Technicalities

When I was a kid my parents had this notion that my proper place was outside. Anytime they noticed me in the house they'd tell me to "go outside and play." I would take whatever book I was reading at the time and go sit under a tree in the backyard. Really, this backyard exile probably just kept me from smelling all the weed they smoked and hearing them fuck and otherwise act like two not very smart people in their twenties. Whatever. The point is that I developed this intense habit of reading as an aid to forgetting how shitty my life was. My memories of all the different places we lived over the years begin and basically end with my reading/hiding spots. An attic. Up in a tree. A cornfield. Rocks next to a creek. Etc. Now that I have myself become an apparently not very smart person in my twenties, this habit of obsessive reading is the only thing that supports my otherwise obviously false conviction that I am very different from them.

This habit has asserted itself to a shocking extent of late. I have developed an impossibly complex system to manage the reading of as many as seven books at the same time. Two large books, a novel and a nonfiction (usually history), as well as one or two books of poetry at home. A book of stories and usually one but sometimes two books of poetry for carrying around the city for reading on subways, at lunch breaks, in coffee shops or any other opportune moment. At least one of these books, though preferably two, in Spanish. And no TV reading, meaning crime novels, cheap memoirs, pop non-fiction, or any other bullshit. I have a TV.

The fruits of this weird yet somehow functional system have led me to think a lot about technique lately, and the way that technique leads to form. Vague discussions annoy me, so let us proceed to the particulars of three books, and try to bring it all together to some extent at the end.

"Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno Schulz
I happened to find a cheap copy at a book stall downtown, so I bought it. I've read this many times, but it had been a while.

Schulz wrote little stories, some of them just a few hundred words. They're all set in a small town and involve a young boy and his family. Very little happens in any of these stories. They are not about plot so much as moment. Schulz's main skill as a writer is his ability to cast a very persuasive aesthetic. All of his stories, and there aren't many of them, cast a palpable mood. They literally enchant you. He's not trying to put you inside the boy's head. He's trying to turn you into the boy. They way he does this is with verbs. He assigns unlikely verbs to everything, especially inanimate objects. Houses sink, windows cling, night caresses, and everything in the story seems to have more agency than the boy does. He is the object of everything, observing it and experiencing it but with no ability to do anything to change or affect it.

Once Schulz has paired an unusual verb with an unlikely noun, he stretches the image out. His paragraphs usually begin with the houses sinking, then go on to draw a variety of usually visual metaphors from that verb/noun pairing, all of which are presented as though they were literally happening. When he does this over and over again in every story, haze lifts up from the text and a little while later you realize you've been a child in Poland for the last half an hour.

"The Melancholy of Resistance" by László Krasznahorkai.
A while back I read a book by this guy, "War and War" and it broke my heart. So I wrote him an email, which said, "László you broke my heart." He wrote me back and said, "I am sorry I broke your heart. With my next book I will try to heal you." Krasznahorkai is Hungarian, somewhere around 55 years old, and a goddamned genius. The two books I've read by him are the only ones that have been translated into English thus far. Another is in the works but a long way from done.

His technique has three main features.

The first is extremely long sentences. Like 500 words long in some cases. Whole pages of margin-to-margin text broken only with commas. These require ATTENTION. They can be tough to follow unless you're just poring over the book. The sentence demands a very high level of focus and because every sentence does that, the whole book does it. It opens you up to all the other things the book is doing, all the things it is saying. It also allows him to really dig into anything he might be talking about at a given moment.

The second point deals with how he structures his scenes. A scene begins with character A and character B involved in some action. At a certain point the scene will transition to a supplemental scene in which character B is telling other, anonymous characters about what happened between B and A. Then back to the scene in the "present." It's a short of shifting of tenses, inserting after-the-fact retrospection into the scene, then alternating between the present and a later remembrance of the same event. The narrative possibilities of this technique are incredible. László builds layers of impression, memory, misunderstanding, motivations and divergent perspectives. He can take apart the act of one character lying to another and break it down into all of its constituent parts and make them all dance and then put the whole scene back together and move the narrative along to the next scene.

The third thing is about choices. It gives away nothing for me to tell you that the next to last scene in "Melancholy" is a funeral. Now comes the last scene. The technique here largely consists in making the exact right choice about what comes next. In "Melancholy" the last scene is a long, detailed description of the decay of the body buried at the funeral, the way that substances already present in said body break it down into organic compounds that are then recycled into the environment. This goes on for several pages. When it ends, László has said everything he wanted to say, philosophically, and done it in a way that is so artful that it is literally chilling. And all of that happens because he stopped, thought it out, and made the exact right choice.

"Distant Star" by Roberto Bolaño
This is a little novella, 110 pages, of the sort Roberto cranked out throughout the '90's. If you read a few of these, you notice a definite formula. First person. Usually a narrator who was on the periphery of important, always Latin American, usually political events. Informal, oral tone.

This formula is exceptionally functional because it is variable. In the context of this formula the specific characters and story become very important to the individual book, but the book itself does not have to stand all on its own. Each of these books are linked, usually by the presence of Arturo Belano, and together they all add up to something which is more than the sum of its parts. In a certain sense Bolaño was taking a cue from Faulkner and García Marquéz, creating a free-standing area in which his fiction takes place, but Bolaño's is less a physical location than the collective mind set of his generation, Latin Americans born in the '50's. Every book adds another layer, but its the cumulative vision of ALL of the books that matters.


So what we have then is three writers who are each exercising themselves primarily on different overlapping aspects of the craft. Schulz: the word and the scene. Krasznahorkai: the scene and the book. Bolaño the book and the body of work.

What's my point? How am I supposed to know? Isn't it interesting?

Personally, a lot of my work is done in an ass-backwards fashion where I get an "idea" and then just write it out and then revise it and then move on. The idea, by which I usually mean the plot, is the main thing. That is not the case with any of the writers cited here, and maybe there's some sort of lesson in that. To take one's time and break that idea down all the way and then build it up again, taking time and care to make each of the millions of choices as well as one can, realizing that the words all matter, and so does everything else, all the way up the line.

You hear a lot of talk among writers these days about "language" and how "all stories are made out of language" and what not. True. But they're also made out of scenes, and characters, and plots or the lack of them (which is itself a sort of plot). And they also take place in time, like music and film. And they say things, even if all they say is that they have nothing to say (which itself a sort of statement).

All of these things matter. You've got to be in control of all of them and make them all work toward the larger goal, whatever that might be. As if this writing shit wasn't hard enough already, right? Still, if you're not going to really do it and do it all the way then what exactly is the fucking point?