短篇小說｜Anne Carson: Flaubert Again

10-17

Objects would suddenly fall or fall apart, cars go off course, dogs drop to their knees. The Army was doing sound experiments at a nearby desert in those days. I was nervous all the rest of my life, she wrote. She was a novelist and enjoyed some success. But always she had the fantasy of a different kind of novel, and although gradually realizing that all novelists share this fantasy, she persisted in it, without knowing what the novel would be except true and obvious while it was happening. Now I』m writing, she would be able to say.

She broke off.

Where would you put a third arm? is a question asked in creativity-assessment tests, or so I have heard. Will this different kind of novel be like that, like a third arm? I hate creativity, she said. Certainly not like a third arm. It would be less and less and less, not more. Barthes died, he never got there. She named other attempts—Flaubert, etc. Other renunciators, none of them clear on what to renounce. This chair I』m sitting in, she thought. Its fantastic wovenness, a wicker chair, old, from the back porch, brought in for winter. Me sitting here, by a lamp, wrapped in a quilt, beside the giant black windows, this December blackness, this 4:30 a.m. kitchen as it reflects on the glass. The glass too cold to touch. The loudness of the silence of a kitchen at night. The small creak of my chair.

To be a different kind of novel, it would have to abolish something, abolish several things—plot, consequence, the pleasure a reader derives from answers withheld, the premeditation of these. Abolish, not just renounce them. To renounce is weak, reactive, egoistic. If she were ever really writing, the writing would pull her down into itself and erase everything but her decency. She would correspond at all points to her story, but her story would not be a story of Heaven, Hell, chaos, the world, the Trojan War, or love. It would just tell itself. It would have no gaps, no little indecent places where she didn』t know what she was talking about. Because, she wanted to say, it would be a story of nothing and everything at the same time, but by now, while only dimly realizing that she was more or less quoting Flaubert』s famous 1852 letter about 「a book about nothing」 that everyone quotes the first time they have this idea, she knew that she had lost it, the murmur, the trace, the nub where it was her own (whatever 「own」 means in a world where it is also 「again」), and she was forfeit, foolish, flailing, inexact, and rattling on—it had eluded her. It let me go! I cannot bear to be let go, clenched in my quilt, a phantom receding, it rustles off, the dawn barely blueing the air, the static stopped.

Chilled and stale as the old night itself, she stood up and folded the quilt, wishing that she were hungry, but she was not, wishing that she were the kind of person who took baths, but, as a rule, she did not bathe. Part of the reason for this was that at the exact moment of lowering her body into boiling-hot water, for a split second, this always happens, she is five years old again and it is Sunday night and she is horrified. Horrified why? She doesn』t know. School on Monday? But she did not dislike school. Or maybe she did at first. Not later. At any rate, there is a rolling, all-pervasive upwash of dread, one great, hot, shooting surge of dread-sensation through mind and body, a sense—perhaps?—of Time, carrying a body from Sunday night to Monday morning, to every Monday morning after that, and on and on, willy-nilly, to extinction, a mountainload of moments forcing the body from now to then, from drab to drab, from exposure to exposure, this progress, this exasperating, non-negotiable, obliterating motion forward into the dark—the dark what? Was a body (at age five) too new for it? Could it be saved from it? Whom to implore? What enemy forces, where? And what about the sheer searing thrill of it—boiling-hot bathwater—this could not be denied: a brilliance shot up through it, and the body fairly sang. Then it was gone. She took the shock as a lullaby and did not expect anything different. When does that begin, the expecting anything different? Is there a childhood sublime? Does it end where expectation begins? For the sublime is punctured by egotism, by the rapt, hard, small beak of my self demanding to be me. My self finding the words for that. If I can find the words I can make it real, she thought, and that was when she sat down to be a writer.

