The Narrative Object

Juan José Saer

Implicitly or explicitly, the notion of object occupies the centre of all philosophy. Implicitly or explicitly

(but mostly implicit), the commercial narrative fiction is related to philosophy. Therefore, it is possible to

say, implicitly or explicitly, the notion of object occupies the centre of all fictional tales. This constant

presence assumes many different forms, but in my opinion what is the most important is how it is related

to the mode of being of narrative fiction, and we could even say: to all narratives.

The verbal transmission of a fact (it does not matter if it has occurred, and if we were to claim it did

happen, it does not matter what is the greater or lesser probability that grants us this capacity to know)

consists in a series of conventional signs that produce an artificial equivalence of the fact. Whether the

transmission is oral or written, it does not matter: anecdote, chronicle, epic, report or novel, the result is

always a construction based on two different materials depended on each other, like water requiring two

molecules of hydrogen and one molecule of oxygen. These two elements form a series of representation

styled by the random signs of language and certain numerical marks provided by the selected genre

(anecdote, chronicle, epic, etc.). All stories are constructions, not discourses. In a discourse, it is rather a

series of universalities [universales, world or universe] that took place, insofar as the story parades an

incessant procession of particular forms [figuraciones] – and whether it has in fact occurred, the

particularities remain unchanged. It is argued that, within some philosophical trends, universalities are

considered objects – as distinct entities of mere subjectivity – but if this is so, the fact would only

reinforce the point of view we have adopted.

If we take not a novel or an epic, but a simple anecdote as the example, this view would seem clearer. The

film director Howard Hawks was waiting for Faulkner at the station, and it was the first time they are

meeting, when Faulkner got off the train, Hawks was there: ‘Mr. Faulkner? I am Howard Hawks.’ And

Faulkner replied, ‘I know. I saw your name on the cheque.’ The stylization has reduced the situation into a

few phrases, excluding most of the inextricable empirical complexity of the encounter, the simultaneous

perception of the two men, their respective stream of consciousness, the particular mode of each and both

of them within the space-time continuum, etc. (we can continue listing infinitely, as much as we want, but

the limitations of language itself would oblige us, in this case, to synthesize). On the other hand, when this

short story functions as an anecdote, certain invariants of the ‘anecdote’ genre are present in this short

construction: the brevity, the unexpectedly witty reply, and through the form of a particular personality,

the dry humour (although it is not always the case in anecdotes; allowing, within the genre, to slide into

some subgenres which are irrelevant now), less explicit to the whole scene. The verbal stylization of facts

combined with the fixed elements of the genre constitutes the anecdote. However, these invariants in the

story, are not universalities [universales], but serve as moulds for the particular elements which are

evoked. In fact, for the listeners, although we like the anecdote, we remain uncertain of its exact meaning:

we might want to demonstrate the light-heartedness of Faulkner (rather improbable on the other hand

despite his truly jovial reply), or perhaps how since he was always short of money, was trying to thank

Hawks for the advance payment in a discreet and modest way, but we could also suppose he was alluding

to the overly mercenary customs reigning Hollywood, etc., etc. If a discourse presents itself as abstract,

unique and intelligible, the story, instead, is a simulacrum of the empirical, what is already presented as a

simple anecdote, or view with the prestige of the epic, of the chronicle or of the novel (even though

proclaimed as truthful or fictitious) always have the tendency to be constituted as a kind of tender

[sensible] construction. When the false is true, fiction fakes a reality not a discourse, which is a

concatenation of universalities [universales], but an object, or as a singular organization of particular

qualities.

What is valid for an anecdote is also valid for a short story, novel or epic. The wrath of Achilles, the web of

sugary tales that Dinarzade and her sister weaved to distract the minister, the only song from the

harmonica of Mr. Helton, or the agony of Rufian Melancolico, are from the order of particular things,

similar to a scene we witness on the street, and the significance, the interpretation according to the point

of view we adopted could vary infinitely.

If we take the song of the Sirens as example, in the same way as for the different witnesses of an incident

on the street, for different readers the meaning could vary – without making it loses its shine or

fascination on the readers, turning the opaque scene, uncertain and contradictory. Styled by the language

and organized in the moulds of the ‘epic’ genre (even though perhaps the fine thread we can attribute to

some subgenres which are often abundant within the epic), the image of Ulysses tied to the mast of the

nave has the factual objectivity configured by the advancement from the outside, and the innumerable

witnesses – both listeners and readers – circulating various versions of the meaning. We could conceive

the scene as a metaphor of a compulsion stronger than will and duty has obliged the individual who

suffers its tyranny to impose physical obstacles in order not to fall into the temptation of yielding to the

fascinating danger because of his fear of its destructive forces. By making the decision of being tied to the

mast and plugging his ears, Ulysses wants to be protected from the sorcerer’s song – this would remind us

of the alcoholic who locked up the drinks or the gambler who demands the officials from the Ministry of

