When I write I fear, whether beforehand or as I am in the midst of it or afterwards. Endless scrutiny awaits. As I am still perfecting how to write academically, to produce arguments in writing that are coherent and verifiable or contestable to a small group of interested readers who follow a narrow and only slowly evolving set of expectations, I get caught up in footnotes, making sure my claims are warranted, looking for the correct loci to cite...These are good instincts that can lead to good writing and maybe even recognition. I have to start, however, and once I do so, not get caught in the snare of substantiation. That can come. Revising is a pleasure. Once you have something down which is an approximation, even in a small degree, of an idea, there is something concrete that can grow and be built out. Contingency is actually king. There are infinite ways to say something. There may be a mot juste but not a sentence or paragraph. Anything that is particular & concrete can be the start of something.
Writing about FW could, on paper, help me with this: its opaqueness and high threshold of understanding, one which is equally challenging for everyone encountering it, means an start is good. An effort to say what you think, if it springs from a real encounter, can begin the process of deeper understanding (which will never end). Whatever comes of it in the future, that is what I am doing by writing about it here every day. Trying to simply put brick next to and on top of brick and see where it takes me.
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As a narratologist I think constantly about discourse and story, narrative (or sjuzhet, a term used by Russian Formalist school) and fabula, the story we read versus the story we think about as we read. It is more challenging bringing this distinction to bear outside of the realm of story. Does argumentative prose, a class essay or a journal article or an academic monograph, have a deep structure, a fabula-like essence that the academic prose of the discourse elicits in the readers mind?
If we think about this from the reader's perspective, an honest reader would grant to the author of the argument they are reading that it is fully formed, laying beneath the first words of the introduction (however formal or boilerplate), and drawing the argument-in-discourse to itself as it unfolds, ordering it. Thinking about this from the other side, instead of being a good storyteller, a critical writer (however we want to call this persona) has to be a good explainer. This however cannot rule the process, the encounter of the explainer and the blank page. I don't think there is a poetics of critical writing and argumentation. Contingency is king, and trusting that external thing which entered your thoughts, something which is not you, can foster the creation of something that has the required objectivity, yet also the inherent appeal of a natural or unique or thought-provoking, fresh, inspired way of looking at something, and stating it. The thing itself, but also its aura.
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Thinking about FW as a narratologist is thought provoking in a unique way. I see potential in FW's wild firework of a poetics and the way it severs, or at least decouples in various grades, what we normally take to hang together in the constructs that make up verbal art and our talk about it. Like the difference and cooperation of discourse and story.
In II.3, the story of Persse and the Norwegian captain is one of the unruliest narratives in modern literature. The idea of unruliness is from Brian Richardson's book A Poetics of Plot for the Twenty-First Century: Theorizing Unruly Narratives. The story has a trebling structure which is typical of much storytelling, and which would be associated in particular with oral narrative. As is usual, the third movement is the difference maker. The captain flees the tailor twice and sails around the world, but after his second return he is, instead, reconciled with the tailor by marrying his daughter.
This reconciliation, the way it comes about, does not make the story make sense, as we would expect. There is resolution happening in the conflict between the two protagonists, and in a very typical way for fairytales or popular literature, by ending with a marriage and also with the celebration of those witnessing it. But the source of the tension that this marriage is supposed to reconcile (again, it feels like this reconciliation is happening, so we have to just go with it) is entirely unclear. It starts when the captain flees after he orders his new suit, and is called thereupon a thief, but no theft is reported. We don't know if he took the suit without paying, or if something else happened which angered the tailor and made the captain guilty. We don't know whence the guilt comes. The story is uninterested, driven only towards the resolution.
This lack of motivation is more remarkable given the many layers JJ has put into the story, with each character identifiable as others, with each other too, and able to split into two or three related personas. With all of this complication, there is still no driving force in the story itself, in its fabula. If fabula can be thought of as a hidden layer behind something visible, an an sich that we know is there and which logically has to be, but which is only present theoretically in the appearances, in this story, there is all surface and no depth, growth without ground, when it comes to the central motivation of its plot.
This kind of unruly narrative (growth without ground) anticipates the postmodern novel. In FW, the key is the dream nature of the book. At the end, in the denouement, there is a tension which is left standing which, normally, would presage or transition to a new episode or book, or major phase in the story: HCE (for it is he) has a fault, but ALP still stands by him. ALP is in fact presented as the way that gossip about HCE and his humiliation can stop: their marriage is "the act of goth stepping the tolk of Doolin" (332.10). This connects to the major theme of HCE's guilt in the book, usually seen either in the incident with the cad or with the girls in Phoenix Park by the Magazine Wall.
I think it is worth considering HCE's feeling of guilt (HCE being, or being from, the dreamer I assume?) as what motivates the story of Kersse and the captain. This connects to the surprising turn of the story to the marriage. HCE hopes ALP will forgive him, wash away his sin. If this guilt, the cause or outcome of the fall, can rightly be considered the driving force of the whole of FW, behind ALP's letter, the twins' rebellion, everything, then surely we can see it as the absent cause of motivation in this story. IT is worth reading it through again in this light, but I have half a book to finish in no too much time.
It is also worth thinking about the role that narrative plays in processing personal guilt, whether the guilt is just inherent to who we are, or is something particular (or both!). The idea that the dreamer devises the story as a response to (in however way) their guilt seems connected also to our inherent ability to follow and tell stories. After all, we dream constantly, and dreams are in a final analysis story. The story drive never leaves our psychic life. The guilt that drives it, that deep down instability in our own soul that imparts tension in all we think, see, and do, is ultimately as unknowable as we are to ourselves---knowable, able to be subjected to a process of knowing, of coming into knowledge, but never in a way where the desire of to know rests. The story will never end or find its resolution.
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