At first, the energy required for using her new beak obscured anxieties or questions like What to write? and Who cares? She wrote about her friend Martha, who』d knocked over a pile of coins in the library. She wrote about going to church with her mother-in-law on Christmas Day. She wrote about snow. It was while she was writing of snow, in contemplation, that doubt seeped in. And all her sentences turned their blank, awful faces to her in blame. It was the numismatics library, she wanted to say to them, but the sentences did not show pity. The same old faux-na?ve stuff about Martha. Oh stop! they cried. Snow again! they scoffed. She went on awhile with the mother-in-law-on-Christmas-Day story anyhow—she liked that one. To comment on knees in church had seemed a bright idea, a bit of an edge.

During the sermon, I crossed my legs. It worried me, she wrote. Once, in Berlin, at dinner, she』d sat beside a man who made his living translating American crime fiction for a German publisher. Got fired. Couldn』t find a non-obscene German equivalent for 「she crossed her legs.」 Could this be true? She studied what she could see of her own legs, two knobby knees in black tights. Glancing around, she saw that no one else had crossed theirs. Places like church—does everyone worry? Does anyone know the rules? Were the rules discussed before I came in? Being respectful in church is a matter of impersonation. Being a daughter-in-law is, too. We all impersonate people who know the rules. I am always making myself up as I go along (Sartre). For Christmas, she』d received a book on the existentialists, people who denounced impersonation, people who said they were nauseated by rules. She crossed her legs in the other direction. Is crossing itself the issue? Are straight lines ethically preferable to bent lines? Why do we call criminals crooks? She recalled studying Pythagoras in school. Early philosopher. Not existentialist. He made a list of everything in the world in two columns. He put Good, Male, Light, Limit, Straight, Accurate in one column, on the right, and Evil, Female, Dark, Unlimited, Bent, Lost in the other, on the left. There』s fear in rules. Oh, that Helen of Troy! Straighten her out? Not likely! Any man might do a girl in, any man has to, said Sweeney.

Sartre would have liked Sweeney. There』s fear in rules and stupidity in sentences. All the old hatred of women and crookedness since Pythagoras』 time having got packed down into stupid sentences, she saw it as one big grindstone grinding through days and nights and history and philosophy and novels. She thought suddenly of Martha in the numismatics library, knocking over a pile of coins. The sound was like coins, there is nothing else that sounds like that, being knocked over. The numismatist glared. Martha laughed later but not at the time. Her mother was in the I.C.U., in a city some miles away, recovering after a nine-hour surgery. Or not recovering. The doctors were vague, the nurses overworked. Martha wished the numismatist could know this. He might have taken Martha』s arm. Martha might not have wept in the stairwell. Once, she and Martha had gone to Greece together, to an international writers』 conference. While they were there, she』d renounced writing. Instead, she made sketches in a sketchbook and titled it 「The Glass of Water,」 as if that were what everyone was looking for, a glass of water in Greece, not a different kind of novel or some not-stupid sentences. The sketches were a bit cartoonish but loving. We see the glass of water disappearing up the stairs with a Russian poet. Or gripped fast by a Turkish Cypriot novelist (who has poured it into two glasses). Or lost by a Spanish writer behind a mountain of toast at the breakfast table. She found toast difficult to draw convincingly, from a side view. Drawing the Peruvian poet, on the other hand, who claimed to have videotaped his llama drinking from the glass of water, was a joy, as she already knew how to draw llamas. The videotape was mostly blank. Meanwhile, the former Nobel Prize winner from Ireland had seen the glass of water being hoisted (by Samuel Beckett in a bar), and there was no pronoun for that, he kept saying. The Serbian poet fell off the bus. He got no sympathy. He never drank water! Then finally all the writers in their 「owl of Athena」 costumes on the last day, an indelible memory. An excellent sketch. All their crazy signatures. She and Martha had, as we say after vacations in Greece, learned a lot. They had found sharing a hotel room fairly unbearable due to their very different temperaments. It brings tears to her eyes now. She isn』t sure what kind of tears they are. She opens the 「Glass of Water」 sketchbook to the last page. It is a drawing of empty hotel balconies. Someone has scrawled 「5 a.m.」 on the side of the page and at the bottom, 「Already tomorrow is here,」 with a bunch of green and blue marks she can』t remember making.

作者：Anne Carson

來源：紐約客（2018.10.22）

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