Almost a decade ago, Michel Butor came across my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ and I added his La modification to me to-read shelf; it proceeded to sit there unconsideredAlmost a decade ago, Michel Butor came across my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ and I added his La modification to me to-read shelf; it proceeded to sit there unconsidered until a couple months ago, after I read Mathias Enard's Zone, from which Enard drew inspiration of its main conceit (a train ride from Paris to Rome in which the narrator's anxious and roving mind considers a major impending decision). I found that novel of Butor's to be fascinating in its total internality. In Passing Time he returns to that inwardness, and also turns his focus on memory and the act of recording it.
The frame of the novel is a man's yearlong stay in Bleston, a British town, and the apparently mystery which he becomes embroiled in. Is the noir narrative one that is real, or is it merely a story constructed out of random signs, which bare significance only via the process of the narrator's recording and creation? Blending myth, memory, and the mostly ordinary events in the town, experienced through the lens of foreignness and dislocation, Butor managers to create a sense of existential dread and propulsive suspense, interleaved with a meditation on how memories accrue significance as we are assaulted by future events and by reminiscence on prior ones.
In our lives we are often subject to various types of suspense, whether anticipation of something looked-forward-to, or dread of something unknown. And we often create from these feelings of suspense stories which both incorporate events gone-by (whether already loaded with meaning, or which become laden with meaning as we careen toward the thing-unknown), and imagine potential series of future events. Through the process of returning to previous events via a diary, and working toward the present, the narrator becomes more and more convinced of a conspiracy which has underlain the duration of his stay in Bleston. Later on, he reviews his earlier notes, and accrues yet more recent events, and on revisitation he finds yet new significances. Paired with this examination of his own memories, the organizing image of the Labyrinth, particularly Theseus in the Cretan labyrinth. To Butor our experience of memories seem a winding series of insignificant time when viewed with disiniterest, but on closer inspection we sense that we can see around the corners of time to see significances and conspiracies lurching around the corners which yet await us.
This is where my real research begins; for I will not rest content with this vague abridgement, I will not let myself be cheated of that past which, I well know, is not an empty past, since I can assess the distance that divides me from the man I was when I arrived, not only the extent to which I have been bogged down and bewildered and blinded but also the gains I have made in some spheres, my progress in the knowledge of this town and its inhabitants, of its horror and its moments of beauty; for I must regain control of all those events which I feel swarming within me, falling into shape despite the mist that threatens to obliterate them, I must summon them before me one by one in their right order, so as to rescue them before they have completely foundered in that great morass of slimy dust, I must rescue my own territories foot by foot from the encroaching weeds that disfigure them, from the scummy waters that are rotting them and preventing them from producing anything but this brittle, sooty vegetation.
everything is clearer once you board the Express leaving the city, the metallic clangor there below, the rhythmic rancor smoothing chuffing out of theeverything is clearer once you board the Express leaving the city, the metallic clangor there below, the rhythmic rancor smoothing chuffing out of the station, the many faces of the city fall away, the hoard of skyrises huddling like homeless around the burning cinders of downtown, the garish billboards in red writing, the brutal hospital building skulking in concrete, and slowly slowly the huddles of urban structure show more fissures, bursting here and there with green shocks of shrub and mangled ficus, I boarded this southward train in a hurry, finding a vacant seat I stowed my precious parcel overhead, nesting like a grouse in the last seat of the compartment facing the locomotive¡¯s rear, the grinding smoothing out to a predictable hum as I stare blankly at the receding reality of the city I am leaving; I have brought with me a novel by Mathias Enard, called, let me see, Zone, which I take up in my nest craning antisocially in my seat; entering a tunnel I spy my doppelganger crouched in the mirror of the darkling windowpane of the moving train, and I begin to be absorbed into this other train journey which is originating at the Gare de Lyon on the express to Rome, and I am thinking suddenly of many other journeys by train that I have taken, not least of which in the body of Michel Butor who too rode this same route with a