[I wrote this several months back, after reading Alphabetical Diaries, but since I had gotten to that book after it had been out for a while, no venue of which I was aware (important proviso) that seemed as if it might be interested in something about it had not already published something about it, so I just let it sit around. But on the occasion of the return of The Clock to MoMA, I thought I might take it back out and put it here.]
What sort of thing is Sheila Heti's Alphabetical Diaries (henceforth AD)? What does it do? It is hardly tempting to say that it is, with its lack of any temporal or narrative structure, a diary, though its matter is diaristic. Let us ask, to start, what it is like; what may it usefully be set alongside?
We may say: it is a work of accumulation, in which the pileup of detail, the first not necessarily connected to the next, both carries one along and limns a subject to whom all these details occur, and resembles in this respect texts like Lucy Ellman's Ducks, Newburyport or David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress (which also ought to be set alongside each other), or his later so-called Notecard Quartet, in whose first book, This Is Not a Novel, "Writer" announces:
A novel with no intimation of story whatsoever, Writer would like to contrive. ...
Plotless. Characterless. Yet seducing the reader into turning pages nonetheless.
In all of them the line "Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage" occurs. Quite so.
The "collage" of AD was not quite so freely assembled as Ellman's or Markson's, because of the fairly severe constraint under which Heti composed it, both as regards what was permitted to occur in it and how those things can be ordered. We may also say: AD is an appropriative work composed of bits and pieces of another work, like the centos that rearranged individual lines of Homer or Virgil to narrate the life of Jesus. (To say nothing of the many, many examples that do not restrict themselves to a single source.) And, as the title tells us, these bits occur in alphabetical order. (A computerized alphabetical order, so that we get, for instance, the sequence "Alone in a room. Alone. Alone. Alone. Alone.", because the period (ASCII 46) comes after the space (ASCII 32). Were I, with my human prejudices, to have alphabetized these same five sentences, the first would have been last, the punctuation disregarded. Nevertheless it must be admitted that that order in the text is better, or at any rate less bathetic.) Here one may be tempted to think of the Oulipo and the extreme constraint-based work it and its affiliates have produced: Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa, Georges Perec's Les Revenentes, or Christian Bök's Eunoia. But very few Oulipian constraints, even the mind-bendingly restrictive ones employed by someone like Doug Nufer (consider Never Again), determine the material nearly so thoroughly as Heti's does, and those that do, such as N+7, tend toward the trivial. (They are so to speak organizational procedures rather than compositional constraints.) The combination of the restricted source text with the rule of alphabetization, with Heti's contribution to the final form of the text being one of selection after the mechanical procedure has been carried out, rather than creation of material according to a constraint, is less like Oulipo than it is like, say, total serialism. (Merely requiring alphabetically-ordered sentences would be another affair and one could imagine Nufer writing an alphabetical novel from scratch.) This is, it's true, a pretty rough-and-ready sort of distinction, which may not admit of a decent precisification; the basic thought, though, is that Oulipian practices attempt to spur on the creation of fresh material, even if the range of permissible material is quite restricted. But Heti does not create any new matter in Alphabetical Diaries.
What remains to Heti is selection, or, if you like, erasure of what is not to be included, and in a textual mode, emphasizing the latter, we might put it alongside something like Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes or Tom Phillips's A Humument, though for Heti the unit of preservation is not words in whatever spatial arrangement they may have on a page but entire sentences: having alphabetized her roughly 500,000 words of sentences, Heti then cut away roughly 440,000, or 88%, of them. Her creativity is curatorial: after the choice of source text and rule has been made, this operation of selection/deletion represents the sole intervention remaining to her.
We need not, however, limit ourselves to literary works, and may place AD productively alongside Christian Marclay's collage film The Clock (henceforth TC), also an appropriative work of accumulation subject to a strict constraint. Marclay of course did not limit himself to one film as his source, but while he and his assistants had the entirety of available film as possible sources his selections were, in the event, fairly classical (that is to say, TC consists largely of well known American and European films, along with a few TV shows: Columbo and The X-Files both make appearances). He also had greater freedom in placing the scenes relative to each other: all the 12:05 scenes must precede every 12:06 scene, but they can be freely ordered within the minute.
