Exercise #24: Édouard Levé's Stochastic Anti-Plots
Édouard Levé, Amy Hempel, Anne Carson, Jan Steyn, Garielle Lutz
Hi friends,
Hello! Last month I was traveling to a writing residency in France as I was writing you; today I’m on the move again, having just left the place I’ve been staying and working. I’m in Toulouse, but about to take the train to Bordeaux to spend a few days there before traveling on to Paris. It’s been a good month!
Since I’m in France right now, I thought I’d share an exercise drawn from the work of my favorite contemporary French writer, Édouard Levé. It’s accompanied by an essay I wrote on his work for an AWP panel a few years ago, called “The Plot to Kill Plot: Practical Alternatives to ‘Plotting’ Fiction,” where I spoke alongside Joseph Scapellato, Allegra Hyde, Ling Ma, and Thirii Myint.
The original essay was written to be performed, and had a “shuffle” component in which it could be delivered in many different forms. It’s presented here “pre-shuffled,” in an order determined (mostly) randomly. I hope it works in written form!
Finally, I’m happy to report that my novel Appleseed was selected as a New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2021 and was included in NPR’s Books We Love list for the year, among other year-end honors. If you’re gifting books to your friends and loved ones, I hope you’ll consider Appleseed for anyone who loves sci-fi or speculative fiction, mythological retellings, American folklore, and fiction about the environment and nature. Thank you to anyone giving it this season: it makes me very happy when people consider my books worth giving as gifts.
As always, I hope your own writing goes well this month, and that you and yours are happy and healthy. Enjoy this month’s exercise, be safe, be kind, and happy reading and writing!
Yours,
Matt
In no particular order, here are twenty-three of the most memorable 2021 books I read this year:
Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge, translated by Jeremy Tiang
Rabbit Island by Elvira Navarro, translated by Christina MacSweeney
Exercise #24: Édouard Levé's Stochastic Anti-Plots
Édouard Levé, my favorite French writer, was a photographer and visual artist as well as the author of four books, Works, Newspaper, Autoportrait, and Suicide. (The books were published in the United States in the opposite order they were written and published in France.) I’d like to talk today about what he and his translators have suggested might be called his “stochastic” method composing fiction, a way of working from and with the fragment, while subverting traditional notions of linear plot.
For clarity, the dictionary definition of stochastic is anything “randomly determined; having a random probability distribution or pattern that may be analyzed statistically but may not be predicted precisely.” What Édouard Levé did in much of his prose was find a way to use seeming randomness during composition to generate a final effect in the reader that seems (to me, at least) anything but random.
The rest of this essay was composed in an order other than how it appears here, then reordered at random before being inserted below. When this essay was first given as a performance, each fragment was written on an index card, which I shuffled on stage before reading, so that even I did not know the order the live version of this essay would take. After the card containing the definition above, the next card read: SHUFFLE. BEGIN AGAIN.
* * *
In his novel Autoportrait, Édouard Levé writes, “I have lived through 14,370 days. I have lived through 384,875 hours. I have lived through 20,640,000 minutes. I am one meter and eighty-six centimeters tall. My eye is not sated with seeing, nor my ear with hearing.” He writes, “Déjà vu gives me more pleasure than a great wine.” He writes, “My memories, good or bad, are sad the way dead things are sad.”
* * *
Jan Steyn, translator of Levé’s Suicide and Works and Newspaper, wrote that the “stochastic, yet formally constrained, method of ‘picking marbles out of a bag’ is present in all of Levé’s writing. In this regard, Levé owes a self-acknowledged debt to the witers of the Oulipo group, especially Georges Perec.”
* * *
As translated into English, Levé’s Autoportrait appears as a single unbroken paragraph of 115 pages or so. Each of its sentences is a single fact about the author, or else one of his opinions. His novel Suicide is a fictional investigation into the death of a childhood friend, completed shortly before Levé took his own life. His novel Newspaper is 120 pages of fictional news events, summarized in short paragraphs, organized loosely by category: international, economics, science and technology. His book Works is a list of 533 possible conceptual artworks, one of which is described as “a book describing works conceived of but not realized by its author.”
* * *
My own drafting process often starts with generating an accumulation of mostly unordered fragments. I have never began a novel from an outline. I have rarely known any plot destination toward which I might aim. My final stories might plots propelled relentlessly forward with almost no backstory, with almost no events recounted out of order. But when I began to write, I only rarely knew how any two pages were related to each other, what chains of cause and effect would be necessary to make one of these two pages seem to logically follow the other. If I had to know that before I could begin, I would sit paralyzed on page one.
* * *
“When something wonderful takes me by surprise,” Levé writes, “I try to reproduce the circumstances under which it occurred, in order to make it happen again, but this is confusing the thing with the grace of accident.”
* * *
In my own work, the different levels of order and coherence are a choice made in revision, not in composition.