different purpose, a break with his conventional life and dessicate family life toward a woman in Rome with whom he imagines totally clearly the possibility of a new life, and in that regard these two fictional journeys are the same, are mirrors of each other, are one journey divided by fifty years but existing on the same plane outside of time; the scenery is shifting, urbane outposts become more scarce, parting continuity for greenways and converted orchards which once speckled the peninsula south of the city, blankets of chaparral and sagebush drape the loping hills, highrises crouch into single family homes or kneel to become crammed apartment buildings, whirling by then loitering on the horizon; Butor was born in 1926 to a railroad inspector and his novel which bears so much in common, seemingly, with this one takes place entirely on a locomotive the type of which his father inspected, living in Mons-en-Bar?ul, a tiny village which abuts Belgium in the north of France, when Butor was born it had a tiny population of under 8,000 people - two of which were his parents, and another six his siblings; he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne and then taught in colleges around the Zone - first in Minya, Egypt which lies 150km south of Cairo where he could have run into Francis Mirkovic of Enard¡¯s novel had he been in the locale nearly 50 years later; Minya is often called the Bride of Upper Egypt as it is situated at the cusp of Northern and Southern Egypt, after the unification of Egypt 3100BC this area formed the 16th nome, named Oryx likely after the antelope species endemic to the area, and was an important zone of commerce which linked the two vast swathes of Egypt proper; Oryx overlooked a gentle bend in the Nile with its green reedy waters, and like the pharoahs of the north the rules of the nomes sought eternal homes for preservation and voyage to the world beyond, however lacking the manpower to build pyramids of their own, they carved chapel-tombs into the limestone cliffs of modern day Beni-Hasan; under Pharoah Amenemhat II of the 12th Dynasty in Egypt, the power of the nome rules was all but eliminated; during the Ptolmaic period, Minya was a hub for Egyptian cotton and a center for the worship of the god Thoth which had the head of an ibis and ruled over the Moon, wisdom, knowledge, writing, hieroglyphs, science, magic, art and judgment; under the Roman rule of Hadrian, the area surrounding modern Minya was populated by Greeks from around the Roman Empire, and their temples and monuments are still found in various states of decrepitude; nearby stands the city of Antino?polis, built in 130 A.D. in memory of Emperor Hadrian¡¯s eromenos Antinous, who drowned on the banks of the Nile river and was considered a God following Egyptian tradition; startling my reverie, the train has pulled into its first station, releasing a hydraulic sigh and gnashing of metal, shadows stir outside and begin to flow into the car, filling up the surrounding seats and unleashing a clamor of movement, I return again to this novel by Mathias Enard, which follows a man, Francis Mirkovic, who has been working for years in espionage for a French Intelligence agency, traveling all around what he has termed ¡°The Zone¡± which describes the area of the Mediterranean into the modern Middle East, Northern Africa, the Balkans of which he is a countryman, up through to Spain, he has above him a suitcase filled with photos, documents, testimony, related to crimes in the region; though he grew up in France, his father is French and his mother is Croatian, he went on to take part in the Croatian wars against Serbia and in Bosnia, where he fought alongside his countrymen Vlaho and Andrija; back in France he was involved with a woman named Marianne and later one named Stephanie; after the wars he found his way into Intelligence albeit as a small player, and was sent to Cairo where he met an exiled Dutchman who made pornography in the Nazi deathcamps, which began his side project of documenting evidence of the Zone¡¯s many disgusting criminals and those that protected them; in his life he has collected many stories from the region, not least of all his own, and much of the narrative is punctuated my his own reflections about his memories of his lost friends and lost loves, as well as reflection on his own identity, his own many crimes and murders for a country which he now almost never visits; I close the novel as someone sits in the seat directly beside me: a stout woman with faded red lipstick spanning her thin lips and teeth and whose hair was a battlefield between combed and mussed bits, I sat in cold terror that she might inquire about the novel at hand and I considered how I might explain the novel and what I enjoyed about it, being that it is told in a single breathless sentence spanning twenty four chapters not unlike the Aeneid by Virgil, another document of war and clash of bronze weapons and bodies left to fertilize in the ancient Zone; this book which I had been carrying around with me for over a week and which I was finally arriving at the Roma Termini