The White Album

A blank page. More than a blank page: Electronic white space infinitely expanding and only as tangible as a screen. Ink and paper gives way to pixels and codes, and still we write and discuss. Stone tablets and papyrus, now this. It is not the medium that matters but the words. At least, we want them to, need them to.

And so, R., I am listening. So we begin. What is more fitting than to start with the alternately daunting and exciting prospect of so much white space? It brings us right to the two novels we discuss the most and the two authors we come back to again and again. I am talking about Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays and Albert Camus' The Stranger (of course, the photo from Café de Flore also inspired this post). Whiteness, the brightness of the sun, as if the essence is contained in vast nothingness.

From L'Etranger: "We stared at each other without blinking, and everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double silence of the flute and the water. It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot."

From Play It: "When that failed she imagined herself driving, conceived audacious lane changes, strategic shifts of gear, the Hollywood to the San Bernadino and straight on out, past Barstow, past Baker, driving straight on into the hard white empty core of the world. She slept and did not dream."

In her essay, "Why I Write," Didion discusses writing Play It: "I had only two pictures in my mind ... and a technical intention, which was to write a novel so elliptical and fast that it would be over before you noticed it, a novel so fast that it would scarcely exist on the page at all. About the pictures: the first was of white space. Empty space. This was clearly the picture that dictated the narrative intention of the book -- a book in which anything that happened would happen off the page, a 'white' book to which the reader would have to bring his or her own bad dreams."

The elliptical is also the lyrical. Both Camus and Didion are masters of style with sentences that are as much a part of the story as the narratives themselves. R -- your turn on Meursault and the sun. How about these lines: "I shook off the sweat and sun. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I'd been happy."

And speaking of lyrical -- readers, check out R.'s translation of Camus' Notebooks 1951-1959.

-- C.