Reading Style

by Jenny Davidson

  This was especially true of anything that assumed a posture of minimalism or perfectionism, or of chilly, intellectual grandeur. Hence my rage at Stanley Kubrick, Don DeLillo, Jean-Luc Godard, and Talking Heads. The artists who’d seemed to promise the most were the ones who’d created art that stirred me while seeming to absent themselves from emotional risk—so these were the ones capable of failing my needs most violently. When I discovered their imperfections, my own hope of absenting myself from emotional risk seemed imperiled. It was as though in their coolness these artists had sensed my oversized needs and turned away, flinched from what I’d asked them to feel on my behalf.

  Perec also writes out of this sort of a bind, but perhaps the writer who most clearly kicks against it and occasionally transcends it is Thomas Bernhard. In the short novel Wittgenstein’s Nephew, describing himself just before he mounts the stage to receive a major Austrian literary prize, the narrator (a distorted version of Bernhard himself) says he “had jotted down a few sentences, amounting to a small philosophical digression, the upshot of which was that man was a wretched creature and death a certainty.”5 To give this sort of remark as an aside is very funny (it is comically inappropriate for delivery on this sort of occasion, though that fact speaks to the dreadfulness of the occasion rather than to anything inherently nonviable about such philosophical digression in its appropriate contexts), but that does not stop it from being also very seriously meant. Here is an early passage that gives the flavor of Bernhard’s unrelenting prose; the whole novel is presented in the form of a single paragraph, or rather the paragraph break has no place in this style of narration. The story chronicles the vicissitudes of the friendship between Bernhard’s proxy and his real-life friend Paul Wittgenstein, nephew of the philosopher and scion of the prominent and self-destructive Austrian family:

  If I had friends staying with me he would go for walks with us. He was not keen to do so, but was prepared to join us. I do not care for walks either, and have been a reluctant walker all my life. I have always disliked walking, but I am prepared to go for walks with friends, and this makes them think I am a keen walker, for there is an amazing theatricality about the way I walk. I am certainly not a keen walker, nor am I a nature lover or a nature expert. But when I am with friends I walk in such a way as to convince them I am a keen walker, a nature lover, and a nature expert. I know nothing about nature. I hate nature, because it is killing me. I live in the country only because the doctors have told me that I must live in the country if I want to survive—for no other reason. In fact I love everything except nature, which I find sinister; I have become familiar with the malignity and implacability of nature through the way it has dealt with my own body and soul, and being unable to contemplate the beauties of nature without at the same time contemplating its malignity and implacability, I fear it and avoid it whenever I can. The truth is that I am a city dweller who can at best tolerate nature. It is only with reluctance that I live in the country, which on the whole I find hostile. And naturally Paul too was a city dweller through and through, who, like me, was soon exhausted when surrounded by nature. (53)

  It is partly the effect of the lack of paragraph breaks, but the way that each sentence knots itself to the previous one by way of repetition and variation leads to the creation of a dense web of meaning, with the narrator the end of this passage seemingly having gone nowhere at all despite having touched down on the misleading theatricality of his walking style, his hatred for nature and his inability to escape it and the link between himself and Paul Wittgenstein based on their shared sense of nature’s malignity. This willingness to circle back around the same topics again and again produces an effect unlike anything I have described so far as the characteristic forms of pacing of novel versus short story. Each “episode” in a novel by Bernhard has the feel at once of a comic set piece and a raw unedited transcription of thought, only the prose is too perfect; the tension between the craft of the sentences (and the shape or momentum of individual stretches of prose) and the repetitive or compulsive quality of the narration gives the narrative its underlying dynamism. Here is another passage that stands out:

  I have always hated the Viennese coffeehouses, but I go on visiting them. I have visited them every day, for although I have always hated them—and because I have always hated them—I have always suffered from the Viennese coffeehouse disease. I have suffered more from this disease than from any other. I frankly have to admit that I still suffer from this disease, which has proved the most intractable of all. The truth is that I have always hated the Viennese coffeehouses because in them I am always confronted with people like myself, and naturally I do not wish to be everlastingly confronted with people like myself, and certainly not in a coffeehouse, where I go to escape from myself. Yet it is here that I find myself confronted with myself and my kind. I find myself insupportable, and even more insupportable is a whole horde of writers and brooders like myself. I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself, and so when I am in Vienna I have to forbid myself to visit the coffeehouses, or at least I have to be careful not to visit a so-called literary coffeehouse under any circumstances whatever. However, suffering as I do from the coffeehouse disease, I feel an unremitting compulsion to visit some literary coffeehouse or other, even though everything within me rebels against the idea. The truth is that the more deeply I detest the literary coffeehouses of Vienna, the more strongly I feel compelled to frequent them. Who knows how my life would have developed if I had not met Paul Wittgenstein at the height of the crisis that, but for him, would probably have pitched me headlong into the literary world, the most repellent of all worlds, the world of Viennese writers and their intellectual morass, for at the height of this crisis the obvious course would have been to take the easy way out, to make myself cheap and compliant, to surrender and throw in my lot with the literary fraternity. Paul preserved me from this, since he had always detested the literary coffeehouses. It was thus not without reason, but more or less to save myself, that from one day to the next I stopped frequenting the so-called literary coffeehouses and started going to the Sacher with him—no longer to the Hawelka but to the Ambassador, etc., until eventually the moment came when I could once more permit myself to go to the literary coffeehouses, when they no longer had such a deadly effect on me. For the truth is that the literary coffeehouses do have a deadly effect on a writer. (85–87)