station, which parallels the change of heart at the core of Butor¡¯s novel also, has both a high emotional valence of its own, but also bristles and shines with a sort of Wikipedia blackhole of research of conflict in the region, and a philosophical exploration of hatred, violence, humanity, and importantly History, it grinds along heedless of its own present, which after all is a simple train ride punctuated by occasional reading not unlike my own and trips to the cafeteria car for tepid cups of Beefeaters, but many eras of time and experience overlap the reality of the narrative which becomes a finely woven fabric of its many themes and locales, seamlessly integrated into the emotional core Mirkovic¡¯s own experiences of love, loss, violence: are these the foundations of humanity and the locomotive themes of history, which is perhaps an ouroboros feasting on its own fate: inevitable spiral of the apocalypse, or is it a symptom of the Zone, which has positioned itself as the powderkeg of modern and ancient history which has spiraled out to feast of the cultures of the East which it still finds itself gorging upon for economic exploitation, extraction in Africa, missions in South and North America, which seems even today to be inextricable from war, conflict, exploitation, ruin, hatred and autocracy; but the woman after nestling down appears to have thought better of her seating situation or perhaps forgotten something or is even perhaps on the wrong train, and she vacates the seat next to me which remains open, and I sigh a bit in relief because in truth I did not want to explain this book, this great and complex and compellingly entertaining if dismal novel, to her, in point of fact if she had asked me I might have lie to her, I might have described another novel, maybe Butor¡¯s which after all is the Odyssey to this book¡¯s Illiad, rich in philosophical and psychological drama couched in comfortably domestic if still existential questions, or maybe I would have told her that this is actually a work of nonfiction about the region of the Middle East - sure to deter a woman of her apparent intellectual stature and sure therefore to stave off and deter any further questioning on the novel (or any conversation at all, likely, few want voluntarily to enter conversations on the Zone), and so I sigh in relief and think about my own journey, and how my own journey today fits into the great spiral of History churning around this very train, and I picture Mirkovic sitting in the Roma Termini, having his cigarette at the end of the world....more
While I believe that his other Hungarian novels are more perfect in execution, in Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming, Krasznahorkai's thesis is writ large. While I believe that his other Hungarian novels are more perfect in execution, in Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming, Krasznahorkai's thesis is writ large. There are no saviors, no heroes, no prophets but false prophets. Love, Power, Money, even Zen are impossible vehicles for salvation in the world. In Krasznahorkai's fictions, nothing can save you, for all is already lost.
More than his other novels, everything in Baron is not-quite, all connections are missed, everything occurs too-late if at all. Even epiphany, immanence, is a false god which only illuminates the path taken as wrong, while obfuscating the path proper.
There are many moments to love in this novel. The Professors efforts of thought inoculation, his hourlong bursts of anxious brilliance. The two funerals and their attendant ironies. The brilliant character of Dante, and of the Baron (perhaps the best wrought manifestation of Krasznahorkai's Myshkin-like Innocent). The utterly brilliant episode of the Baron's clothes.
In attacking the full scope of modern apocalypse, this is Krasznahorkai at his most acerbic, broadest, and most zany, with Pynchon-esque scope. A different Krasznahorkai from his honed and anxious modernism of his other Hungarian novels, but still a strange joy to read....more
I have been on a jag of reading long, dismal ultra-modern fiction lately. Krasznahorkai, Cartarescu, Pynchon. When I read them, I see the world as I oI have been on a jag of reading long, dismal ultra-modern fiction lately. Krasznahorkai, Cartarescu, Pynchon. When I read them, I see the world as I observe it. There is a special thrill of identification, explanation and exploration of the world as it appears, its stylized reality - if not its naked image.
Saramago awoke a new appreciation for the modern psychological novel, which unfortunately too often is reduced to watered down realism, particularly in American literature. But what Saramago delivers in psychological, emotional, and philosophical breadth, in this odd parable is so gripping, so visceral. I couldn't put it down. In technical terms I believe this is a perfect novel, the kind of novel that convinces people of the value of literature. It is a rare novel that I recommend to all.
It is occasionally good medicine to the post modern dismal to take a draught of Hope....more
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