Narrative Jumps
How high. Or not. Or something else that is both. Paul Celan. Unreliable narrator.
Sections at beginning of novel are coming together. Reading through they “add up.” Chapters pick up where last let off. But each discovers its own territory.
I bumped into a serious jump. A jump in the voice of the narrative which felt jagged, like it needed more lead in. And it is the beginning of the rest of the novel.
I have been trying to tie things together in the story by working each chapter up “a notch” in terms of my use of language. Thats what I have been working on I think, for weeks. And the sides, are finally starting to meet.
I think the chances that I wont be teaching this fall have gone up. And that means there will be nothing nothing nothing in the way of my writing the novel. That said I have already put together first classes just in case.
To stay calm enough to write it, I have to translate too.
Continuity
Things I do to adopt a “serious” sense of continuity over on my site, have helped to provide me with ground. Just like junk helped with sandbox. And it works.
Having translation to lean into, in the morning of my writing day, saves me from the fear I face sometimes addressing writing again, like this morning even made me feel sick.
The translation on my site is in itself a continuation from something else…
I use both now as fundamental to my work day.
Also Cioran goes “there there” in his own dealings with how writing addresses itself as a sickness. I let his fervors run down my spine, as a release of those tensions, the madness of writing just to write.
Paul Celan a Life
Got Paul Celan new bio.
It’s making me think about poetry vs my narrative. And how I have now let the narrative take over the life of the poetry. The poetry feels a little startled by it. Doesn’t matter.
Poetry often exists as a reckoning with hell. Celan managed to make it through by being a translator. Pessoa was a translator too. Marcel also. As well as Pound. There is something very reassuring about its “honest” intentions.
Novel goes much wider than poetry, embraces mythic, religious, rhyme and the mathic as part of understanding language.
Poetry is trapped in “airs,” l’air de in french. Having the air of being trapped there — in rigors of rhyme as a wasteland theology, they are a kind of sludge, pickled in verse. Narrative takes it out of there, gives it Colette and Pessoa, whose a narrative poet.
His poems are verse too. He is like Van Gough but sane, his landscapes…
I gave something “up” in the first chapters of the Novel to Bonjour Tristesse by Colette. Because it starts as a love story. I wanted its simplicity to be in accordance with the intensity of naked innocence. That is also other things. Whose mind has more than one life.
There’s a quiet discussion slipping into the “back” of my mind, about appearance in the novel, here and there, of an “unreliable narrator”… though at this point, no idea what the means are for it to do —