Of Narratology and the Fraying of the Posted Bill

When I lived in Africa, I often found myself in Rome. Somehow that city—a crude but enticing amalgamation of the ancient and the newish—was where my family usually rested on the way to and from Africa. We always stayed at the same hotel, a couple of blocks from an old and giant aqueduct, and I enjoyed myself quite a bit there. In our hotel, we had a real continental breakfast every day—bread, butter, and tea, and the butter was European, something quite different from the usual butter in this country—and Rome was a city with enough sites to visit, even after a visit or two. Rome ended up inspiring plenty of my writing at the time: quite a few poems, a set of weird postcards back to the group of people at my job, and a sequence of visual poems I have never come around to completing.

One day, we had to visit the American embassy. As we loitered in a waiting room there, I walked around examining the artworks on the walls. What I found immediately intrigued me. The pieces of art were sections of found advertising posters, but layers upon layers of these posters. As one poster was fastened atop another, vertical strata were applied to the walls that originally held the posters. And as the elements pounded against these glued-together posters, the edges of them frayed erratically, allowing different layers of the posters to appear on different areas of the surface and creating a three-dimensional text. Taking this idea, I began to create, without benefit of found posters, poems for each of the four European cities we stayed in during that trip back to the US: Rome, Bern, Paris, and London. I finished, maybe, a dozen, and I can think of only one that is easy to find online.

But that’s the story of my creation and my imagination. What really interests me now is what Nick Piombino has created, out of a similar set of discoveries, in his “visual collage novel” Free Fall. Nick, while visiting Amsterdam in the summer of 2001, became intrigued by similar posters that had begun to disengage from the walls that held them. Nick’s methodology resembled that of the now-anonymous artist displayed in the embassy: He tore the loose layers of posters off the walls, chose a few choice sections to take home with him, and eventually culled the most successful bits of aleatoric creation for Free Fall. Eventually, he pasted his chosen swatches into a spiral notebook, producing a book he could show me when we met a couple of years ago. But he had to find a publisher willing to print a book that would be over 150 pages in length and in full color.

That’s where Mark Young, his Otoliths imprint, and the magic of publishing on demand technology come to the rescue. What this process has produced is a sturdy little perfectbound book, one quite heavy for its size, and resembling a graphic novel in heft and scent. The repetition of a single panel per page reminds us we are not inside a graphic novel here. But so does the “story” itself, since the story is not so much told as invented by the reader.

I can’t claim that the concept of narrative is itself perfectly clear and simple to conceptualize, and I can’t claim that narrative is avoidable. Almost any two nouns placed beside each other will suggest a narrative, even despite our attempts to keep a narrative from appearing. But there are some clear hints to a narrative within the pages of Free Fall, and it’s our job to find out how to make these work. First, the book opens with a grey page repeating the word “Cachet,” parts of which are occluded by a solid sea of grey, and the book later ends with an entire page of “Cachet.” Significantly, the city of Amsterdam itself appears repeatedly in these pages, serving as a full character as much as the once-quaint city of Nashville did in the movie of the same name by Robert Altmann. Sometimes Amsterdam is only “MSTERDA” or “AMSTERD,” but, even when partially hidden from view, we still recognize it. The human characters who appear in this story almost always appear as legs only, without torsos or arms—but people wander this city (sometimes with the name Chris Dangerous).

The pages in this narrative veer from the heavily to the barely textual. Occasionally, only a pair of letters appears on a page, affording us little direction. But, often enough, the page is stuffed with a chaotic mass of overlapping text, affording us little direction. We eventually learn to take the text as signposts rather than subtitles to the images. The text tells us where we are and who is there with us. We know there is music everywhere—we just can’t hear it. We know the names of the people traipsing through this landscape, even if we see them only once. And we know this is a vibrant city, filled with tumult (because “TUMULT” appears, from time to time on the page, as a reminder). The story is one of a night around the town, an adventure without a purpose, an attempt to learn in a short time something not easy enough to learn in a week. And we discover that we are the story tellers, that we have to invent the story of this book, just as we invent the story of our lives out of the multitudinous and unrelated actions that fill them. We learn that there is no narrative in life, just as there is no narrative in this book, except for that that we fashion out of what we find before our eyes.

The search for narrative, the creation of the narrative of this book, is enjoyable—like a visit to Rome. And the color and the frenzied tears and wrinkles and slices found on these pages feed our eyes. We are not looking at posters anymore. We are using a microscope to look at the ink and the pulp that make up the posters. We are burrowing—past air and earth and water—into the text, which is our only real home.


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Piombino, Nick. Free Fall. Otoliths: Rockhampton, Australia, 2007. US$35.95.

ecr. l’inf.