* * *
If life is a series of fragments—thoughts, experiences, feelings, series of moments coming one after another, but often experienced and re-experienced as if they occurred in some other, more random order—then how does the ending of a life reshape the story that life told? Conversely, how might the ending of a story, reshape the invented life that story told? Levé thought about this too. From Suicide: “The way in which you quit it rewrote the story of your life in a negative form. Those who knew you reread each of your acts in the light of your last. Henceforth, the shadow of this tall black tree hides the forest that was your life. When you are spoken of, it begins with recounting your death, before going back to explain it. Isn’t peculiar how this final gesture inverts your biography?”
* * *
Every piece of writing has to end somewhere. It is difficult to avoid reading a piece of writing in light of its ending. Even shuffling these paragraphs over and over, as I did here, will not prevent this essay from having an end.
* * *
In one conception of this essay, I thought to present my fragments in random order, as I am now, but to also announce a number at the beginning of each fragment: part one, part two, and so on. But that would have falsely implied a structure I neither feel nor desire.
* * *
In my first novel, In the House upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, there is a long middle section in which the narrator wanders through a memory palace of his wife’s making, finding in each of her rooms a single event or object from their strained marriage. Each room was given only a single paragraph. I wrote hundreds of rooms, sixty or eighty or one hundred pages of rooms. I wrote so many because any day I didn’t know what to do next, I wrote more rooms. Once I realized the function this maze of rooms served in the story—they’re the setting for the narrator’s pursuit of his wife, after their marriage fractures—I began to order them, to find a way through. I discovered the “plot” of that part of the novel in the same manner as my protagonist: by opening door after door after door, by peering in at the images and objects left behind in each room, by wondering what story they could together be made to tell.
* * *
In Suicide, Levé writes that “to portray your life in order would be absurd: I remember you at random. My brain resurrects you through stochastic details, picking marbles out of a bag.”
* * *
As a writer, you can expect your reader to have certain reactions to the material, however you present it. The brain seeks patterns and repetitions. It wants to organize, to categorize. Every unknown will eventually be moved toward the known. This is how our brain keeps us safe from the chaotic nature of experience: it tells us a story. We cannot, whether we want to or not, keep from telling stories.
* * *
Some of my stories show their fragmentary origins more than others. One story of mine, “Wolf Parts,” began when I wrote sixty different micro-retellings of Little Red Riding Hood, permutating key elements of the story over and over into new arrangements: the girl, the wolf, the grandmother, the basket, the woods, a knife or ax, the red cap. Before sending it out for publication, I arranged and arranged and arranged, into an order than suggested a kind of arc to the proceeding. But there are many other ways that story could have been arranged. As an example for a class I taught on nonlinear narratives, I made an interactive text adventure version of “Wolf Parts,” in which clicking key terms moved you through the story in an essentially randomized order, driven by reader interest instead of authorial intention. A better path through the forest? At least a different one.
* * *
Amy Hempel once spoke of her own associative writing and intuitive process of building a story: "There is a leap of faith necessary as thoughts and recollections accrue—you have to trust that there is a reason they are occurring when they do, and you will, at some point, understand it. It’s an exciting way to work because of the discovery inherent in it. Patterns proceed from the accrual.” In Hempel’s process, as I understand it—and in mine, as I commonly practice it—the understanding and the pattern are imposed on the material by the writer, before giving it to the reader. But this isn’t the only way to proceed: instead of the writer taking the “leap of faith… that there is a reason [the fragments] are occurring as they do,” it is possible to ask the reader to do the leaping themselves.
* * *
In Autoportrait, Levé writes, “It takes me a while to realize that certain people bore me, such as people who are witty but tell stories slowly, with lots of useless details, at first I admire the precision of their memories, then I get tired, and finally I can’t stand to wait fifteen minutes to find out the upshot of a story that should have taken one minute to tell.”
* * *
The translator of Autoportrait rearranged the order of Levé’s text every time he published it. Just looking at one particular passage: Levé’s sentences appear in one order in the final book, in another order in an excerpt published in The Paris Review, in a third order in a tinier excerpt published years earlier in Harper’s. It’s not entirely possible for me to know if this is merely an overreaching translator: is this ability to be reordered a feature or a bug, a series of successful unique translations or a continued failure to get it right? In French, as far I know, the sentences in this passage appear in just one order, which might or might not be any of the orders they appear in in English.
* * *
Anne Carson once said, “I like to deal with fragments. Because no matter what the thought would be if it were fully worked out, it wouldn't be as good as the suggestion of a thought that the space gives you. Nothing fully worked out could be so arresting, spooky.”
* * *
I began one story of mine, “An Index of How Our Family Was Killed,” by writing a long series of very short images and memories, all related to various kinds of violence and crime. It wasn’t until I imposed alphabetical order on the fragments that a story started to emerge, of a family that had experienced a larger than average amount of deadly violence, of the last remaining son trying to bring order and safety to the chaos that was their lives. If I had used a different organizational scheme, I would have uncovered a different mystery.
