be said, Énard paints incredibly
vivid portraits, especially given the difficulties of his narrative mode). His
future, by and large, is unknown, and the matter of whether he’ll be able to
put everything he’s done and failed to do behind him in order to start anew is
very much an open question. Should Zone be written in the past tense,
the protagonist would necessarily gain wisdom, a knowledge of how this tribunal
of in his life ended, and thus deprive the novel of its life-giving
uncertainty. A third-person past tense would work in this respect, of course,
but would then lose the journey of self-discovery and exculpation that deepens
the novel as a whole.
This is further underscored by the
second element of Zone that makes its use of first-person present tense
successful; namely, that it is built largely on the fictive past. Mirković
weaves his story primary with the fibers of memory—of his time in war, love,
and deception—and of history—both classical-mythological and compendiously
accurate European and Middle Eastern. This is a common tactic of Énard’s—a quick present-tense re-set branching
off into an extended discussion or disquisition on something he’s left long
behind. These elements, which serve to enrich the novel with an incredible,
near-Joycean tapestry, are at their most effective, in this specific context,
as spiraling asides from a mind facing the chaos of the unknown. It Mirković’s
instability, his lack of agency on the train as he revisits the contents of his
encyclopedic mind in front of us, actively and synchronously, that propel Zone
to the breathtaking speeds it achieves—the near-unique force that runs
efficiently on first-person present tense.
X
A near cousin to the first-person
present tense dilemma is the Dujardin Problem: the issue of how to present
consciousness in effective present via first person, without the awkward
structures and biases inherent to the mode.[31]
A key distinguishing trait of first-person against third (and hetero- vs
homodiegetic narration) is the level of ‘unbiased’ access able to be achieved.
In the first person there will always be a greater distance than in third.[32] The majority of first-person
fiction, written in the past tense, never encounters the Dujardin Problem.
While the inner world of the narrator is often addressed in the narration, it
is overtly from the ‘future’, the time of the narrating, and therefore
typically shrouded in cagey half-mystery in service of the plot. The Problem as
such emerges when a first-person narrator looks to render their inner world,
faithfully, in real time, be that in the past or present tense. As with Édouard Dujardin’s Les lauriers sont
coupés, this almost always results in a fatally inorganic narrative mode.
So what of Zone? To be sure, we
run into some rocky ground at times. The book’s central premise necessitates
the type of stilted present action movement that plagues Dujardin’s work—I get
up, I shift in my seat, that sort of thing. But on balance Énard is able to evade, if not conquer,
the enemy.
I was afraid, all of a sudden, I fled in
a cowardly way, an insect trying to escape a boot, we all ran away abandoning
you there in the countryside quivering with spring, but don’t worry you are
avenged, you are doubly avenged for Francis the coward is in the process of
disappearing, after his long journey among the shadows of the Zone he is
erasing himself, I will become Yvan Deroy, I owe you this new life, Andi, it’s
over, I’m off, we’ll see each other again on the White Island at the mouth of
the Danube, when the time comes, farewell Marwan farewell Andrija and shit now
I’m crying, this story made me cry I wasn't expecting this, it’s unfair I rub
my eyes turn my head to the window so no one sees me I’m not in very good shape
I’m exhausted probably I can’t manage to stop the tears it’s ridiculous now all
I need is the conductor to show up, how foolish I’d look, crying like Mary
Magdalene a few kilometers outside Florence, it must be the effect of the gin,
the trick of perfidious Albion, no, that story is taking me back with my
realizing it, too many details, too many things in common, better set the book
down for now, even in Venice in limbo in the depths of the lagoon I didn't cry
much and now almost ten years later I’m weeping like a schoolgirl, the weight
of years, the weight of the suitcase, the weight of all those bodies collected
right and left preserved embalmed in photography with the endless lists of
their lives their deaths I’ll bury them now, bury the briefcase and all it
contains and farewell[33]
We can see the dangers. Reading his novel on war and remembering his own
experiences in battle (and specifically his friend Andi who was killed) Mirković
like Odysseus skirts both swirling waters and treacherous cliffs, but gets
through more or less unscathed. Énard never allows his narrator to linger on the present; a
memory or references (Mary Magdalene is most notable above) will soon enough come in and stop or
slow the thread. The relative little fictive present action, aligned with the
directly-associative temporal movement via memory and history, avoids (without
solving) the Dujardin Problem while providing that rich forward momentum we
highlighted above. Simply put, Zone largely escapes the problem of how Mirković can display his
mental-emotional condition because he spends very little time focused on his
current state of affairs. Instead, he sidesteps, placing a focus on his past
and historio-literary references which indirectly fill in his character and
situation. We come to understand a great deal about our hero by implication—his
obsession with his past and what he’s done, his fixation on war and death, his
frayed nerves and the blood-red eyes we can nearly see for ourselves. Énard does not need to have his character
tell us how he’s feeling because he shows us his past, and only a
madman or a fool could fail to understand the effect such a life must have on a
single man and a single mind.
