Miscellaneous

Carver, Gombrowicz…
  August 2, 2006

I have recently picked up again that certain book by Hofstadter that I can't ever finish.  The chapter I flipped to talks about figure and background.  This brought me back to an old idea: a negative story.  That is, a story written entirely around an event, not about it.  The event isn't even mentioned; it has to be deduced by the reader from the shape of the narrative demarcating its empty outline.  Logodrome contains one failed attempt to have this idea become word.

And then it hit me: where I failed, another succeeded a long time ago.  His name was Raymond Carver.  A negative story was the one technique he had perfected.

Now that I got on the topic of theoretical arguments leading to insights about my favorite authors, let's not forget James Carse of the Finite and Infinite Games fame and the late, great, beloved Witold Gombrowicz, a consummate infinite player if there ever was one.  Quoth Carse: “[Finite p]layers must intentionally forget the inherently voluntary nature of their play, else all competitive effort will desert them.  From the outset of finite play each part or position must be taken up with a certain seriousness; players must see themselves as teacher, as light-heavyweight, as mother.”  This intentional forgetting is achieved by what he calls self-veiling, a “free suspension of our freedom,” a concealment from oneself of the fact that one is not the role and doesn't have to follow it.  Gombrowicz's entire oeuvre, his life's work, his obsession, is the exposure and stripping of these veils; flamboyant sarcasm is his weapon.  In Ferdydurke, he calls the veils “mugs” or “arses” (I'm translating from my Russian copy here); people don them and shed them like camouflage fatigues.  Hence also his preoccupation with youth and immaturity, the time and state when the fundamentals of self-veiling haven't yet been mastered and finite play isn't yet taken seriously.

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