HOBART

SSM: video games & repetition in stories

 

Possibly the best thing I've read online recently is Brian Oliu's "Zelda Revisited." As such, I've been wanting to write about and try to point more readers in its direction, but I have kind of struggled with what say say beyond, like, "wow," and "awesome," and just kind of pointing my finger at it and nodding.

After reading it a handful of times, one of the aspects that has really stuck with me is how well Oliu is able to draw inspiration from a game that so many of us are probably familiar with and remember fondly. I mean, throw a Zelda reference into just about anything and I'm all but assured to like it. That said, and as easy as that is, I think it can be really hard to then grow above that and write a story that works on its own terms and where the video game / pop culture references don't feel like a bit of a cheat. (Along these terms, I actually remembered Kevin Wilson's "Mortal Kombat" that I wrote a bit about last year. Also: Mike Alber's "Magic: The Essay" and Matt Bell's "Ken Sent Me: Lost in the Land of the Lounge Lizards" are both among my favorite of pieces we've been lucky enough to publish in Hobart for their ability to use gaming as an element to something larger. (See, also: Matt Bell's "Mario's Three Lives."))

Where "Zelda Revisited" shines is in its language, and the way it has really re-envisioned such a familiar scene. Written with the tautness of the best short shorts, the story is lyrical like a prose poem and sucks you in, almost hypnotically. In fact, my favorite parts are the very-hypnotic repetitions -- first with its "Unlike before... " and "We will... We will... We will..." and finally, in the last paragraph, the amazingly circular, "I will wake up and think you are dead. I will wake up and you will be dead... I will wake up and I will be dead... I will be dead and you will wake up..." etc. 

Yes. I know, right.

In fact, just to plug a couple more favorite recent stories, it reminded me a bit of the repetition in our own Jensen Beach's " We Cannot Cross the River" and "Family," both stories that use repetition in their own different ways but to the best of effect.

-aaron

SSM: stories v. novels, featuring DFW

 

Phew. Finally. The semester over. Final seminar paper is written and turned in, grades are done, and even took the weekend to drink and relax and basically not do anything at all, and now... now, back to work. Which means, we're going to try to kick some action back into this blog. For real. And what better time to do that, than short story month? Nevermind the fact that the month is half over. 

First up, I just finished reading Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, which, as my mantra has been going, is maybe not all that great as a book, but is kind of amazing and fascinating as artifact. Here's a snippet from Wallace, which I thought ties in nicely to short story month, and is also an idea and concept I've thought a lot about, here and there:

...I meant that's probably ultimately why novels and movies have it over short stories, as an art form. Is that if the heart of the short story is dishonest, there aren't enough of the little flashes to keep you going. Whereas in a novel or a movie, even if the central project doesn't work, there are often ten or fifteen great, great, great things.

Hm. Thoughts on this? Of course, one could argue that, then, if the heart of a short story IS honest, it has the possibility of maybe even being the "greater" art form, what with it being like a small, crystalized, perfect thing with nothing around it to taint it. I don't know. 

 

On a similar note, I remember hearing something year ago, on NPR I believe, where this guy referenced a Japanese term (again, I believe; my memory of this actually happening is really, really fuzzy) that basically referred to something being better because of its faults -- the novel with the moments that don't quite work, the album with its "weaker" tracks instead of any kind of best of, etc. I've reference this, in one way or another, tons of times over the years, and I really, really wish I could remember the interview or the word or phrase. But. Anyway. Not sure where I was going with this, but I think it's interesting and wanted to throw it out there.

From now until the end of the month I am really going to try to read and blog about a story a day. We'll see how that goes.