  I am unsettled by the combination of humor and seriousness here. Are these sentences really funny, or is this intolerable, insupportable? Both must be true at once: “I find myself insupportable, and even more insupportable is a whole horde of writers and brooders like myself”; “I avoid literature whenever possible, because whenever possible I avoid myself”: it is the bind of literature, but also the bind of life, and Bernhard’s prose will have to serve as fine consolation.

  I recently read a passage that summed up what I, too, see as the highest goal of writing. I have published four novels, but I have become increasingly frustrated with the aspect of fiction that involves making up characters and the things that happen to them; it seems to me fatally artificial, an abuse of my own imaginative powers and an insult to what I see as the underlying purpose of any novel I would write (to examine or anatomize a problem or a situation, in the process transmitting something of a mood or an emotional affect—really I am an intellectual at heart rather than a novelist, but I don’t see why the two should finally be at odds with one another). When I came to read it, I found Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle just as transfixing as everyone said it would be. These words fall near the end of the first volume and represent a kind of turning point as Knausgaard’s own vocation comes into clearer focus:

  I was after enrichment. And what enriched me while reading Adorno, for example, lay not in what I read, but in the perception of myself while I was reading. I was someone who read Adorno! And in this heavy, intricate, detailed, precise language whose aim was to elevate thought ever higher, and wher
e every period was set like a mountaineer’s cleat, there was something else, this particular approach to the mood of reality, the shadow of these sentences that could evoke in me a vague desire to use the language with this particular mood on something real, on something living. Not on an argument, but on a lynx, for example, or on a blackbird or a cement mixer. For it was not the case that language cloaked reality in its moods, but vice versa, reality arose from them.6

  It is not so different, strange to say, from the green peas that Barthes hoped would punctuate the intellectual murmur: a fusion of ideas and things in language that becomes in turn a supremely sensitive instrument of the self, the kind of instrument desired by many of the other writers whose words I have most loved. It has been the purpose of these pages to open up to others some of the ways of reading and writing that have shaped my own reality, delighted and consoled me; and now I will simply step aside, given the impossibility of offering any kind of a proper conclusion, so that we can return to our real lives of reading and writing.

  NOTES

  1. THE GLIMMER FACTOR: ANTHONY BURGESS’S 99 NOVELS

  1. Stephen Burt, Randall Jarrell and His Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 2.

  2. LORD LEIGHTON, LIBERACE AND THE ADVANTAGES OF BAD WRITING: HELEN DEWITT, HARRY STEPHEN KEELER, LIONEL SHRIVER, GEORGE ELIOT

  1. Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai (New York: Talk Miramax, 2000), 57–58.

  2. Lydia Millet, “Alice in Familyland,” Globe and Mail, September 23, 2006, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/arts/alice-in-familyland/article193732/. As I finish the last revisions to these pages, Christian Lorentzen has just published “Poor Rose: Against Alice Munro,” London Review of Books 35, no. 11 (June 6, 2013): 11–12.

  3. I have a strong enough sense of fairness, buttressed by feelings of scholarly responsibility, that after writing these words, I did read the novel in question.

  4. The passage is from McDermott’s novel After This, as quoted in Joan Acocella, “Heaven’s Gate,” New Yorker, September 11, 2006, http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/09/11/060911crbo_books.

  5. Otto Penzler, “The Worst Writer in the World,” New York Sun, December 21, 2005, http://www.nysun.com/arts/worst-writer-in-the-world/24771/.

  6. Harry Stephen Keeler, The Riddle of the Traveling Skull, ed. Paul Collins (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2005), 182, 191, 111, 201.

  7. Lionel Shriver, The Post-Birthday World (London: HarperCollins, 2007), 46. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

  8. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Rosemary Ashton (1871–1872; reprint, London: Penguin, 1994), II.xx.

  3. MOUTHY PLEASURES AND THE PROBLEM OF MOMENTUM: GARY LUTZ, LOLITA, LYDIA DAVIS, JONATHAN LETHEM

  1. Gary Lutz, “The Sentence Is a Lonely Place,” Believer, January 2009, http://www.believermag.com/issues/200901/?read=article_lutz.

  2. Gary Lutz, “Waking Hours,” in Stories in the Worst Way (1996; reprint, Providence, RI: 3rd bed, 2006), 8–9.

  3. Daniel Long, “An Interview with Gary Lutz,” Fiddleback 1, no. 5, http://thefiddleback.com/_webapp_4159108/An_Interview_with_Gary_Lutz.

  4. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (1955; reprint, New York: Knopf, 1992), 9.

