If you've somehow stumbled across this blog, and you pay attention to the dates on the posts, you'll see that I abandoned this blog almost five years ago. I did not delete it, because I thought it could stand alone as a Web 1.0 style record of my own reading of Composition No. 1, albeit an incomplete one.
You'll also see that I abandoned it only about a third of the way through the novel's 150 pages. I was keeping this blog during a fall semester of teaching freshman composition classes, and I stopped updating my progress on the blog just about the time midterms came due.
Now, almost five years later, I have re-read the book. I actually saw it sitting on the my shelf on a weekend I had mostly free and thought that it would be a good time to experiment with it by reading in a different order. So I shuffled the pages by throwing them at my son, who was recording with a camera phone, until we got a clip that I liked (about four takes). Then I picked the pages up in whatever order they lay in front of me, realigned them so they were all facing the same direction, and began reading again.
Here, I am going to try to track my new experience with the book by looking at some major elements of the story. I'll pause here first to suggest that if you (dear reader, whoever you are) have not yet read the book but plan to, you should stop and read it first. I do this so that my reading here won't cloud your own perceptions of the novel. I also encourage you to take notes so that you can track your experience, then compare what you find with my reading here. You may even wish to read my older posts so you can see how my own perceptions changed between my two readings.
Point of View:
Point of View is tricky in this novel. It is third person, and seems mostly to be a very close third person to the unnamed male protagonist(?) of the book (who Saporta called X in his original introduction). Interestingly, narration about X is very indirect in the scenes that he seems to actually be in. People respond to him, touch him, and so on, but he himself never speaks. His actions are described through a kind of passive voice, indirectly described as what's being done to other characters. The reader must guess what he might have said whenever a character responds to X. In scenes where he does not directly interact with others, it is never very clear as to whether or not he is actually the character the narration describes. In other words, things happen to someone, and the reader is quick to assume that it is X, but this is never specified (and in this second reading, I've doubted that X was the character involved in events where I had previously assumed he was).
The Resistance:
The novel is set during WW2, and throughout the novel, scenes are inserted that describe movements of the French resistance, the German soldiers who are hunting and arresting (and killing) members of the resistance. After two reading, I am still very unclear as to whether or not any of the main characters of the book are directly involved in any of this. The one clue is that there is an apparent act of espionage in which someone (possibly X) steals documents from an office. These documents are, at one point, said to be the confessions of resistance fighters. It seems that X is breaking into the office of his own manager, but he does not seem to have any use for such confessions (at least, nothing else in the narrative suggests he does). He does, however, have plenty of reason to steal other things: money, a mortgage possibly. So I am left to wonder if X steals these documents, but did not intend to, whether or not there are actually two thefts by both X and someone else, or whether X is himself the spy stealing these confessions. In any case, these scenes describing much bigger world events amplify the profane nature of the main plot. In the sweeping events of a great war, a man is having affairs while his wife goes nuts.
The Car Accident:
Several scenes describe parts of a horrific auto accident which leads, it seems, to someone's hospitalization. The first time I read the novel, I thought that X was not the injured driver, but the other driver who tries to convince the bystanders that he was not at fault. This time, I spent most of the novel under the impression that it was X is the injured driver, plunging into the water. Toward the "end" however, one scene made me wonder if in fact it was Marianne plunging into the water after one of her fits of insanity caused her to believe that a hitchhiker was endangering her.
Dagmar:
In both my readings, Dagmar is the most endearing character for me. She is confident, easy going, and attractive (though the text makes clear that she is "not even pretty" she is also clearly alluring). It's never clear whether or not she knows that she is the Other Woman. X confesses to her, and she forgives him, saying that she can forgive anything but lying and that things would be different if she found out on her own. It is unclear if X is confessing his marriage or his "affair" with Helga, his 17-18 years old nanny. She eventually leaves X, but it is not clear why. There is no scene to explain this; she is simply suddenly absent.
Marianne's Madness:
Marianne was mentally ill very early in this reading: before X's infidelities are discussed, and before the scenes in which her friend Francine is dying. This made a big difference in my second reading. In my first reading, I noted that X's affairs seemed to cause her madness (I had forgotten this until I re-read my old posts after this second reading). In this reading, Marianne is mad from the beginning. This allowed a more sympathetic reading of X. Her madness is unbearable, so X's affairs seems more easily understandable. He refuses to divorce her in "her condition," but he carries on affairs nonetheless. He seems to be moving on though he remains married to her for the sake of propriety.
