[Digital Poetics 4.4] The Longest Possible Route by Andrew Key

Image by Andrew Key

—What a large volume of adventures may be grasped within this little span of life by him who interests his heart in every thing, and who, having eyes to see, what time and chance are perpetually holding out to him as he journeyeth on his way, misses nothing he can fairly lay his hands on.—

— Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey

So anyway, on the first page of the main text of the novel in my copy of A Sentimental Education: The Story of a Young Man (an Oxford University Press Oxford World’s Classics edition translated by Douglas Parmée and published in 1989), Gustave Flaubert tells the reader that Frédéric Moreau, his protagonist, is “returning to his home in the provinces by the longest possible route” (p.3). I noticed these words when I picked up A Sentimental Education the other day and started reading it again, which is something I seem to find myself doing every couple of years. Reading these words on the first page of the main text of A Sentimental Education (by which I mean Flaubert’s text, not the preliminary paratexts, or the introduction by Parmée, or the list of main characters, or the chronology of Flaubert’s life, all of which takes up the first thirty-five pages of the book), made me realise that the “longest possible route” was, in fact, the whole novel. The “longest possible route” is the action of the book, which follows Frédéric from the age of 18 to the age of 45, from just before he starts law school at the beginning, up to his return to the family home of Nogent-sur-Seine at the end, where, we’re told, Frédéric has  “settled down to a humdrum middle-class life,” (p.460) twenty-seven years after the opening of the novel. Of course, at the beginning of the book, the reader — and Frédéric too — thinks he’s just going back to Nogent-sur-Seine for the summer after he finishes school, before he moves to Paris, where his real life will begin, but it turns out that in fact his real life is waiting for him in the provinces at his family home. It’s obvious, looking back on it, why this book made such an impression on me when I first read it, aged 24, having just moved to California in the hopes of escaping my own provincialism. There is a kind of foreshadowing here; something about the entire novel is revealed in this sentence, or maybe not even the whole sentence, but just the last few words of it. The whole sentence, in Parmée’s translation, is:

His mother, having provided him with just sufficient to cover his expenses, had packed him off to Le Havre to visit an uncle who, she hoped, would be putting her son in his will; Frédéric had left him only the previous day, and to compensate for not being able to spend longer in the capital was returning to his home in the provinces by the longest possible route.

The sentence is proleptic, because it turns out to be this very inheritance from his uncle which allows Frédéric to sink into the comfortable ease of his humdrum middle-class life; by the time he’s finally moved back to Nogent-sur-Seine, he’s “squandered two-thirds” of the fortune left to him by his uncle. We have the cause of the novel’s momentum in the first half of the sentence — the uncle’s will — and then the effect of that momentum — Frédéric’s returning to his home; cause and effect are separated by the semicolon, which creates an elegant and balanced sentence that is, in a way, the whole of the book’s action. Of course it’s not actually the whole book’s action, but it could be: a young man from the provinces tries his luck in the capital, but eventually returns home to live out the rest of his days on a modest inheritance. I’d be tempted to say that this foreshadowing is accidental, but I don’t think anything in Flaubert’s work is accidental.

Anyway, “returning to his home in the provinces by the longest possible route” is a clue to the novel, which, like the clues in many nineteenth century mystery or detective novels, is buried in a sentence or a clause that doesn’t seem to be too important. Viktor Shklovsky points out that this is characteristic of the nineteenth century mystery or detective novel in his book, On the Theory of Prose, the recent reading of which inspired me to pick up A Sentimental Education again. In that book Shklovksy also tells us, in the new translation by Shushan Avagyan (published by Dalkey Archive in 2021), that “the French novel of everyday life from Flaubert’s period widely employed the device of unrealised action (see Sentimental Education)” (p.79). In A Sentimental Education, the device of unrealised action is employed as a process of deferral, deceleration, postponement. The main unrealised action of the book is the failure of Frédéric to consummate his love for Mme. Arnoux, the wife of his employer, but there are a lot of other unrealised actions throughout the book, one of them perhaps being the Revolution of 1848: the collapse and failure of political ideals in 1848 is reflected by the collapse of the dreams of the individual characters in Flaubert’s novel. It suddenly seemed obvious to me, upon reading Flaubert tell the reader that they were about to read a book in which Frédéric Moreau returned to his home in the provinces by the longest possible route, that Flaubert had laid bare the entire action of the book — that is to say the plot of A Sentimental Education is: Frédéric goes back to his home in the provinces — before spending around 460 pages deferring this action. By the time we reach the end of the book and Frédéric’s settling down to the humdrum middle-class life he was destined for, we have forgotten that Flaubert has already told us what is going to happen.