-Aaron

A Conversation With Jean-Philippe Toussaint

My friend (and yours) Jim Ruland had a chance to speak to Jean-Philippe Toussaint recently, and sent this interview. I was going to run it on Hobart, but the schedule didn't allow for it to appear in a timely manner there. Instead, we are cross posting it here on Hobart's lovely blog and at HTML Giant to get the interview as much attention as we can. —Matthew

Jean-Philippe Toussaint is the author of nine novels. Originally, published in France, the slender books have secured the Belgian author a reputation as a stylist who favors impressions over plot, comic situations over character development. Since 2007, Dalkey Archive Press has been publishing Toussaint’s work in English, trickling out two or three novels a year to a growing audience of eager enthusiasts for the quirky little books. The most recent novel, Self-Portrait Abroad, released earlier this month, features a Belgian author traveling to cities in Europe and Asia. A sensual train trip to Prague, a visit to a strip joint in Nara, a victory in a lawn bowling tournament in Cap Corse are described in Toussaint’s quintessential style. We’re never told the purpose of these travels, or even if the voyages are connected. Nothing much happens and there’s little to link the vignettes save for a curious epigram:

Every time I travel I feel a slight dread at the moment of departure, a dread sometimes shaded with a soft sliver of elation. Because I know that any trip brings with it the possibility of death—or of sex (both highly improbable of course, yet not to be excluded altogether).

This is Toussaint in a nutshell: A deeply felt impression that trumps experience, a seriocomic tendency to editorialize, musical language and a whiff of the absurd. As Toussaint’s visits to the United States are infrequent, I was fortunate to speak with him last month after his book signing at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.

Ruland: What is it like to come to a new place, where your books are appearing in a new language for the first time, even though they were written many years ago?

Toussaint: Yes, it’s a strange feeling because Self-Portrait Abroad was translated in English ten years ago by a friend of mine, John Lambert, who had already translated Monsieur for a British publisher. Afterwards I tried to find a publisher in the United States, but nobody wanted to publish it. With Dalkey it’s possible to publish the book in English. So it’s quite strange. But I know my books. I wrote some texts 15 years ago, but I know them very well. They are my texts, my characters. I feel very close to them.

Ruland: That’s very interesting, especially since, there’s a strong autobiographical element. The protagonist of Self-Portrait Abroad is an author very much like yourself.

Toussaint: Yes, it is, it is. It is the only book I wrote where the protagonist is clearly myself. A Belgian writer, he has the same wife, the same children, the same age. The same questions. He is myself. But I introduce also some element of fiction. It’s not only autobiography. So I think it’s interesting to introduce some element fiction. The other books, like Running Away, it’s clearly fiction, but of course there’s some element of my real life. For me it’s not a problem. I could say that everything is autobiographical even if I don’t really live it in the real life, because I live it when I write it. I experience it with my senses. Everything. I think everything is coming from me.

Ruland: Is there a lot of autobiography in your earlier work, such as Camera?

Toussaint: Well, yes, of course, but it’s not so clear. It’s not exactly me. But of course, I feel everything, and I know very well the main character, the narrator.

Ruland: As a reader who is encountering your work in English chronologically, the novels have this progression of incredible stillness to almost manic movement.

Toussaint: I would say the priorities are different. In my first book, there is more humor. And there are, I would say, for every new book that I write, I have always the same problems. I think a real writer writes always the same book. But it’s important also to renew some things. In The Bathroom and Camera I think I would like to express a view of the world and I try to be funny, the humor was very important. And now it’s quite different. Especially with the last books Making Love, Running Away, and Self Portrait Abroad, and the next one to be published in English, The Truth about Marie, there is more gravitas, there is more melancholy. Different as I get older. Maybe that is the reason.

Ruland: The humor in your early novels is very pronounced. But I think once you learn how to read your style, you can find humor in all the books. You’re not going for the joke as often, but the humor is always there. Would you agree with that?

Toussaint: Yes, maybe, but with some books, like Television, humor was really a priority. Now it’s different. It’s not a priority. I can write some pages without humor and it’s okay. Before if there was no humor I would find it no good, not interesting. When I read the books for an audience and if people didn’t laugh I was very sad and thinking it’s not a good book. That was the criteria.

Ruland: But there plenty of funny moments in Self-Portrait Abroad. The lawn-bowling scene… I find the grandiosity of the narration hilarious.

Toussaint: It’s quite difficult to speak about humor. What’s important is the efficiency of humor. It’s a question of feeling. I have some ideas about literature, but about humor, it’s really difficult. It must be instinctive.

Ruland: And also very much about context. Television is the most slapstick of your books. There’s a kind of literary situational comedy where the protagonist is set up to fail.

Toussaint: Yes, there is humor of the situation. The situation is really funny. I try really hard to create the situation. For Television, it was a priority. I think Television is my funniest book.

