Telling

I finished Handke’s Across on the underground yesterday. I write yesterday because this post will go up on what is my tomorrow and your Saturday. It is still Friday for me, Friday afternoon, 3.10, which means all the sandwiches are discounted at Benjy’s. It’s Saturday (or after) for you – I should remember I too am included in this ‘you’, that I am also the addressee of these words, but forget that for the moment. The fact is, a day divides what is written from what is published and in that time span anything might happen.

I am in London; I write in an internet cafe on Charing Cross Road. I happily anticipate a trip around the bookshops; I have Across beside me on the desk. Will I find any more Handke in London today? R. M. reminds me I said with my chest puffed out and striding around her living room: ‘you’ve backed a winning horse’. Is that what I said, really? It’s been a few days, and what confidence I had has dispersed. Then, it is true, everything seemed possible. Writing was open to me, the end of the six papers I had to write was in sight and I was even letting the plan for a novel crystallise inside me. A novel, of course, which will never be written, but I had the sense of incubation; something was preparing itself inside me and in that pregnancy I was happy.

And now? There is no inside. I make no plans; when I return to my office on Monday – if I return, for anything might happen and what I have written now may only reach you posthumously – I will have to remind myself of those projects with respect to which I felt so confident a few days ago. Is this what London does to you? Is this what happens in the constant press of people, in the endless round of events? I have Across open beside me. I thought I had finished it, but it turns out there are a few more pages, an epilogue. How had I missed them? How was it they hid themselves from me, keeping their secret in the pages beyond that one I thought was the last?

Nevertheless, they tell me little. In what I took to be its final pages, the mysteries of Across started to form themselves into a greater mystery, which is to say, those plot strands which never seemed to come together – the murder, the wandering, the topic of thresholds, assembled themselves into a whole.

A few days later, I had a powerful little experience in the Oak Tree Colony supermarket. (It is the basis of the present tale.) No doubt as a precaution against shoplifters, a tiled mirror is fitted to the ceiling, and chancing to look up I saw my face in it.

What is the experience? He looks up and sees himself. What does he see? Not the one his son (whom we have not yet met in the novel) resembles, but the one who resembles his son.

Ordinarily resemblances between forebears and descendants strike me as distasteful, if not outrageous; but this resemblance was the opposite; and it would never be noticed by anyone but me. It had not to do with the features but with the eyes, not their shape or colour, but their gaze, their expression. Here, I said to myself, I see my innermost being, and for a moment I felt acquitted.

Acquitted of what? Of the murder he committed earlier in the novel? And why did he see his innermost being in the eyes of a face which resembled that of his son (a resemblance only the narrator declares himself able to have seen?) This by way of a response: earlier, as I read, I underlined this phrase: ‘this could all be said differently’. I underlined it thinking: what is it that could so be explained? What is the ‘this’ that is in question here? What is the event this book is recounting? I ask this question again after reading the brief passage in which ‘the basis of the present tale’ is supposed to be revealed. That passage continues:

In the far corner of the supermarket, in the meat department, two white-clad women were standing in total silence. A car rumbled over the planks of the canal bridge. Outside the display window, there was a great brightness; a vault of light spanned the bridge. But this gaze, I asked myself a little while later – what was it like? And the answer: Wounded.

He is speaking of the gaze he saw in his reflected image. The gaze in the mirrored ceiling of the supermarket. What was it he saw? Again, it is a question of what can only be told and retold, and in different ways each time. This novel is this retelling; retelling – but telling is only ever retelling – is its life. And I think to myself: perhaps this telling is the life of all novels, perhaps this is the life of which all novels speak. What does this mean?

Reading this passage I remember how once, when I liked to think I was writing, I would attempt to pare away what I took to be inessential details. So here I would have wanted to delete the passage about the white-clad women or about the rumbling passage of the car on the canal bridge. What have they go to do with the experience in question?, I would have said to myself if I, as their author, were able to delete them. With what would I have been left? With a few lines describing an intensity, a strong affect. A few lines and many blank pages and with vagueness. Everything, I know now, depends on telling.

It is only recently that I have come to understand what ‘this could all have been said differently’ might mean. Happening on this underlined phrase in Across as I sat outside the Lloyds building waiting for R.M., I thought: Handke is teaching me what a novel is. I thought: I am learning by the details he includes in his novel – no, not ‘includes’, that is the wrong word, the details that his novel comprises; the events which allow it to come to itself – what a novel is. I am learning about telling. That was earlier today (your yesterday). Now I’m going back out into the afternoon and I know the final pages of Across will bear me up Charing Cross Road towards the bookshops.