TC is ordered chronologically, not alphabetically—something that would not be totally absurd in film; Arst Arsw does not really reward viewing in full, but it does exist, and one could imagine it being done better. Like AD it has its characteristic beats: in Heti we get clusters around possessive adjectives and pronouns; around question words; around names; around now and then, if and should. I will forms a thicket of injunction and prediction within the long I section. In Marclay all the hallmarks of the generic day are observed: breakfasting in the morning; shootouts a little past noon (Charles Bronson's Harmonica, in Once Upon a Time in the West, even observing to Henry Fonda's Frank that they're a little past the canonical time); filing out of school at three and the office at five. All things in due course, and even Hell itself awaits its appointed hour to breathe out its contagion to this world. Since in each case one knows where one is in the work's progression these landmarks can be anticipated and serve to generate tension and release. It is not that the works are not so absorbing that one pays attention to where one is, marking time until the next thing happens, the next unit begins, so much as that being absorbed in these works is, in part, being aware of the progression of time and letter.
David Velasco, writing in Artforum, called TC a "remarkably bad" piece of cinema that is nevertheless compelling as a "paracinematic—and, indeed, aesthetic—experience". I am not sure that AD is remarkably bad as literature, but it is compellingly paraliterary in the way it directs attention not even to "language" but to letters and the alphabet. To be aware that the Ps cannot last all that much longer and that Q must be coming up soon, and then to be amused that the Q chapter is all of one sentence long, is not the sign of distraction that "surely this chapter must be ending soon" would be in another sort of book: awareness of its literally literal qualities is awareness of its substance.
In both works plot and reference are lost in the magical principles of adjacency and resemblance; one experiences narrativity without narrative, in which the formal devices that create the feel of coherence are laid bare. Even without Marclay's sensitive sound editing purely visual features knit disparate scenes together: a character looks to one direction, and is met in the "reverse" shot by the answering gaze of a character in an entirely different film, and it all flows together. Someone opens a door and enters a building—cut—someone else steps forth, exiting a different one, and the logic of crossing a threshold prevails. One person looks down at another's wristwatch. What AD lacks in the aural it gains in anaphora: it is astonishingly difficult, as one reads, to remember that the pronoun "he" in one sentence does necessarily refer to the previous sentence's male name, or corefer with its "he":
Then he said, what is your name? and his eyes flickered across the alley, paved in stones. Then he spat on me. Then he went to get a cigarette and I could smell him smoking.
Who knows if the questioner, the spitter, and the smoker are the same person? "I" and "me" in two or three successive sentences presumably do all refer to the forensically identical person, but they could be years and miles apart.
I watched through the window as Vig left the garden and went into the street and started writing on his BlackBerry. I welled up with tears. I went back to my room where my clothes were.
In TC, it is generally pretty obvious when two sequences come from the same film; here, one may wonder whether even seemingly perfectly matched pairs of sentences had, originally, anything to do with each other:
Does he die, drowning, trying to kiss himself? Does he stare forever at his image?
Perhaps these were written just like this, one after the other, only to be separated by scads of "does he really"s, finally to be placed back in order when those intervening sentences were deleted. Perhaps they had, as composed, nothing to do with each other, written years apart—surely a person is allowed to think about Narcissus twice. Yet these terse little narratives go down easily, and stand out, as they wouldn't in a conventionally composed text, for their being comprehensible together. While they could have come together by the mere operation of alphabetization, their seemingly purposive adjacency is one of several reminders that while AD, like TC and like Markson's quartet, may be an "assemblage" in the mere sense of being made out of preexisting material, it is also assembled in the sense of being put together with purpose, not just thrown into an alphabetical heap. Not for nothing does it begin with six sentences starting "a book that…" ("a book that is a game" is the last); not for nothing does "I once" so niftily follow "I never" without a gap; not for nothing is the section of the "I" chapter beginning with the bare first-person pronoun set off from the rest of the text by some decorous vertical space. Heti's elimination of 88% of the text did not, one must presume, proceed haphazardly, and, just as does Markson's, her text seems to drop hints about itself:
All the elements of the world, everything I encounter and that other people encounter, can be put in a book.
Don't forget that although you aren't telling a story, you must still do what stories do, which is lead the reader through an experience.
It will not be fiction, and it will not tell a story, and there will be no characters, and you will not worry about the voice or the way it is written, just about what you are saying.
To quote Markson quoting Dizzy Dean: it ain't bragging if you can do it.
What are we to make of AD's selection, its constructedness? Catherine Lacey, writing in Bookforum, may well be right that Heti did not redact as she did "to remove the embarrassing bits", since after all "vulnerability has long been Heti's compass as a writer", but we need not think that she was engaged in Calvinistic deceptions to think that the fact of her selections is significant. (Anyway, do you know what Heti considers embarrassing, what wounding? Maggie Nelson once told a seminar that she considered it more revealingly personal to discuss her writing process face to face with them than to describe, for the benefit of strangers, anal sex in the opening of The Argonauts. The possibility that Heti is actually increasing the proportion of embarrassing or wounding bits—if that's her thing, why not go all out?—is not broached.) Here at last it seems to matter somewhat that text which serves as AD's source is Heti's own diary: there would seem to be a real life to be glimpsed, at a fair few removes, in these pages.
