Full Transcript for What Is Tabular Narrative?

not really given the solution. You're not given a model kit for how to solve this. You have to figure it out on your own. And this this need to figure it out and this act of figuring out is part of the effect that the author is getting. So so the thing about both Dogren and the Floating Opera is these are fairly short passages. They go for a page or two. So it's not all that hard to navigate. You could just read the one and then read the other. It's not that big a deal. So Steve Katz is gonna do us one better. In his 1968, I think it is. Absolute postmodern tour de force, the exaggerations of Peter Prince. Steve Katz has actually breaks his narrative from one to two columns and then runs this two column parallel simultaneous narrative for the next twenty pages. And then after twenty pages of this, the rightmost column breaks again. Into two columns. So now I have three columns: the original leftmost column and the two children of the rightmost column, and that runs for another 18 pages. Which gives me a lot to think about in terms of how I am going to j ⁓ digest this part of the book. Right? How much of column one am I reading before I move on to column two? And then column two has these two subcolumns. What am I doing about that? Do I treat all three columns equally? And I gotta remember, these are subcolumns of which one. So it's very interesting. And again, as a reader, it leaves you wrestling with how do I deal with this? Now I don't own, so there's another example of this, and I don't own this book, and I haven't read it. I haven't read it because I don't own it and I can't get it in my local library. That's called Bottom Bottom's Dream. It's the English translation by Arno Schmidt. It's originally written in German. And this is a massive, massive novel. It's a giant book. It's got a huge page count, a huge word count. It's heavy. It's enormous. And it actually runs in three columns. There's the name narrative in the middle column, and then there are these two side columns with with with other narrative and commentary. And that runs the entire length of the novel that way. So Bottom's Dream would be another great example of that. Maybe I'll be lucky enough lucky enough to get my hands on a copy one day. I don't have one. So I can't show it to you and I can't talk about it from firsthand experience. But that has come up in other places as an example of that. So that's one way you could do it. You could literally lay out physical columns together on the page. Another way you can do it though is you can introduce logic in the book that forces the reader to skip back and forth and deal with simultaneous narratives and parts of the books find that simultaneously. And Palefire by Vladimir Novakov, something we've talked about in the past, is a great example of this. It starts with this long poem, a 990 line line poem, or arguably it should be a thousand line poem, which is part of the point of the book. So this call it a thousand line poem is in the beginning of the book, but then most of the back of the book Is anecdo annotations on what happens in in the poem. And so these are going line by line. So here, line 400, line 493, etc. And when I get to that annotation, I kind of need to go back and look at that line in that part of the poem to understand what the annotation is saying. And to some degree, I may have to be reading the context of the poem. So in the po in the process of reading the novel Palefire. One reads the entire poem pale fire multiple times. Because the first thing it's the front of the book, you read the poem, then you start moving into the novel, and you keep going back and reading portions of the poem again to make sense of what's in the novel. So you have to kind of balance and skip how you move between the two. Another book that very much is the the the direct, the spiritual and the direct spiritual of offspring. Offspring of Palefire is The Red Handler, as it's the translated title goes by Johann Harstadt. And the Red Handler is a very similar thing. It it presents the first roughly half of the book, let's say, presents what are said to be the short mystery novels of this, ⁓ of this author. And obviously, if all of his short novels are sitting in half a book, these are very short novels, and that's part of the point. It's He's riffing on the idea of minimalism a little bit. And he's got this extraordinarily minimalist ⁓ aesthetic in in in this guy's writing. And then the second half of the book is the annotations on the minimalist novels that are in the first half of the book. And while Palefire really is the story of the commentator on the poem, the red handler is the story of the author of these books. So as we go into the annotations, we're learning about the man who authored these books. And that's really what the second half of it is about. But again, it's a similar thing. What I did when I read this was I first of all read all the short novels. And then when I got through the short novels, I started reading the annotations. And I had to go back and look back at the short novels to understand what was being annotated. And I basically wound up reading all of the short novels again, more than once as I was going through the annotations. So I moved back and forth because I had to get my head around what was in that short novel, and I had to get my head around what was in the annotation. Just as with Palefire. And so that's another way that it's tabular. You, as the reader, are forced to apprehend and deal with parallel simultaneous narratives. Now, if we want to talk about postmodern tour de force novels, let's talk about infinite jest. So Infinite Jest, of course, is a torto force in many ways and will come up time and again. One of the things about this absolutely massive book, more than a thousand pages worth of text, is that at the end of it is almost 100 pages of end notes. Nearly 400 endnotes. And these end notes are essential. If you don't read the end