* * *
In her essay “The Sentence is a Lonely Place, Garielle Lutz makes a distinction between page-turning prose and “page-hugging prose.” You can read Levé’s books as page-turners—in his English translations, he’s compulsively readable—but perhaps they are better read in “page-hugging” mode: one idea at a time, lingered in, the reader invited to refuse to go on instead of being pushed to proceed.
* * *
Most writers instinctively understand the power of juxtaposition, of counterpoint. We employ it often, but usually as one tool among many. Still, it is possible to write books using only one tool: only juxtaposition, only counterpoint. Levé’s Autoportrait is perhaps such a book. Consider this extract from an excerpt published in The Paris Review:
“When I look at a strawberry, I think of a tongue, when I lick one, of a kiss. I can see how drops of water could be torture. A burn on my tongue has a taste. My memories, good or bad, are sad the way dead things are sad. A friend can let me down but not an enemy. I ask the price before I buy. I go nowhere with my eyes closed. When I was a child I had bad taste in music. Playing sports bores me after an hour. Laughing unarouses me. Often, I wish it were tomorrow. My memory is structured like a disco ball.”
* * *
You or your reader can impose order on a pile of fragments at any time. It is impossible, probably, for the human mind to really read each fragment as its own unit. Unless you read just one. Unless you leave the remainder unread, staying inside the single moment, if you can. Because as soon as you progress, progress appears.
* * *
Some other fictions that could be thought of or revisited in this mode, whether or not they’re intended to be read this way: some of the stories in Susan Steinberg’s Spectacle; Norman Lock’s novella-in-fairy tales, Grim Tales; Michael Martone’s Michael Martone; Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Jedediah Berry’s shuffle story The Family Arcana, printed on a deck of playing cards.
* * *
A belief of mine: mostly, the reader does not want your logic. If you say, life is like this, the reader can only agree or disagree, they go away saying, the author says life is like this and I agree or disagree. But if you make a space for the reader to do their own thinking or feeling or moralizing, then the reader will come to their own conclusions. They will say, I read this book, and it made me think that life is like this. Anything the reader figures out in the space you make, the reader will own—and what the reader owns, they will keep and treasure. There are many ways to create such useful gaps. The stochastic method, which in Levé’s work rarely forces connections between ideas, images, or emotions, is one such method.
* * *
The Paris Review excerpt of Autoportrait concludes: “I have read more volumes one than volumes two. The date on my birth certificate is wrong. I am not sure I have any influence. I talk to my things when they’re sad. I do not know why I write. I prefer a ruin to a monument. I am calm during reunions. I have nothing against the alarm clock. Fifteen years old is the middle of my life, regardless of when I die. I believe there is an afterlife, but not an afterdeath. I do not ask “do you love me.” Only once can I say ‘I’m dying’ without telling a lie. The best day of my life may already be behind me.”
* * *
One goal, perhaps: every reader allowed to make their own order, every reader’s order making each reader their own story.
* * *
Your exercise this month is to write a piece of fiction or nonfiction in fragments, then impose an arbitrary or random order upon them. I would suggest doing this first choosing a constraint for your unit of composition: either the sentence or the paragraph. Once you’ve done that, write 1000 words of sentences or paragraphs that can stand on their own and that do not logically follow each other, as is.
If you are composing on the computer, put white space between your sentences or paragraphs. If you are writing by hand, consider composing on index cards or scraps of paper instead of in a notebook.
Once you have your 1000 words, apply one of the following methods to your text:
Alphabetical order. Alphabetize each of your sentences/paragraphs, letting your fragments land where they must. If you are missing “letters,” perhaps write new sentences/paragraphs to fill out the form, allowing the gaps to dictate your composition.
Shuffle. If you’re writing on index cards, shuffle the cards and then read the story that the arbitrary order creates. If the effect isn’t satisfactory, shuffle the cards again. If it still isn’t satisfactory after the second shuffle, write more cards. (If you composed on the computer, print out your pages, cut the fragments apart from each other with scissors, then fold them and pull them from a bowl or bag to create the same effect.)
In both cases, what you end up with might be interesting but not entirely satisfying. If that’s the case, feel free to revise at the level of the fragment (your sentences/paragraphs) OR at the level of the composition as a whole. You don’t have to preserve the randomness of stochastic composition into a final draft to benefit from having tried it: using these kinds of tactics might be a way to discover interesting material, but not the best way to present that material. After you’ve shuffled your fragments, you might decide you’ll benefit most from imposing a more purposeful order on the randomness you’ve created, or that you’ll need/want to write connective tissue between sections, maybe even hiding or erasing the randomness you used to generate the story.
Good luck! See you next month!
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Matt Bell’s novel Appleseed was published Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, will follow in March 2022 from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.