  5. Lydia Davis, “Boring Friends,” in The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), 313.

  6. Lydia Davis, “Samuel Johnson Is Indignant,” in Collected Stories, 351.

  7. Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude (2003; reprint, New York: Vintage, 2004), 91. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

  4. THE ACOUSTICAL ELEGANCE OF APHORISM: KAFKA, FIELDING, AUSTEN, FLAUBERT

  1. Jane Austen, Emma, ed. James Kinsley, intro. Adela Pinch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), I.i.5. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

  2. Jonathan Swift, The Poems of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), 2:556. The original reads “Danes l’adversité de nos meilleurs amis nous trouvons quelque chose, qui ne nous deplaist pas.”

  3. Franz Kafka, The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka, trans. Michael Hofman and Geoffrey Brock (New York: Schocken, 2006), #20, #29, #32.

  4. Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, ed. Alice Wakely, intro. Tom Keymer (London: Penguin, 2005), I.v.

  5. Samuel Johnson, vol. 4 of The Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets; with Critical Observations on their Works, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Clarendon, 2006), 3.

  6. D. A. Miller, “No One Is Alone,” in Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 31–56. The passage quoted is on 31–32.

  7. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary: Provincial Ways, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Viking Penguin, 2010), II.12.167. Here is the text in the original language: “Il s’était tant de fois entendu dire ces choses, qu’elles n’avaient pour lui rien d’original. Emma ressemblait à toutes les maîtresses; et le charme de la nouveauté, peu à peu tombant comme un vêtement, laissait voir à nu l’éternelle monotonie de la passion, qui a toujours les mêmes formes et le même langage. Il ne distinguait pas, cet homme si plein de pratique, la dissemblance des sentiments sous la parité des expressions. Parce que des lèvres libertines ou vénales lui avaient murmuré des phrases pareilles, il ne croyait que faiblement à la candeur de celles-là; on en devait rabattre, pensait-il, les discours exagérés cachant les affections médiocres: comme si la plénitude de l’âme ne débordait pas quelquefois par les métaphores les plus vides, puisque personne, jamais, ne peut donner l’exacte mesure de ses besoins, ni de ses conceptions ni de ses douleurs, et que la parole humaine est comme un chaudron fêlé où nous battons des mélodies à faire danser les ours, quand on voudrait attendrir les étoiles”; Madame Bovary, ed. Bernard Ajac (1856; reprint, Paris: Flammarion, 1986), 259.

  8. James Wood, How Fiction Works (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008), 19.

  5. TEMPO, REPETITION AND A TAXONOMY OF PACING: PETER TEMPLE, NEIL GAIMAN, A. L. KENNEDY, EDWARD P. JONES

  1. Peter Temple, Black Tide (San Francisco: MacAdam/Cage, 2005), 38.

  2. Unlike crime fiction, science fiction is a genre less inherently hospitable to beautiful prose—though there are always exceptions to this sort of generalization—even as it magically inherits the mandate of the novel of ideas, no longer commercially viable if it ever was, but now finding new life in a form that potentially reaches huge audiences: an excellent recent example of bestselling science fiction that is also a first-rate novel of ideas would be Neal Stephenson’s Anathem.

  3. Peter Temple, The Broken Shore (2005; reprint, New York: Picador, 2008), 127.

  4. Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys (New York: William Morrow/HarperCollins, 2005), 135–36. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

  5. Luc Sante, “French Without Tears,” Threepenny Review, Summer 2004, http://www.threepennyreview.com/samples/sante_su04.html.

  6. For more on this, see Jim Dawson, The Compleat Motherfucker: A History of the Mother of All Dirty Words (2011), esp. 159; I am indebted to Brian Berger for the reference.

  7. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–67), ed. Melvyn New and Joan New, intro. Christopher Ricks (New York: Penguin, 2003), V.xvii.339. The missing letters are chamber pot and pissout of the window.

  8. A. L. Kennedy, Paradise (2004; reprint, New York: Random House/Vintage, 2006), 198.

  9. Tobias Hill, “School Stories,” Guardian, April 5, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/apr/05/extract.

  10. William Boyd, “The Things I Stole,” Guardian, August 1, 2008, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/02/william.boyd.short.story.

  11. Jenny Davidson, “Great Jones,” Village Voice, August 26, 2006, http://www.villagevoice.com/2006-08-29/books/great-jones/.

  12. Edward P. Jones, All Aunt Hagar’s Children (New York: HarperC
ollins/Amistad, 2006), 395, 237.

  6. LATE STYLE: THE GOLDEN BOWL AND SWANN’S WAY

  1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” in Essays on Music, intro. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 565–67.

  2. Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 456.

  3. Henry James, The Golden Bowl, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (London: Penguin, 2009), 3. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.

  4. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967), 280.

  5. Alan Hollinghurst, “The Shy, Steely Ronald Firbank,” Times Literary Supplement, November 15, 2006.

  6. Ronald Firbank, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926), in Five Novels (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, [1949]), ch. 1, 333–34. The following paragraph reveals that the entity being christened is “a week-old police-dog.”

  7. Quoted in the introduction to Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Penguin, 2004), xiv. Subsequent quotations are from this edition and are given parenthetically in the text.