Ruland: My favorite is Monsieur. He’s an amalgamation of poses. And some of these are so out of touch with his surroundings, that it becomes very funny. In other novels, when the narrator recognizes these poses in other people, he skewers them with editorial digressions and parentheticals that electrify the prose in a very funny way.

Toussaint: Monsieur is a theoretical character. He looks like an idea of character. He is like other characters in literature: Palomar, a character by the Italian writer Italo Calvino. Also there is a character by a French writer Valery, Monsieur Test—like Mr. Head. He is always thinking, he is very theoretical. With Monsieur, I tried to create such a character.

Ruland: Mr. Palomar is similar to Monsieur. He only exists in terms of his impressions and ideas.

Toussaint: Yes, exactly. I would like to create a character like Monsieur Palomar. A character without qualities. Instead of Monsieur Something, Monsieur Nothing.

Ruland: Moving on to more recent novels, I read somewhere that Making Love influenced the film Lost in Translation.

Toussaint: I think it’s a coincidence. My book was issued one year before the film. So she [Sofia Coppola] really had no time to read it and make an adaptation for cinema. I think it’s a coincidence. But it’s the same places in Tokyo. It’s the same hotel. It’s very funny. There’s a lot of coincidence.

Ruland: You have a very elastic definition of what constitutes a novel. Have you met much resistance to your books, that they aren’t long enough, don’t contain enough narrative, or are in some way lacking as a novel?

Toussaint: For me I don’t mind. It’s not a question. A novel is a notion. You can do what you want. For me, you can write non-fiction in a novel. You can do poetry in a novel. I think the genre novel is very interesting because it’s very free. Very open. That’s why I write novels. If I had written in the 19th century, I think I would have written poetry. Nowadays, the genre is so open you can do what you want.

Ruland: In the anthology, Best European Fiction 2010, you refer to your piece, “Zidane’s Melancholy,” as a novel.

Toussaint: It is a very short text. A sort of interrogation about a literary genre. It is at the same time nonfiction, an essay, poetry, something like psychoanalysis, something like literary criticism. Everything inside. Not a novel. It’s not even a short story. It’s everything.

Ruland: What would you like your readers to take away from your latest book Self-Portrait Abroad?

Toussaint: I would say it’s a very funny book. It’s very light. It’s also really the only one where things are autobiographical. I experience everything I’ve narrated. There are some very funny situations.

Ruland: It feels lived. I read it while traveling, waiting in airports and flying from once city to another. I found that it awakened me to the wealth of sensory impressions around me. All the information that one chooses not to take in while traveling. Many of the scenes are simply exquisite observations. As soon as something like a story takes shape…

Toussaint: That’s always my idea. It’s not telling stories. Here it’s clear. What I’m talking about is absolutely uninteresting. I am talking about things that I lived. Very little things. Uninteresting things. Always daily life stuff. And it’s my life. I try to make literature with my life. It’s my project.

Ruland: It’s a wonderful project. The next novel to be published in English…

Toussaint: The Truth about Marie. It was the last book to be published in France, last September. I think it’s a very interesting book because there’s some reflection about literature.

Ruland: How different is it from Self-Portrait Abroad?

Toussaint: It’s not so different. There’s a cycle. A cycle about Marie. Because in the last three books there is always a narrator and the character of Marie. Making Love, Running Away, and The Truth about Marie. I am always speaking about Marie. Marie is more and more important. In the last book, she’s really the main character. I think that’s maybe different. I have never had such an important feminine figure.

Ruland: Marie makes a very bold impression, yet she’s extremely elusive. Is she more present in this next novel?

Toussaint: Maybe not so much. It is always my style. It’s all that I can do.

Ruland: What are you working on right now?

Toussaint: Maybe I will continue with Marie.

Ruland: You travel quite a bit. Is this your first time in California? T

oussaint: No, ten years ago I was invited by the Film Festival of San Francisco for my film Ice Rink but I stayed just a week. I don’t really know California. I discover it now.

Ruland: And have been here long enough to get a favorable impression? Or will it show up in a novel someday…

Toussaint: I have always impressions. I don’t know what I can do with this impression. Impression I have, but I don’t know what to do with it.