who?
october thirty-first | nine twenty post meridiem
Geezers Need Excitement
I've been reading Thomas Bernhard's The Loser, which is oppressing me in a way that's common to a lot of fiction I've read recently, but in such a concentrated manner I think I'm finally starting to figure out what that what is. It's a seemingly endless monologue, with no paragraph breaks, by a narrator who has travelled to the Austrian town where his lifelong scientist friend committed suicide. He speculates obsessively about their shared friendship with Glenn Gould, and Gould's genius and how each of them failed to live up to anything equivalent to it and how this manifested itself in their lives. What's oppressing me is how relentlessly univocal it is, the extent to which you're trapped in this narrator's musings and remembrances; musings and remembrances which do not shy away from exaggeration or extremes of judgment, ruthless vitriol, and endlessly circling back on their own private pattern of oscillation and progression (or non-progression). It's the sort of narrative that frustrates by your inability to interrupt with a helpful interjection which might redirect it towards a more productive - or at least interesting - line of thought. And, perhaps most significantly for me, it's almost wholly subjective, private, and speculative, and about something that's sort of intrinsically subjective and private anyway: long-term friendships. The unreliable narrator is one of my favorite devices, but here I think it's being abused, or at least taken past the point of aesthetic interest and into unwashed-man-on-the-streetcorner near-psychosis.
It's this sense of dealing with the personal through (sometimes excessive) personal means which is annoying me about fiction in general. I'm also reading Iain Sinclair's Lights Out For The Territory; a psychogeographical series of journeys through London which wrings a kind of speculative amateur archaelogy through a very vibrant style. This is a similar dynamic to what Sebald does in his prose works, and it's one I find very congenial right now: that eagerness to look outside of yourself, outside of conventional ideas as to what consitutes intimate cultural connections and companionship (i.e., romance and friendships, the territory of novels) (and I swear this needless alliteration is happening of itself - I'M POWERLESS TO STOP IT AAARRRGGGGHHH). It's not a strict dualism between the personal and the social; more a series of Big Questions re: in what does the personal consist and how do we represent it to ourselves? How does apparently ephemeral trivia play a role in people's obsessive private consciousnesses? What can we learn by looking at the unique, the peculiar, the anomalous fortean elements not only in the behavior of humans (or characters), but in the cast off materials - the worn brick and graffiti smears - they leave behind (and how we in turn react to them)? What glosses can we make on the catalogs of representation that have come before us?