Nor It the Nothing Never Is

I was on holiday recently, and, as I was picking my way through the books I'd brought with me, I re-encountered a wonderful little thing I hadn't looked at for at least five years. It was a three-page story (or a three-page piece) by Donald Barthelme, one of those included in his career-spanning collection Sixty Stories. I don't know Barthelme very well, but Sixty Stories is one of the most rewarding selections of short prose I've ever seen or heard of, and I'm thinking now that it might be a worthy contender for a go-to holiday book: it's light, compact, beautifully designed (in my Penguin Modern Classics iteration at least), and promises delight on every page. It's always an uncanny sort of pleasure to recognise a source of influence for writers you already know well, or, if not quite influence, a concentration of much that you've loved in others. I read Gravity's Rainbow after I'd read Midnight's Children, and I remember well the strange suspicion that the best of Rushdie's book had been lifted almost wholesale from Pynchon's.¹ Reading Barthelme now, he shines as a true hero of doggedly comic writers; every page calls to my mind David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, John Barth, Martin Amis, Angela Carter, Rushdie, Pynchon, B. S. Johnson, James Thurber, Vonnegut, Heller, bits of Burgess and Borges and Bellow, O. Henry, Nabokov, Beckett, even Joyce. This is a partial and imperfect list, obviously, but what also matters to me is that these are not just great comic writers but writers of impeccable prose—some of the doyens, in my experience, of sentence-craft. You can get sick on prose like Barthelme's and Nick Baker's (who often writes better sentences than Martin Amis, I feel), but it's also a reliable source of uncut, moment-by-moment joy.

As an undergrad, I was assigned a handful of bits from Sixty Stories for a seminar on contemporary literature, but I remember that I missed the class. I had, however, done the reading, had enjoyed the reading, and the piece that most beguiled me back then was the one I turned to on holiday. Its title is 'Nothing: A Preliminary Account', and it was first published (surprise surprise) in the New Yorker. Barthelme himself has been recording reading it.

'Nothing', like the poems by Emily Berry and Oli Hazzard that I discussed in a previous post, is a virtuosic piece of list-making. Unlike those poems, which are laid out in sparse, regular forms, Barthelme holds the freer reins of prose.

It's not the yellow curtains. Nor curtain rings. Nor is it bran in a bucket, not bran, nor is it the large, reddish farm animal eating the bran from the bucket, the man who placed the bran in the bucket, his wife, or the raisin-faced banker who's about the foreclose on the farm. None of these is nothing. A damselfish is not nothing, it's a fish, a Pomacentrus, it likes warm water, coral reefs—perhaps even itself, for all we know. Nothing is not a nightshirt or a ninnyhammer, ninety-two, or Nineveh.

You get the idea. Here's some more:

Nor is it snuff. Hurry. There is not much time, and we must complete, or at least attempt to complete, the list. Nothing is not a tongue depressor; splendid, hurry on. Not a tongue depressor on which a distinguished artist has painted part of a nose, part of a mouth, a serious, unsmiling eye. Good, we got that in. Hurry on. We are persuaded that nothing is not the yellow panties. The yellow panties edged with white on the floor under the black chair. And it's not the floor or the black chair or the two naked lovers standing up in the white-sheeted bed having a pillow fight during the course of which the male partner will, unseen by his beloved, load his pillowcase with a copy of Webster's Third International. We are nervous. There is not much time.

More:

It's not the ice cubes disappearing in the warmth of our whiskey nor is it the town in Scotland where the whiskey is manufactured nor is it the workers who, while reading the Bible and local newspaper and Rilke, are sentiently sipping the product through eighteen-foot-long, almost invisible nylon straws.
         And it's not a motor hotel in Dib (where the mudmen live) and it's not the pain or pain or the mustard we spread on the pain or the mustard plaster we spread on the pain, fee simple, the roar of fireflies mating, or meat.

Reading the whole short thing is truly exhilarating, vertiginous. The prose is breathless in places (parts make me think of Hopkins's 'The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo', a poem Richard Burton once recorded at an appropriately fast pace), but also expertly controlled. It's not a loose firehose but a tightly twiddled valve. The piece contains a consideration, or a refutation, of some concepts of nothingness, but I don't love it for its philosophical sophistication (which I'm not really equipped to judge, anyway). I love it because it's one of the most purely celebratory things I've ever encountered; in its passion for life and language, it's as stirring as the close-out of Ulysses. You know: 'and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arm around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes'.

Heidegger is far too grand for us; we applaud his daring but are ourselves performing a homelier task, making a list. Our list can in principle never be completed, even if we summon friends or armies to help out (nothing is not an army nor is it an army's history, weapons, morale, doctrines, victories, or defeats—there, that's done). And even if we were able, with much labor, to exhaust the possibilities, get it all inscribed, name everything nothing is not, down to the last rogue atom, the one that rolled behind the door, and had thoughtfully included ourselves, the makers of the list, on the list—the list itself would remain. Who's got a match?