Anyway, I’ve only read all of A Sentimental Education once, in 2014, when I read the majority of it on a flight from London Heathrow to San Francisco; the flight I took when I temporarily moved to California to attend graduate school. I quite regularly find myself returning to it without any real intention of reading it all the way through again; I like to just pick it up and flick through a little bit of it here and there. In the early days of my living in Berkeley, having read the book in English translation on the way there, I bought a copy of Flaubert’s novel in French — L’Éducation sentimentale, properly called — from the now defunct University Press Books, the quite dusty bookshop opened in the 1970s on Bancroft Avenue, next to Musical Offering Café, the café where over the next few years Eliot and I would often have the exact same lunch: a small black coffee and a hot chicken focaccia sandwich. Other people were often at these lunches, but I associate them most with Eliot because of his amusement at the regularity with which I ordered a small black coffee and a hot chicken focaccia. Once or twice he deviated from this combination only to be disappointed; a mistake I never made myself. Since the graduate program on which I was enrolled involved me having to pass translation exams in two languages, I thought I better try getting back into the habit of reading books in French, and, with all the over-confidence characteristic of a first-year PhD student, or, at least, the kind of first-year PhD student I was — insufferable — I thought Flaubert was as good a place to start as any. Even as I bought the second-hand copy of L’Éducation sentimentale, which I think cost about $5, though it might have been closer to $10, I knew that I was very unlikely to read much, or indeed any, of it in French, but I had enjoyed reading it in English, and I was addicted to buying books anyway (I still am), so it was easy enough to justify the purchase. I took the book to the counter in University Press Books and the man standing there, who I’d guess was in his sixties, and who I would soon understand to fit exactly into a particular kind of archetypal Berkeley personality, looked at what I was buying and exclaimed, “Wow! You know, everything you need to know about writing is in that book. It’s got every literary technique you’d ever need — it’s a masterclass in style!” I think about this comment every time I think about A Sentimental Education or about L’Éducation sentimentale, and the bookseller’s emphasis on Flaubert’s mastery of technique, his knowledge of the whole storehouse of literary technique, came back to me with full force when I read Shklovsky’s parenthetical mention of Flaubert. The bookseller wasn’t wrong! I can’t remember what I said in response to his remark, but the energy of his comment kind of threw me off — I wasn’t used to the ceaseless enthusiasm of Californians yet — and I think I just muttered an agreement and then got the hell out of the bookshop as quickly as I could.

Anyway, in the first chapter of On the Theory of Prose, the chapter which in Avagyan’s translation is given the title “Art as Device”, but which is perhaps better known by its older translation, “Art as Technique” — a classic work of literary criticism, assigned on countless curricula, one of the only works of Russian formalism that anyone other than specialists ever really reads — there are a couple of sentences which will no doubt be very familiar to many readers of this essay here, but which I think are worth sharing again anyway, particularly in the new translation by Avagyan. The sentences read:

And so in order to restore the sensation of life, in order to feel things — to make the stone stony — we have something called art. The purpose of art is to convey the sensation of an object as something visible, not as something recognisable. The devices of art — ostranenie, or the ‘estrangement’ of objects and the impeded form — magnify the difficulty and duration of perception, because the process of perception in art is an end in itself and must be prolonged. Art is a means of experiencing the making of an object; the finished object is not important in art. (p.12)

