Of Stories - 1

For anyone who spent some time reflecting about his / her own tastes regarding novels, the stories they tell and the resources they use to tell them, the apparent arbitrariness of these choices is striking. A literary movement like the Oulipo based its own identity on finding ways to escape it, by randomly constraining its authors to using certain forms and certain plots. The best example of it might be Georges Perec's Life, a manual, where every single plot, background, decor and character is determined, not by the needs of the story, but by a random draw from a pool of possible characters, decors, backgrounds and plots.

Far from being a flaw of the genre though, this arbitrariness is deeply rooted in its nature, as Marthe Robert demonstrates in the groundbreaking analysis she published forty years ago. As always, as I read it this morning, a powerful feeling of  reassurance overwhelmed me as if, at last, I had been proven to be merely human. 

This, and the sunshine. 

"Sauf lorsque [le roman] se considère lui-même à distance et, découvrant ses propres illusions, les prend résolument pour sujet. J'ai tenté de montrer ailleurs (l'Ancien et le nouveau, Paris 1963, 1968) que cette méditation active et romancée du genre sur lui-même — ou «donquichottisme » puisque Cervantes en donne le premier et le plus grandiose exemple — est la seule façon de surmonter le paradoxe du « feint » et du « vrai », qui autrement tourne nécessairement à la mauvaise foi ou la naïveté."

"Apart from when [the novel] looks at itself from a distance and, discovering its own illusions, takes them resolutely as its topic. I tried to show elsewhere (L'Ancien et le nouveau, Paris 1963, 1968) that this active and romanticized meditation of the genre onto itself - or "Quixotism" since Cervantes gives it its first and most brilliant example - is the only way to overcome the paradox between the "faked" and the "true", which otherwise turns into bad faith or naivety."

Marthe Robert, Roman des origines et origines du roman, Paris, Gallimard, 1972, p.68 note 1.

Attempt at a Form

With the fiction and the story telling so arbitrary, I find myself in the same position as many a writer in the post Nouveau Roman world : fiction does not make sense. It is meant to build sense - but the foundations of any fiction work are laid on air. From the basic commercial product to the high moral fable, only relativity and void surround any fictional production.

This issue is, unfortunately, unsolvable -lest we go back to the Marxist conception of cultural manifestations as by-products of ideology. But it is possible to work around it. The likes of Oulipo or Raymond Carver showed us the way : constraint, as a unmasked form of arbitrariness. 

My initial constraint will be minimal : my stories will contain no more than 3,000 words. I will build them as I would a novel, researching characters, places and plots, developing backgrounds, structuring the narration in scenes and subplots. This done, the writing will consist in fitting all this material in the pre-defined format.

This will favour the emergence of a visually extremely dense and striking style, concentrating all manners of formal tools and figures in order to achieve maximum efficiency. Should the 3,000 words format prove too diluted again, we will reduce it accordingly. The expected result is a prose resembling poetry as closely as possible, whilst retaining its primary purpose of story-telling.

There will be no manifesto

But there might be a name.

For far too long I tried to fit my experience of the world into tales which were not mine. Tales I had learned to hold for the truth. Then, at the age of twenty-five, I read Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Générale.

"[...] any definition made about a word is doomed" Saussure tells us. "To start from words in order to define things is a bad method" (1)

These lines were a revelation. Because of the nature of language, stories  were not true, stories could not be true. So I understood. Any story was a struggle to make sense of what was in front of the teller. But stories, I also understood, had to do with the very essence of human beings. They were told and written by us: they were made by us. They were not discovered. They were not unveiled. From their inception to their final word, they were brought to existence by whoever was telling them.

This, you might think, is a reality of the basic level. A story is a story is a story. It is not true, obviously it is not true. It is fiction. Yes. But.

To start with, I am a stupid person. I am credulous, slow to understand. I need to dig. I need to break apart. I work my way through the mysteries of life far less, I must say, like a gyrfalcon hunting a snow hare than like a worm hunting a grass root.

But this basic truth tells us more.

Language serves no practical purpose. If men needed a way to exchange warnings, the simple system of noises and body language common to most animals would have been enough. Words add very little to it. Language developed away because (if there is a cause) it was fulfilling a different function ; because it was providing an escape route to our desires and to our fears.

This is my explanation, my own story about language and stories. Stories explain the world. Stories are not true. Combining these two incompatible attributes can have dramatic consequences. Examples abound of people who, pushed by their belief in a story which was obviously not true, started changing the world.

Words may be powerless to account for the world, but they can change it. At least, they can change the world of human beings. I often hear about the importance of being precise when using the language. This refers to the language capability to categorise and describe things. But what is really at work in making stories is another ability: the power of the language to name things. In this movement the dictionary is of little use. A writer must rely on his own mind to call the things he summons on the paper by their appropriate name. Whether this name has been authorized by the dictionary is none of his concern. When telling a story, a writer has no other master than himself.

The urgency to write in English rose in me as I went to see Crosby Beach, north of Liverpool, many weeks ago. As we were walking on the beach, a gale storm burst out. We should have run away. Instead, I found myself obliged to stay at the same place and stand as still as possible while the wind, the sea, the sand, the clouds and the rain combined their efforts to destroy everything else around them. I felt that I had to witness this storm and later recall it, in the language of the people of Crosby. In English then. But this would be my own use of English, in all its awkwardness, all its métissage. That would be my story of the storm, made with words I would pick myself. There is no point in writing otherwise.

And here I am. A man standing on Crosby Beach, in winter, in a gale storm.



(1) Introduction III, par. 2, al. 19 : "C'est pourquoi toute définition faite à propos d'un mot est vaine ; c'est une mauvaise méthode que de partir des mots pour définir les choses."
Saussure never wrote the Cours de Linguistique Générale. He never even authorised it. His researches, he felt, were not complete. He was not ready to publish yet. Only after his death did two of his students gather their notes to build the text which changed the whole field of linguistics, and accidentally laid the ground for structuralism.