*

If I were a teacher of creative writing, I would encourage students to make their own versions of 'Nothing', not for any significant assignment but as perhaps a fortnightly exercise, a couple of pages of not-nothings at a time—although foregoing the explicit discussions of philosophical and scientific concepts of nothingness. Imitating lists is an easy way to get yourself writing, and this list is the most germane one I can think of. Everything is permitted, first of all, but every aspect of everything is permitted: nothing is not the gin bottle on your desk, nor is it the secret beauty of barcodes, nor is it the history of serif script, nor is it the drop sliding like a tear down the inside of the neck, nor is it the double-thump heaviness of the name L O N D O N, nor is it the comfort of being dry. The goal is not to describe every inch of a space as you might in a New Novel, but rather to pluck one thing, pick a few of its petals, and move on. In Barthelme's story, each apparently new not-nothing begets a small family of not-nothings, all related along various lines. There are small enclosed narratives ('bran in the bucket', 'the large, reddish farm animal', 'the man', 'his wife', 'the raisin-faced banker'); back-pedalled chains of production ('the ice cubes', the 'warmth of our whiskey', 'the town in Scotland where the whiskey is manufactured [....]'); and links of linguistic closeness ('a nightshirt or a ninnyhammer, ninety-two, or Nineveh'). There is also, however, plenty of fancy and invention, moments where imagination creates the next step:

I am sorry to say that it is not Athos, Porthos, or Aramis, or anything that ever happened to them or anything that may yet happen to them if, for example, an Exxon tank truck exceeding the speed limit outside of Yuma, Arizona, runs over a gila monster which is then reincarnated as Dumas père. 

So the prompt or brief for aping Barthelme might read something like this: Write your own version of Barthelme's 'Nothing: A Preliminary Account'. First, find or imagine something that is not nothing. Then, name some other things that bear some proximity to the first—such as in terms of colour, shape, category, linguistics, opposition, inversion, physical closeness, or anything else. Try not to spend too long in any one rabbit hole, and don't be afraid, every now and then, to randomise. Vary your sentence structures; try to find a few different ways to introduce or declare what is not nothing. Experiment with syntax, imagery, and metaphor. Aim for some kind of cohesion, but not at all costs.

An example: Nothing is not why cavemen painted on walls, nor was it to be found anywhere in their favourite natural pigments. It is not the mental roadblock of trying to imagine a colour you have never seen. It is not, fortunately, your late grandfather's favourite watercolour, and not the square of papered wall where it was once hung and where now, presumably (you can't, I know, remember damnit which room it was), there hangs another, another's. "The paint doesn't move the way the light reflects, / so what's there to be faithful to?" Is it that fine question, read aloud? It is not. Nor is it saying, more than once and with feeling, I am faithful to you, darling, whether or not you say it to the paint.²

Now that's not great, and it probably reads as confusing and obscure. But it was quick to write and, as I see it, the point of this hypothetical creative writing assignment is not to produce something proud and polished but to get you thinking and writing. It could, as I've suggested, be a genre of diary-keeping; you could use it as a way of revisiting and repackaging your day or your week. It might, for some, turn out to be a useful therapeutic tool, a kind of affirmation-by-negation that every bad part of your day, even the taste of your own tears, was nothing if not not nothing.³

Put it on the list. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. What a wonderful list! How joyous the notion that, try as we may, we cannot do other than fail and fail absolutely, and that the task will always remain before us, like a meaning for our lives. Hurry. Quickly. Nothing is not a nail.

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¹ This is grossly unfair . . . It was the simple chronological uncanny of reading second what I knew had come first, and thereby having an altered sense of their connections. I'm very fond of Rushdie, if not actively so. Midnight's Children was a very important book for me: I read it during my transitional period between adolescent and adult reading, and it was possibly the very first book that opened my eyes to the possibilities both of the novel and of prose per se. On a very local level, Midnight's Children makes use of a simple linguistic device that I absolutely love, namely, writing out lists with no commas. As on the second page: 'such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumours'. Like Barthelme's story, it is exhilarating, pulse-quickening; it has a peculiar urgency, as if the importance of getting everything in as quickly as possible trumps one of the basic tenets of punctuation.

I'm also amazed by how rare it is. You'll see it in some form in poetry, but rarely as a twist within what is otherwise conventional prose. I've only seen it in one other novel (although I have a possibly false memory of seeing it in some of Whitman's prose), Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift. Which (and this is a pointless story, but obviously I've teed up the telling of it) Rushdie mentioned as one of his favourite novels, and one he had been recently rereading, when I saw him give a talk a couple of years ago. I queued up to have him sign my copies of Midnight's Children and The Satanic Verses, and, while I waited, I thought about asking him about this very device. But he had so many books to sign that I knew I couldn't, and I still probably took too long to tell him how pleased I was that he mentioned Humboldt's Gift, which is also one of my favourites. He didn't even have time to notice and admire any of the hopelessly earnest notes and annotations my teenage self had scribbled in his books.

To sum up: I love Rushdie, and he has been very important to me, but Pynchon is probably better.

² There are verbatim quotations in this passage from Richard Siken's poem 'The Way the Light Reflects', which has appeared in B O D Y (among other places), April 28 2014.

³ There is a risk that you will find yourself piling up negatives in a cloying fashion. There is a risk of ending up with something that resembles Martin Amis's uncharitable parodies, in his memoir Experience, of Beckett's prose: 'At a dinner, having been irked by Salman Rushdie’s professed admiration for Beckett, he lays down a challenge:

‘Quote me some. Oh I see. You can’t. […] Well I’ll do it for you. All you need is maximum ugliness and a lot of negatives. “Nor it the nothing never is.” “Neither nowhere the nothing is not.” “Nothing the never—”’.