Interior to bar him from entering the casinos. According to Suetonio, for the sophists of Rhodes island, the

content of the song of the Sirens, the same as the name Achilles adopted when hidden amongst the

women, were all pointless questions (due to the impossibility of obtaining a precise answer) which

should be left to students to discuss during rhetoric class. For Adorno and Horkheimer, in the Dialectic of

Enlightenment, the scene is an unconscious description of the alienating division of labour because while

the leader (Ulysses) weighs, according to his class logic, the threat of a tragic end, if captured by the

Sirens, but for the oarsmen, the anonymous masses – insensitive and indifferent to the song, or even

worse, without a tragic importance if they were to fall victims to the destructive influence – they must

keep rowing. For Kafka, the song of the Sirens is without doubt dangerous, but much less dangerous than

their silence:

But they have a weapon more terrible than their song: their silence. Although it has never happened, maybe

it is imaginable that someone was saved from the song, but of the silence certainly not.

This shocking Kafkaesque variant seems to interpret the myth of the Sirens as a transcendental

metonymical form, and also relate why the work of Kafka, with his systematic application of incertitude,

with regards to the meaning, could be the clearest example of structural narration with an opaque

autonomy of the object, not the conceptual transparency of the discourse. The indeterminacy of sense in

story of first magnitude is comparable to the universe. The multiple readings, which I have just described

in the example, give the narrative object an indefinite number of possible interpretations as it occurs

within the different systems that attempted to explain the world: the hermeneutic attempt is always

speculative, and we can take this word in more than one sense.

The longevity of certain stories which permits them to traverse centuries and cultures: who is not

saddened by the fate of Palinuro until today, who has not observed still, with endless wonder, the

manoeuvres of Buscón, who does not daydreamed of being bandied through the sertao by the incessant

procession of the ghostly and rough heroes of Guimaraes Rosa. Tearing apart the transparency and

pragmatism of language, these lumps of verbs, thick and atypical, in its own way, putting aside the

universal concepts, organized as unique concretions formed by particular elements that continue to exist

indefinitely as such. The constant flow of speech jammed in this bloom denser than the utilitarian

abstraction, and if the nominalists consider the universals as flatus vocis, without a higher existence than

the tone of voice that utters in the instant of utterance, the narrative object instead lives in the eternal

present of the story with the gross substance of particular things.

It is obvious that the notion of the object is also related to the problem of representation, i.e. whether if

the particular that appears represented in the story exist outside of it and came before it, or if it exist only

superficially in the literal sense of word, as a textual surface that, insofar as resulting in a series of verbal

combinations, constitutes not more than an appearance, suspected on the other hand that it could also

inspire us, if similar thing exists, the extraverbal reality. The answer to this dilemma in this sense or

another, like how it has demonstrated interminable discussions throughout the century, seems to

constitute a simple opinion: Reality-Came-Before-the-Text giving the impression of being the essence like

the First Cause with regards to the appearance of the world. However, what stays clear in this debate is

the existence of the narrative text, which, because of these discussions precisely, has further affirmed its

autonomy.

The whole world knows that, according to Flaubert, he was Madame Bovary, but fewer are aware that he

had also said ‘a Madame Bovary in each little town of France’. This contradictory declaration encapsulates

terms of dilemma proving that even for Flaubert himself the problem remains unclear. By saying that he

was Madame Bovary, Flaubert signifies that the transposition of his romantic ideas into a feminine

character would eliminate from the text the fickleness of documentation, giving it rather a virtual

character. But with the declaration that opposes the aim to exalt the representation of his middle-term

(the heroine), it thereby gives rise to the categories employed much later by various critics – with Georg

Lukacs amongst them – to describe the character types of realist novels of the 19th century. The ‘Madame’

of the title leads us into thinking that, despite his intimate projection in the character of Emma, Flaubert

also had the intention of introducing in his novels elements of satire and moral criticism of society,

because it is evident that Madame is ironic, and came to signify so more or less. Hence, this book shows

what is hidden in reality under the respectable title of Madame of many French towns, and the scandal

that promoted the appearance of the novel suggests how his aims were achieved.

From how the problem is approached from different angles, all of the above seem to suggest it has always

clearly resulted in considering narrative as an autonomous object, an end in itself whose sole reality as

object we would extract the whole meaning. The particular forms which constitute – by being solely

particular – the empirical sequence raise more than just clear definitions or enigmas, and more questions

than affirmative concepts.

While it is a verbal object, the story is also a mental object living in the memory and imagination of the

receiver free from verbal condition. For imaginary recollection, the mental existence is no less

problematic than the recollection of what we call the real. But we can say how in a certain sense it is much

more verifiable than the latter, because, if it is a text, we can use it as often as we need for verification. But

this difference is not only puerile but also illusionary, and superfluous and pretentious that the narrative,

insofar as an object, could give us more assurance of reality than the non-verbal objects from what we

called the ‘world’, mostly because the opposite seems less likely.