I have made a lot of annotations around this passage in my copy of On the Theory of Prose, both underlining it in its entirety and drawing a line next to it in the margin. I have also circled the words “and duration” in the third and penultimate sentence of the extract. The devices of art magnify the duration of perception; aesthetic techniques makes the perception of an artwork take longer. This is what this essay is about, really, and it’s taken me a while to get to this point, because I have been trying to apply the lessons I’ve taken from Shklovsky’s book about postponement, digression, deferral, and slowing down. This essay here, the one you’re reading now, is about taking the longest possible route as a writer, but it is also about the experience of reading a writer who is taking the longest possible route — about readerly impatience, about waiting for something to happen, for a text to get to the point. The finished object is not important; art is about the experience of making the object. In fact, the American pragmatist John Dewey claims something not entirely dissimilar in his book, Art as Experience, but the similarities and differences between Dewey and Shklovsky will have to wait for another time. 

Anyway, I picked up On the Theory of Prose because I was in fact planning on writing this essay about “something to do with the critique of everyday life in the poetics of Lyn Hejinian and Gertrude Stein”, as I had vaguely pitched it, and Hejinian wrote the afterword to the Dalkey Archive edition of Avagyan’s translation of Shklovsky’s On the Theory of Prose, an afterword which, like Hejinian’s afterword to the Dalkey Archive edition of Shklovsky’s The Third Factory, discusses the influence that reading Shklovsky had on both her own poetics and on the broader poetics of the writers who came to be associated with Language poetry in the Bay Area and elsewhere in the 1970s and after. As I did more reading and thinking I realised that I had to narrow down that very broad and unspecific brief, and I noticed that I was becoming more interested in writing something about the experience of ‘waiting’, of waiting as an element of everyday life which had its own aesthetics and its own poetics. As Hejinian writes in Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, “There is a lot of waiting in the drama of experience” (p.14). Waiting is an active process, not a passive idling. What is the opposite of waiting? At first I thought it might be “doing”, but quickly I decided that’s not right. “What are you doing?” “I’m waiting.” “Are you waiting?” “No, I’m — ” … what? What is not waiting? What is not-waiting? I asked Laura what the opposite of waiting is and she said it’s “rushing”, but I’m not quite satisfied with that, even though I can’t think of a better answer myself. I suppose it’s true that waiting can’t be rushed, even if it can be impatient. Waiting involves an expansion, or a surfeit, or an increased awareness of time. Rushing involves time’s compression, its deficit, though surely it also involves an increased awareness of time. Waiting is when you have too much time, or when something is taking too long; rushing is when you don’t have enough time, or something is happening too soon. But waiting for an ambulance to arrive, for example — that’s a waiting that might feel rushed.