The Rape:
The first time I read the book, the statute for Rape appeared on the very first page for me, so I assumed (and still do) that X's affair with Helga is, in fact, rape. The scenes themselves however make this a bit unclear. She seems to fight him off, but then submit and experience pleasure. She smiles, pulls X in close to her and so on. In both readings I have struggled to figure out if Helga is supposed to be coquettish, feigning resistance while actually welcoming X's assault. In my first reading, I was willing to re-interpret the affair based on these scenes. The "Rape" statute complicated the affair because she is his employee, not because the sex was non-consensual. His actions were wrong and illegal, but not violent. I find that this time, even though the scenes where Helga seems to express pleasure come first and the statute for Rape came in the last few pages, I am actually less inclined to see these scenes as anything but rape. Perhaps this says more about my evolution as a reader in the last five years than the order of events on this reading. Somehow, I distrust the narrator now, where I did not five years ago. I am more inclined to read perversion into the narrator's insistence that Helga is experiencing pleasure, rather than taking the narrator at his word. The narrator may describe Helga as experience pleasure, but that doesn't make it true.
Everyone is Dying, but No One Dies:
In a novel that it completely non-linear, at least three of the major characters appears to be dying: X in the auto accident, Francine of cancer, and Marianne who is starving herself to death. Yet, since this novel cannot build to a definite end, these death scenes are not included (the deaths of members of the resistance is suggested but no one who appears in more than one page is scene to die). Certainly, it would be possible to include these scenes. Reading one of these early on might make the plot look like flashback while reading one late may look like climax. The fact that each of these storylines seems to be heading toward a death that never comes gives the novel a different feel entirely. The present tense of the narration, combined with the non-linearity of events, and the seeming march toward a death that never occurs gives the novel a feeling of being en media res. The novel has the feel of being X's "life flashing before your eyes." This lack of finality has an eerie effect. Perhaps it is you, dear reader, who has died in the middle of things, while these stories are still in the middle of unfolding.
Traditional Reading Habits/Non-Traditional Text
One of the things I have found interesting in re-reading Composition No. 1 has been examining my own reading habits and how they influenced my reading. Serious readers will be aware of the concept of "gaps" or the presence of holes in a narrative that are filled in by readers. We tend to fill these gaps with what, to us, seem logical based on the content and context of the narrative. For instance, without even realizing it, the reader of Genesis may assume that the serpent in the garden is Satan, a detail not explicit in the narrative.
In Composition No. 1, I found myself filling in not just narrative gaps, but structural ones as well. I hint at this in the last section by discussing the plot as being like a flashback. We have been taught to read in specific, culturally bound ways. Our texts tend to come in recognizable structures. In a text like this one, I suspect that we press these structures onto the text, even if the text resists them.
Composition No. 1 consists of 150 loose leaf pages, each containing a stand-alone scene. There can be no purposeful "rising action" since the order of events is assigned at random. There can be no "plot-thickeners" since there isn't even really a discernible plot-line. There can be no actual "climax" since there is no event to which the other events (the rising action) can ultimately and inevitable lead. Chekhov's proverbial gun found in Act 1 can't be fired in Act 3, since we don't know from one reading to the next which events will be in which act. This text violates Aristotle since A cannot lead to B if that order cannot even be guaranteed. But this does not mean that we are willing to violate Aristotle.
I find that where I was in the text, and the order than I came across events caused me to see these events as rising actions or plot devices or other tropes. When a substantial event happened about five pages from the end, I couldn't help but to think of that as the "climax." That event, simply by random placement in the story, became the point that everything led to. My imagination was willing to fill in how.
In this second reading, the last line of the book was Dagmar saying "I am happy." Because it came last, this became the resolution for me. Dagmar is the character who turned out alright (which to me, meant that she separated herself from these other characters). This was aided by the fact that I liked Dagmar the most, and wanted her to turn out alright. My own reading habits forced me to impose a structure onto the story, and this necessarily shaped the way I read the story.
Rethinking Text:
Ultimately, whats so fun about reading/re-reading Composition No. 1 is that it forces the reader to confront all this stuff. By dispensing with linearity, through the simple act of unbinding the book, this novel lays bare the way our expectations of narrative, of character, of plot line, and of structure influence our reading. By shaking these things up, and thus denaturalizing them, the book causes us to notice them and to question them. Readers will often say that they read a piece differently every time they re-read it, and they usually mean that they noticed details they've never noticed before. Composition No. 1 goes way beyond that. We not only re-read the novel, but we re-read the act of reading itself.
