Blocks to, and building blocks of, narrativity: Fragments, anecdotes, and narrative lines in David Markson’sReader’s block

Abstract

AbstractDavid Markson’sReader’s block(1996) consists of 193 pages of quotations, anecdotes, names, and fragments. The book bears the paratext “A novel,” and the work has indeed been read as a narrative whole, in which “an aging author [...] contemplates the writing of a novel.” By being out of ordinary and therefore worth of telling, the anecdotes or curiosities seemingly fulfill the requirements of a “natural” narrative as defined by Monika Fludernik (1996). However, a mass of such mini-narratives, mixed with even more fragmentary texts, seems to defy narrativity (and tellability). In my reading, the ostensive block to narrativity also functions as its very building block. Thanks to polysemy,blockcan relate to a block of a city, of stone at a gravesite, of text on a printed page, and of index cards. The seemingly dispersed fragments begin to gravitate around these semantic blocks and yield discrete but intertwining narrative lines. The very text claiming to deal with blockages performatively, as a finished book, testifies to the opposite: the mass of texts and plans proves that the ability to work on writing is not lost. Blocks that obstruct also construct, and the demediated novelistic medium still mediates as a form and repurposed content.