Anyway, a couple of months ago Will came up to Sheffield, and we went to see a performance of Morton Feldman’s Violin and String Quartet. Feldman is one of those names that I’m more familiar with on paper than anywhere else — before this concert I’d never really spent time listening to his work with any real intention, though occasionally I might have put it on in the background while I’ve tried to read (not a very respectful approach to the work of a major modernist composer, admittedly). I’ve been interested in him since I learnt that he collaborated with Samuel Beckett, but I’ve never taken the time to explore his work. The performance was undeniably boring: one hundred and thirty five minutes of slow rotation through a couple of notes. Laura came with Will and I to hear the Feldman piece — she was ready to leave at the interval (much of the audience didn’t come back for the second half), but changed her mind when she realised that she could lie down at the back of the room. Ultimately I think she came around to the piece after listening to it from this new perspective. Later, when I asked her about lying down during the Feldman performance, Laura told me she thinks being forced to sit in uncomfortable chairs at this kind of event is “a bad hangover from the Enlightenment” and that lying on the floor in more places should be encouraged. Will is a connoisseur of annoying experimental music and told us afterwards that he’d had a great time. I am less of a connoisseur than him in these matters, but I’m keen to be seen by others as the kind of person who is cultivated enough to sit through and understand challenging aural works of a repetitive nature. I don’t know whether I enjoyed myself or not — though enjoyment seems besides the point in a work like this — but as I sat in the auditorium, occasionally sipping from a glass of wine which I noticed had been bought from Marks & Spencers, I found myself feeling increasingly impatient. I was waiting for something to happen: for the music to start to make ‘sense’ (even though I wasn’t very clear on what I meant by the idea that the music would ‘make’ ‘sense’ or how I’d know that it was ‘making’ ‘sense’ if and when it was indeed ‘making’ ‘sense’); in other words, I was waiting for something in the music, some tension or irresolution, to resolve itself — but not just this. I couldn’t quite decide what it was I was waiting for, until eventually it clicked, maybe half an hour in (i.e. with over one hundred minutes of the performance left to go, not including the interval): I was waiting for the performance to be over. Not in a hurried, annoyed, I-need-this-to-end, kind of way, exactly. I became aware of the thick texture of the music’s duration. In a way, the length of the piece, its repetitiousness, drew my attention to its limits, to the fact that it would, eventually, end, and that my engagement with the work was structured around an anticipation of it eventually being over. The Feldman piece induced a state of patient anticipation in my mind, but it turns out what I was anticipating is the end of the experience, the return to the everyday.

Anyway, I still haven’t said anything about the everyday, or about Hejinian, or about Stein, and I’m approaching my word count. Hejinian’s book, Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, which I mentioned above, was written in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when Hejinian had been visiting Russia with some regularity. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a book which ‘takes place’ in Russia in the years running up to the collapse of the Soviet Union, there’s a fair amount of waiting in Oxota. Here are a few lines which I transcribed from page 154 of the copy of Oxota which belongs to the library of the University of St Andrews, which I borrowed using the interlibrary loan system at the University of Huddersfield, where I work at a Holocaust museum, not in any academic capacity, but as a fundraiser (‘Development Coordinator’, according to my business cards and email signature), and where I use the library to borrow texts of the twentieth-century American avant-garde which would otherwise be prohibitively expensive or annoying to get hold of :

Waiting depends on the thickness of thought
Its destiny — everything turns fortuitous
The plot stops, then description clocks thought
We wait from it
Waiting not waiting but sky
Everything is perpetuated

The title of the chapter of Oxota from which those lines come from is “Drama But No Outcome”. I read quite a lot of Hejinian and Stein before I sat down to write this essay, and it feels like a shame to not say anything about them, but perhaps that’s the unrealised action at the heart of this essay, which is not really about Flaubert, or about Shklovsky, but which has had to travel through Flaubert and Shklovsky to realise that it’s not really about them. Of course, ‘about’ is a useful word, because while we generally take it to mean ‘directly relating to’, at least in the context of an essay, or a novel, or whatever (“What’s your book about?”), ‘about’ can also be a way of approximating (“I’ll be about five minutes”), and according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘about’ can also mean “in an aimless, idle, or frivolous manner; without any definite purpose” when used in combination with a verb denoting activity, as in “fucking about”. But why can’t we use “writing about” in this sense? I’ve been writing about waiting, which has been a kind of fucking about, which has been a way of making time pass, but also a way of postponing anything happening, and I’ve been trying to take the longest possible route to get there, or thereabouts.

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Andrew Key is a writer based in Sheffield. He is the author of a novel, Ross Hall (Grand Iota, 2022), as well numerous essays, which have appeared in publications including The New York Times Magazine, Parapraxis, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, Lugubriations and elsewhere. Between 2019 and 2023 he wrote Roland Barfs Film Diary, a newsletter using casual film criticism as a conduit for the interrogation of everyday life. 

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