Friday Column: The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom

Let us start by agreeing on a few things: that Cees Nooteboom writes with a grace that legitimates the assured tone found in The Following Story, an assurance that might sound presumptuous in a lesser book; that small books are often considered slight, but that when each word is placed with as much precision as in this book, the outcome is substantial; that when a novel's schematics leave the right level of ambiguity, a book will necessarily draw a reader back for the pleasure of reading everything a second time.

The plot is as follows: a Dutchman named Herman Mussert wakes up in a hotel room in Lisbon. He has no idea how he reached the hotel, but he knows the room well because he "had slept there twenty years ago with another man's wife." As he heads out to reconnoiter his surroundings, the story of the affair unfolds: Mussert, his love (Maria Zeinstra), and the love's wife were all teachers at a private school in Amsterdam; Mussert, an ugly misanthrope ("I must get out of this bathroom; my own presence is becoming oppressive"), finds his first and last love in Zeinstra, but in a climactic scene it all unravels. There's a fourth personal involved in the affair as well: a young, beautiful student who herself is having an affair with Zeinstra's husband.

Everything ends badly. All three lose their jobs, and the narrator ends up ghostwriting travel guides for a living. Thus ends our backstory. From Lisbon, the narrator boards a ship with six other companions. They cross the Atlantic and head up the Amazon deep into South America where it slowly becomes evident that everyone on the boat is dead.

The Following Story can simply be enjoyed as a character study. Although the book is scarcely more than 100 pages, the narrator comes across as a fully realized individual, and his affair, so close to bringing some happiness to an otherwise empty life, contains the force of tragedy. The secondary characters are well-pitched, especially Zeinstra. Throughout the novel it's an open question as to whether she loves Mussert or is using him to avenge herself on her husband. Nooteboom carefully, and quietly, accumulates evidence in both directions.

Yet this book also has an intriguing metaphysical level. This may sound dry, but it is not. Nooteboom's choice of epigraph is a clue: "Modesty hesitates to express metaphysical concepts directly" (from Theodor Adorno). Making good on this epigraph, The Following Story is a book that does not discusses metaphysical topics directly; rather it anchors these topics at various points to the story, leaving enough room for readers to speculate as to what it all means.

First and foremost among the metaphysics here is the concept of immortality. Our narrator is nicknamed "Socrates," and, as a scholar of classics, and one of the biggest moments of his academic year comes when he teaches his students the Phaedo, the text that describes Socrates's execution and in which the philosopher lays out his beliefs on the immortality of the soul. Quite symbolically, during his teaching of the Phaedo, Mussert actually assumes the role of Socrates:

He adduced proof upon proof of the immortality of the soul, but beneath all those ratiocinations yawned the chasm of death, the absence of the soul. . . . Of course, they wanted to believe that the uncouth, rough-hewn form before them contained a royal, invisible, immortal substance which was no substance, something which once that strange septuagenarian body finally lay supine, grotesquely inanimate, would be liberated at last from all that obstructs pure reason, free from desire, which would travel, depart the world, and yet remain or return--the impossible.

Continuing the immortality theme, there's this very suggestive bit when the narrator recalls a visit to the Air and Space Museum in Washington in which he sees a film shot from Voyager's perspective:

I had drifted into a sort of theater where there was a film about space travel. I found myself sitting in one of those American swivel chairs that hug you like a womb, and setting off on my journey through space. . . .In the distance shone (!) the unimaginable planet Earth. . . . I could smell the dead dust at my feet, I saw the puffs of moon powder whirl upward and settle again. I was divested of my being, and no substitute was in the offing.

Compare this to the narrator's rendition of the Phaedro:

I showed them the earth from above, my pupils who had seen the earth a hundred times on television, a blue-white ball suspended in space . . .

And lastly, this quote from near the end of the narrator's voyage across the Atlantic:

"I've been here before. And we've been sailing in a southwesterly direction. In a few hours we will see Belem. I have always admire the Portuguese for this--you depart in Belem, you arrive in Belem. There's something cyclical about it, something of eternal recurrence. Not that you believe in that sort of thing, of do you?"