In the beginning, we have affirmed that all narratives, fiction or not, are constituted by a series of

particular forms framed by a variable number of conventional elements belonging to different generes,

just as in the anecdote of Faulkner. For others, insofar as it is art, all narratives tend be divided naturally

by the invariants of the construction and the genre. By its distance, ostensible or not, with these marks,

each narrative is a singular being, and the individuation (singularity) is produced thanks to the

proliferation in the interior of the particular elements detrimental to the invariants of construction and

genre. In a reverse case, these invariants impoverish the texture of particular forms (someday we should

write the history of the evolution of details in realist fiction, through the path opened by Mimesis, the

seminar work of Erich Auerbach) and transformed the story into a type of industrial product. The novels

of Chandler, during his time, with his inclusion of new particular forms, is remote from the detective

genre – although conserving some of the invariants, such series of murders, puzzle that is only resolved at

the end, etc. The result was the thriller that, in turn, after sometime was converted into a genre more rigid

than the old detective novel – similar, with its repetitive mode, like the industrial objects, all identical to

each other, in order to meet the demand of the market, delivered from the same pack. The tyranny of the

genre alienates both the reader and the novelist, but all the more for the latter who is obliged to please

the market demand of the production circuit, annihilating his conscious of free creation.

Inversely, we can give examples of certain narratives that started off with the same constructive

elements, with its abundant inclusion of particular forms, obtaining the status of an object that is unique

to the work of art, of narrative object that is sufficient to itself and which, inside the limits that were

imposed by the principles of sovereign construction, its own world, a cosmic truth within the other. If we

were to consider comparatively three novels from the 20th century written in the span of a decade, from

1954, 1955 and 1964 respectively, with the same language and from the same continent, Farewells by

Juan Carlos Onetti, Pedro Páramo by Juan Ruflo, and The Silencer by Antonio Di Benedetto, what is

immediately evident is that, from the same point of departure, and principles of construction, each have

reached extreme singularity of distinction (and to say again, it does not matter if the object that

represent exists outside our subjectivity or is a pure mental object).

The principle of construction that divides these three stories is the first-person narrative, the invariant

element of many other. And amongst these precise examples, each has fallen into a different mode. The

structuralist generality contains much of the specific story as the skeleton of Clodia Lesbia, being

desirable and cruel, fanned by each night of passion and the suffering of Catulo. The living material of the

three novels constitutes an immediate refutation of these generalisations. In Farewells, the narrator is

external to the facts, in way it suffers from what we would call the poverty of empiricism that resorts to

imagination and, as a consequence, in certain parts we are told about what did not occur but only

imagined by the narrator, etc. In Pedro Páramo, the first person of the story goes crumbling towards

fragments of second and third person, each time it recurs in more fluid, elliptic, and fragmentary manner;

and as for The Silencer, the narrator tells us the story indifferently, of what has happened outside, pacing

out what has been revealed to us. But it seems to realise the scope by narrating in an ambiguous and non-

affirmative way – which is perhaps the dementia of truth stretched by his approach.

These three distinct texts, which began with a common procedure, could be described as a story told in

first person, where the possibility of the narrator’s own knowledge is ambiguous, contradictory, and

limited, thus producing, as deployed, its conditions of singularity – although to be recognised as stories, it

must be produced under certain invariants of the genre, and in this case, the genre of ‘novel’. Besides the

obvious (but necessary) stylistic individuality, many other factors of differentiation would intervene each

of the texts, even though we have found three texts, particularly in relation to representation, some

coincidences that reflect the preoccupation of the epoch, such as the possibilities of narrative form, the

number of difference is greater than those which resemble. The concurrences result in a general semantic

indeterminacy of the stories which debunks the only certainty that Sartre was vehemently opposed to:

the ubiquity abused by the omnipresent narrator, the empirical modesty of the story told in the first

person. Deliberately proposed or not, it hardly matters if we were to admit that the meaning of the story

is in the story itself. For these three novels, the empirical modesty of the first person presents very little

assurance of veracity, unlike the omniscience of the third.

This indeterminacy of meaning, however, would not tarnish the relevance, nor reduce its efficacy to

nothing. On the contrary, the confused images, unfinished narratives, its enigmatic allusions, the sudden

transitions, the constantly disrupted linearity of the events, or, on the contrary, misleading regularity

engendered by a logic that escapes us, the world shattered, the singular existence of its resulting

characters, confront our actual human experience, as much more plausible than the many discourses,

allegedly rational, political, economical, scientific, religious, philosophical which deals mysteriously with

the oppression, and attributed its authority (of course, to those who are supported by it) the advantage of

certainty.

Refusing to deal with the general, emancipated, thanks to its own logic, by the supposedly ineluctable

external imperatives, the ideological, moral, religious obligations that are estranged from its essence,

separated as far as possible by the stifling rules and conditions imposed by the repetitive routine of the

genre, these narratives, rooted in the murky and swampy waters of the particular, have acquired the

unique and non-reproducible taste. Gaining the same autonomy as the rest of the objects in the world,

with some of them, larger, more patient, and more fearless, it is not only limited to reflecting the world: it

includes (and also believes) staying there where – besides the postulation of an supposedly authoritarian

universe endowed with this or that unequivocal sense – there was really nothing.

(1999)

Translated by Justin Loke

(April, 2014)