L’Appel du Vide: Narrative Mode and
Narrated Life
If language is the world humans inhabit, and
literature their cities, then point-of-view is the stolen fire of the gods,
illuminating and burning, warming and destroying in equal measure. Modernism,
that highbrow Prometheus, set aflame novelistic convention a century ago, and
ever since we have been gathering like the hopeful phoenix the ashes. In her
perspicacious monograph, Consciousness in Modern Fiction, Violeta
Sotirova asserts that Modernism was a technical-mechanical response to the
fallacy of an ordered existence as represented by the neat plot and narrative
coherence of the Victorian novel. Grammar itself signified convention, and by
doing away with it Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Eliot, and their revolutionary
compatriots did away with the old world, creating a new one in the chaotic
chambers of the mind.[34] The two extraordinary,
monumental, exhaustive novels that are the focus of this essay are not
Modernist works, but they share both that fearless spirit of risk-adept writing
and the sentence-level innovations that bend convention—grammatical and otherwise—to
their will.
X
The
single running sentence, that beast of energy and power, is the main weapon Énard and Ellmann employ. But, as
we have noted, neither book is actually comprised of only one line. And so,
before we depart, a brief word
about the interludes. Both books use them, which is why neither can truly be
said to be other single sentence, to different and interesting ends. In Zone,
the interludes, which are excerpts of a book Mirković is reading, are simply
examples of accessed writing, essentially a frame device that fits with and
reinforces the book’s overall possession of a homodiegetic narrative mode. And, conversely-yet-similarly,
the interludes in Ducks, Newburyport reinforce it as having a heterodiegetic narration. Comprised
of the recurring story of a mountain lion, wandering through Ohio (an event
that really took place around the time of the fictive present), they showcase
the narrative entity's ability to move outside the scene that predominates the
novel, abandoning its central character, briefly, from time to time in order to
tell us something else--a prototypical trait of third-person narration.
Genette,
returning to the topic in Narrative Discourse Revisited, stresses that
the heterodiegetic narrator (what I’ve referred to here as the narrative
entity) is not accountable for his information, which is granted by virtue of
the parameters of the external point-of-view. The homodiegetic narrator,
however, is obliged to justify (by, for example, reading a book) the
information he gives about scenes from which he was personally absent.[35]
This tracks nicely with what we’ve found. The narrator of Zone, Mirković himself, is
clearly responsible for everything he knows, and as we have seen, provides a
great deal of expository information to fulfill this debit. This is
emphatically not the case with Ducks, Newburyport. In a rather neat bit
of symmetry, then, both the interludes in Ducks, Newburyport and Zone,
via opposite routes, support the dueling conclusions regarding their respective
narrative modes.
And
it is in that totality of vision, the fusing together via profound learning and
innate talent the textual and narrative functions of their novels, that Ducks,
Newburyport and Zone share the most in common. Both Lucy Ellmann and
Mathias Énard display in
their work the profound grasp of the power of narrative mode and the aptitude
in execution that so often marks great writing. Their respective approaches to
capturing that which makes up the vast majority of lived life, to capture it
and reconstitute into something elegant and resonant, are at once admirably
ambitious and instructive paths for others to follow and to break away. The
long arc of literature has bent not towards progress (an illusory and
corrupting notion) but towards truth. Not moral or even historical truth, but a
truth of life, a fierce commitment to seeing, feeling, and distilling the world
as it is found into the written word. As times and places change so too do
ideas of what this truth means, but the great novels all work towards
excavation in their own way. Chained to the rock of convention, the best
writers look not at what literature is but what it might be. The question then,
as it always does, returns to matters not of desire but of vision.
The best of art can make us feel; the best of fiction can cause the reader to experience a depiction of life that draws out their own pasts, illuminates their own moments of being, gives voice to the innermost workings of their minds. That ghostly creature with which we unceasingly live, consciousness, is at once ineffable and in great need of expression. Each of us only navigates our own existence, and for as singular these fleeting things are they feed on the same stuff of life. In literature, truly verisimilar narration, unlocked and explored by the types of ingenious, far-reaching, risk-adept narrative modes we have studied in this essay, can give light to the recesses of the mind, can move a novel from a crafted work of art to something more, a window to the underworld, a thunderous meditation on the terrible and beautiful power of the ordinary, the everyday, and the unknown truths of the self.
———
Ellmann, Lucy. Ducks, Newburyport. Windsor,
Ontario: Biblioasis. 2019.
Énard, Mathias. Zone. Translated by Charlotte Mandell. Rochester,
NY: Open Letter Books. 2010.
[1] As well shall see, this duality becomes rather
complicated.
[2] This time, I’ll stick to that conviction, too. For a
wider view of the state of modern writing, see the companion essay to this one.