It would seem, then, that The Following Story is the tale of a body's passage (perhaps Socrates's) through time. According to the complete review, Nooteboom suggested that the novel "covers the last two seconds of Mussert's life, one second of memory, and one second of the passing from life into death." With its invocation of Socrates and the eternal return, the book points toward the idea that after death something survives to be born into life again.

But for all its signals toward immortality, this is also a book very caught up on the limits of flesh. At one point, a beetle's appropriation of a dead rat body is discussed in great detail. In part:

Mother [beetle] takes a bit of puréed rat, the larvae lick the inside of her mouth. Everything is connected with love. Five hours later they are eating by themselves, the next day they are crawling around in the rolled-up cadaver. CAro DAta VERmibus: Flesh given to worms.

And the narrator himself notes

That is the difference between gods and men. Gods can change themselves; humans can only be changed. (emphasis in the original)

Despite the freedom implied by immortality, Nooteboom is claiming that humans are still subject to forces beyond their power. In The Following Story, this idea works not only on the level of immortality, but on that of death (we're led to believe that Mussert's death came suddenly and unexpectedly), and even that of life itself (like all good tragedies, Mussert's affair unravels without ever giving him a plausible chance to stop it).

Time, yet another force humans are powerless to control, is also prominent in The Following Story. Throughout the book many different clocks are described in detail, and much is made of the dominion of time over everything. Early on Nooteboom references a clock in Lisbon bearing the following inscription:

Whosoever attempts to interfere with time, wheresoever that may be, whosoever seeks to stretch it, retard it, channel it, stem its flow, divert it, should know that my law is absolute, that my magisterial hands indicate the ephemeral, nonexistent now, as they always do. They stand aloof from corrupting division, from the mercenary now of the scholar; mine is the only true now, the durable now encompassing sixty counted seconds.

But though humans are unable to control time, The Following Story makes clear that time is malleable. Many different kinds of time are mentioned here. There's that represented in Tacitus's Histories, which "are annalistic . . . but he frequently interrupts his narrative in order to stick with the strict order of events"; there's the "time of science" and "the time of the heart," the latter represented by a clock where the numbers are reversed (look in a mirror to see it run normally); there's the "moment" represented by the stars ("what had bound them [the constellations] together was the accident of our vision during the past few thousand years"); the time represented by relativity ("this infinite slowness was, of course, swiftness, as you  know better than anyone else because you must live in this dream-time forever, in which contraction and expansion cancel each other out at will").

In The Following Story, Nooteboom lets all these different concepts of time link together within Mussert's consciousness. Like a number of circles that spin and revolve while nestled withing one another, each of these different modes of time is presented as Mussert tells different sections of his story. What's constant is not the way in which time passes, but the body of the narrator, which (as he's telling "you" a story throughout the book) necessarily remains the same. The Following Story reveals the way different concepts of time interact and fit within one another as the narrator tells his story.

Yet the novel would also seem to be a defiance of time, as its final sentence neatly recycles us back to the book's beginning. It changes everything. Essentially, then, upon reading that last sentence we the readers are transported to an entirely new place, just as Mussert finds himself transported to Lisbon at the beginning of the novel. This brings up the question: If the novel ends where it begins, then has any time passed at all? Or has Nooteboom placed it into a moment outside of time?

This trick also makes the second reading necessarily different from the first. Initially we take the novel as just another first-person story, but after reading the book we realize that it has all been a story told to a specific entity for a specific purpose. The last sentence all but invites us to go back and read the book again, not a bad idea given the book's beautiful prose, its wealth of allusions and aphorisms ("love is the pastime of the bourgeoisie"), and the elaborate way in which different elements are foreshadowed and layered together throughout the course of the story.

The Following Story is small enough that someone could reasonably read in one sitting (although, due to the gravity of the writing, I recommend spacing it out some). Yet in this small frame, Nooteboom has crafted a story that defies simple definition, that can easily support a number of non-superficial interpretations. It is a book that all but compells a reader to go back through it a second time. It is the kind of elegant, managed novel that others, for all their size and extensive plotting, can barely approach the depth of.

Comments

[Paul Sweeney]

Thanks Scott, that was really useful. I've read that book 5 times, and just could not make out why it was so highly regarded.