Borgesian Pastoralism
I've been reading Place Names by Jean Ricardou, recently translated by Jordan Stump for Dalkey Archive Press. It's hard to believe, but this may be the first English translation of this short novel, originally published as part of the New Novel movement in France in 1969.
I've come to dub Ricardou's style here (at least for the book's first half) as "Borgesian Pastoralism." This first half is essentially a series of descriptions of some small villages in the French countryside. What's Borgesian here is the minute attention to detail and the fact that, read one way, the book essentially says nothing, but read another way virtually ever single sentence is bursting with significance.
The pastoralism comes from the places themselves--they're lovely, and I want to visit them all. For instance, this from the chapter Belabrre:
Some ten leagues from the touristic village, the road responds to the enticements of a nearby valley; soon it follows the bed of a narrow river, the Demoiselle, conforming to its ever meander. A visitor willing to stop at the place called "le Tournant"--"the Turning" may there witness a phenomenon rarely seen even in hilly calcareous regions such as this. Setting off from a bend in the road, a steep footpath will lead him beneath a verdant arcade, straight to a place where the river's waters begin to whirl in a swift spiral.
If chance has not sent a fragment of bark, several leaves, or some manner of twig tumbling into the current, he need only gather such objects from his surroundings and cast them into the river at some point upstream. In so doing he will better distinguish the waters' rotations, made manifest by the floatsam: he will see the debris veer, then spin, and vanish into the center, aspirated by an intense circular flow. . . .
Needless to say, whatever natural charm these places have is done a great service by Ricardou's prose.
This is interesting to me because although I've read a number of novelists who have all reminded me of Borges's style for one reason or another, I can't really remember one that felt pastoral like Place Names does.
Unfortunately, I'm not too sure if I'm with the second half of this novel. In the second half Ricardou abandons his "travel guide" writing for something that quite obviously explores the novel's various subtexts. The second half has its merits, but I think Ricardou is too intently guiding us toward meaning. Especially bothersome here is some dialog that goes beyond the simply unrealistic to read like something out of an academic journal.
Inevitably, whenever an author tries too hard to instill a certain meaning into a text she is actually sapping meaning from it, because guiding us toward a preferred reading necessarily reduces our ability to provide our own readings. What I liked about the first half of Place Names was how aloof it was from trying to "tell" us anything, how it simply presented a number of interesting elements that were obviously linked in some way.
the excerpt really is beautiful, makes me want to read the book. the passage reminds me of adalbert stifter, but in a hurry.
Posted by: sd | October 10, 2007 at 11:02 AM