[3] Or even, to a large if lesser extent, content.
Sontag’s annihilation of the distinction looks rather prescient today.
[4] I can’t let slip the opportunity to also mention Lucy
Ives’ Life is Everywhere, which reminds me of these novels with respect
to those first two traits especially, but doesn’t quite fit here.
[5] Free-association is a fairly widespread appellative
for a distinguishing characteristic of so-called ‘stream-of-consciousness’
writing (see below); direct-association has spread, as far as I know, only to
myself. They will be defined below.
[6] More detail on this issue can be found (among many,
many other places) in The Schemes of Poseidon.
[7] Come to think of it, one could even retell The
Odyssey in about 600.
[8] Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, which begins the
companion essay to this one, is an excellent resource on this topic. Auerbach,
Erich. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton
Classics, 2013.
[9] The usual note on definitions is appropriate: perspective
refers to the character who is centered by the narration; point-of-view is
the technique used by that narration. The narrative entity of Mrs. Dalloway
follows mostly Clarissa’s perspective in a close third-person point-of-view.
[10] Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse, Cornell
University Press, 1980. Pp. 244-5.
[11] A good analogy to illustrate the overly broad
application of SOC as a specific method is to think of asking someone, “What is
your favorite food?” and them replying, “It’s a fruit.” While they’ve given a
response that leads in the general direction (and eliminated a number of
choices), they haven’t really answered the question; there are still a number
of disparate possibilities. Saying a novel or story is written in
“stream-of-consciousness” style is similarly a half-answer; it tells us
something about the work—an important something—but doesn’t provide the
sought-after specificity.
[12] While essay is not, per se, yet another
proselytization for risk-adept writing that engages authentically with inner
life, it is worth pointing out that the absence of this narrative scaffolding
creates far more fidelity in the rendering of consciousness, which constitutes
the power of techniques in the SOC family. See Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent
Minds: Narrative Modes of Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton
University Press, 1978., esp. pp. 133-6; 217-22; 234-40.
[13] The Schemes of Poseidon discusses Molly Bloom
in greater depth.
[14] Ducks, Newburyport, pp. 94-5. For quotes of
both Ducks, Newburyport and Zone I’ve decide to forgo the
ellipses that should, strictly speaking, be used. Both novels create an
unceasing atmosphere, an avalanche of words, images, phrases, and allusions,
the spirit of which ellipses would undermine.
[15] Cohn, as part of the best analysis I have found,
calls the technique used at the close of Ulysses (and would have
probably used the term for Ducks, Newburyport) ‘autonomous
monologue’ in Transparent Minds, which I quite like and have written
about elsewhere. Autonomous monologue would be the moody-yet-brilliant second son of
the SOC family tree.
[16] Ducks, Newburyport, pp. 384.
[17] Ducks, Newburyport, pp. 596-7.
[18] The title of this section comes from another, quite
lively, instance on pp. 514-5.
[19] Ducks, Newburyport, pp. 456-7. Note that here
the ellipses are added in the traditional manner.
[20] The distinction between itemized and conceptual being
the lesser range of the former—only methods of preparing chicken, for
example—leading to a more focused and controlled sense in her cognition. The
scope of ideas in conceptual association creates a spontaneous effect,
mirroring a mind running of its own volition.
[21] Ducks, Newburyport, pp. 906-7.
[22] See The Schemes of Poseidon for an
introduction of this concept along with more detailed discussion of the end of Ulysses
with respect to these matters.
[23] One that is of questionable effectiveness—one wonders
how more fluidly the novel might read, and how more definitive of an answer
might be possible on our question here, were those excised.
[24] In large part due to Mandell’s commendable
translation from the French, which achieves a swift and rhythmic English that
deftly navigates Énard’s continual landmines.
[25] Zone, pp. 36.
[26] Zone, pp. 24-5.
[27] Zone, pp.
10-11.
[28] What I mean by this is that too often a book seems to
be written in the first person present way for extra-textual—it’s ‘different’
or ‘interesting’ reasons than intra-textual ones.
[29] This issue at once more and less complicated than how
I’m presenting it here, but by and large what’s written in first-person present
tense would be better in an intermediate range third.
[30] Zone, pp. 221-2.
[31] Emily Hall, in her brilliant 2022 debut The
Longcut, does this by overwhelming her narrative situation with sheer style,
a feat I have written about elsewhere, while introducing the Dujardin Problem in more detail.
[32] In The Schemes of Poseidon, I use the analogy
of trying to see one’s own eye without a mirror. Another might be trying to cut
one’s own hair—you can do it, but it won’t come out very well.
[33] Zone, pp. 315-6.
[34] Sotirova, Violeta. Consciousness in Modern
Fiction: A Stylistic Study. London: Palgrave, 2013. Pp. 21-5.
[35] Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse Revisited.
Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 1988.
Comments
Post a Comment