notes, you won't understand what's going on in the book. So you can't skip them. And you can't read the whole book and then read the endnotes. You've got to deal with them while you're reading the book, or you won't get it. But these endnotes themselves can go on for pages and pages. Some of them have their own footnotes. So now what I need to do is I need to figure out how I'm dealing with this. When I recommend to people, when you read Infinite Chest, read it with two bookmarks: one in the main narrative and one in the endnotes, right? And You can find yourself sitting and reading the end notes for a long period of time. And you gotta do them both. And then this again presents the dilemma. I'm working on the main narrative, and when am I gonna skip? And ⁓ I'm reading along and I see that number and it says 176. Okay, am I gonna do with this now? But I'm midway through a thread and action and I'm learning things and stuff going on. Am I gonna come back to this later? How am I gonna do this? So the reader has to figure this out. And the fact that the reader has to figure this out is part of what makes this novel interesting and unique and engaging in a very unusual way, and part of what makes it ultimately postmodern. And of course, the other thing to think about with infinite jest is, and this happens in a decent amount of tabular fiction, is The author doesn't necessarily make it super easy. The author isn't spoon feeding it to you. Because if it's spoon feeding it to you, then this moving back and forth thing is easier and it's not not such a ⁓ an interesting question. It's a more interesting question when you're sitting and puzzling things out. And David Foster Wallace very famously forces you to sit and puzzle things out. So while I'm puzzling things out, while I'm trying to understand, I've been dropped midstream into some narrative. And I've gotta figure out the context just from what I'm little clues that are dropped, and I'm trying to do that, and I don't know where I am or what's going on or why any of this is happening. Suddenly in the midst of all of this, I'm given this little footnote. Do will the footnote explain it to me? Maybe that's what's gonna figure it out to me. Will the footnote distract me and send me off on a dog leg that itself is interesting? Where I'm figuring that out and it didn't solve help me solve the main narrative, and I'm gonna still have to come back and wrestle with the main narrative? These are all questions that you get when when the author makes things makes you work a little on on the main narrative as well. And so that's part of why the footnotes are I think so interesting and and important in Infinite Jest. So all that's great. But let's talk about the ultimate example of a tabular narrative. And this is Only Revolutions by Mark Danielewski. Now Mark Danielevsky is best known for his book House of Leaves. And some people like to point at House of Leaves to call it to what they call quote unquote ergodic. I think ergotic is not a very useful word, and we'll get to that later. But if you want to talk about forcing the reader to deal with multiple streams, you're much better off talking about only revolutions. Same author, much better example. So how only revolutions works is you can start reading the book from either side. And whichever side you pick. You're going to read the story of this encounter and this anecdote that has two main characters, Haley and Sam. And because I have chosen this side at random to read from, the big capital H indicates to me that I'm starting with Haley's narrative. And as I start to read this, you'll see, first of all, it is also multicolumnar. And it is multicolumnar the whole way. So I already have that little bit of tabularism to deal with, which is I've got the main narrative here, but I've got this other stuff over here, and I've got to figure out how I'm gonna deal with those two. But then at the same time, while I'm gonna get the big text at the top, there's a little bit of small upside-down text at the bottom of this page. And as I turn the pages, I keep reading the main stack. There's more and more of that upside down text. And over time, the top text gets smaller. And takes up less of the page, and the bottom text gets bigger and takes up more of the page until when I've gotten to about the middle of the page, about the middle of the book, they're both roughly the equal size. They're both roughly taking half the page, and they're both, you know, roughly the same ⁓ point size. Now I keep going and the narrative I'm reading here, the right setup narrative, is smaller and smaller, and and taking less of the page, and the bottom narrative is bigger and bigger and taking more. until I get to the end. And that is because if I just take the book and turn it over. I can do the exact same thing on the other side. And this time, instead of Haley, now I'm looking at the S, I'm looking at Sam's narrative. And to furthermore, make things interesting, Mr. Danielevski has the exact same place in the narrative occurring on the exact same page inward. On either side. So page five of Haley's narrative has the same place in the anecdote as page five of San's narrative, and page 236 of Haley's narrative has the same place in the anecdote as page 236 of Sam's narrative. So now you are given, you are presented with the opportunity to track the two of them and how they're saying the same episode from different perspectives. Side by side and you have to figure this out. Am I gonna sit and read all of Sam and then turn around and read all of Haley? Am I gonna read one page of Sam and one page of Haley, five pages of Sam and five pages of Haley? Daniel Eske doesn't tell you. You as the reader need to figure it out. Now he seems to recognize though that there's a good chance that you're going to try to do that because he has bound two ribbons into this book to track where you are. And the wit ribbons very ⁓ politely, thank you, Mark, are color-coded. So the green ribbon goes with the green spot color on the front. Or if you turn it over, the yellow ribbon goes with the yellow spot color. So I can move through both of them simultaneously, imagining somewhere along the line the ribbons cross, and then go down to the other side. So you might say, okay, well that's fine, but which of these is ultimately prop prominent? Which which side of the book is really the top side? And the answer is it is completely and utterly equal. They both have a title page, they both have copyright information and Library of Congress information, the stuff you would expect. If I turn it around, I'll see the same thing on the other side. Copyright information, Library of Congress information. The page numbers run both directions simultaneously. So I see what page I am of Haley and what page I am of Sam. So this book is completely ambiguous and it's absolutely symmetrical in terms of which side you start from. And again, I have to work through them both to make sense of the story. So this is as tabular I cannot imagine. What you would do that would be more tabular than Only Revolutions by Mark Danielewski. So those are some examples. There are probably more of how authors play with this simultaneity and forcing the reader to choose and forcing you to put your attention on only one thing. And how are you going to shift your attention when all of these things want your attention equally well? Tabularism and narrative, thank you very much.