Velasco again on TC and its (rather more obvious) constructedness writes that "Every movie has its own temporal grammar, and Marclay typically gives us just enough of a film to reveal its particular speed or pacing … he makes salient the idiosyncrasies of movie time", the time of its individual component movies and the time of movies in general. This way of putting what Marclay is up to suggests that he's accurately conveying to us something about, say, Otto Preminger's Laura, or about time in movies—something that was anyway true—and one of the things that a rearrangement of existing material, as in TC, promises to do is make clear salient sympathies and connections that would otherwise remain hidden. There are facts about movie time that could also be understood independently of TC, but which it brings out in a compact way. But the same technique can be employed, as in Markson, to create an impression of sympathies and connections, the entries in their sequence adumbrating a consciousness which is a pure intentionality. There's no substantial Novelist of whom we might say, as we can of movie time, that we might have learned the same things about him some other way. There's just the panoply of notes, with the occasional wry comment, out of which we create a character. "And so the chorus points to a secret law", as Goethe put it, but in this case the chorus legislates by its pointing.
Wittgenstein, in his Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough, called the kind of presentation that puts one thing alongside another to transmit an understanding of "just the connections" übersichtlich, generally translated "perspicuous" but used by him somewhat eccentrically to denote a display that enables multiple perspectives, showing us multipolar relationships and the overall shape of a thing. "It is equally possible", he writes shortly before invoking Goethe's chorus himself, "to see the data in their relation to one another and to gather them into a general picture without doing so in form of a hypothesis concerning temporal development", the way, for instance, a diary might show a person's evolution in narrative time. The decidedly atemporal organization of AD seems to achieve just such a perspicuous representation: each of the individual male figures in the book receives, naturally, his own section for his first name: Lars, Hanif, Pavel, Lemons, a sort of composite, cubist portrait; the "he" section displays from all angles The Heti Man. "I will" gives a compact representation of her resolutions and suspicions. Overall, the radical organization of the text seems to present us with Heti's sensibility in an uncommonly direct fashion.
Sort of. David Markson really existed, of course—but it's not called This Is Not a Memoir and the figures of the quartet, Novelist, Writer, Reader, Author, whose subjectivities are the hidden principles of the collage, aren't David Markson. Sheila Heti really exists, and it is called Alphabetical Diaries. But we aren't, for all that, confronted with Heti's first-order sensibility.
Diaries are already a scene of construction, memorialization, and sense-making; potentially of self-deception and self-justification. They are not naïve records of the events of a person's life, written with, as it were, an innocent pen, not because their authors are necessarily trying to distort things but because there is no innocent pen. Still, Heti's was a diary of events many of which not only Heti experienced, about which intersubjective agreement is possible, and the full text, recording ten years of her life, would, moreover, presumably enable its reader to put together more than its temporally various authors realized they were revealing. One would learn, if not about Heti and her life, at least about Heti the diarist and her perspective. This might be even more the case with an unredacted alphabetized diary: who knows what might be revealed about Heti the diarist in (one imagines) hundreds of pages beginning "I "?
We have, however, a much reduced text, Heti the redacter's version of Heti the diarist's version of Heti the person's life. (It's possible that if we had the full text to compare with the redacted version we would find it to be just more of the same, that Heti's editing is really just stripping out redundancy. But why assume that's the case?) If we try to look Heti face to face in this text we will see her through two glasses, darkly. Why so much as think that that's what's happening? AD is built out of Heti's diary, and the material is, unsurprisingly, convincingly diaristic in precisely the way that diaristic and epistolary novels aren't—full of the grain and strangeness that someone cutting a diary from whole cloth wouldn't think to invent. But it isn't a diary, nor is it even an excerpt of a diary; she leads us through an experience as if of revealing hidden connections through an objective, semantically indifferent rule of arrangement, but she has constructed the impressions that we will thereby get by selecting what is there to be connected to what. Not, indeed, to deceive us, since we could only be deceived if we thought we were learning about Heti as she lives and breathes, but to construct characters: Lars, Hanif, Claire. And the chief one, who isn't named. Call her Diarist.
This is pretty wonderful, a really good way of delineating what’s different about Heti, and of describing the the kinds of agencies this alphabetisation gives us.
I wonder where (or if) Murnane fits in.
Posted by: Guy Lionel Slingsby | November 12, 2024 at 06:47 PM