An Elemental Lesson : THE BODY IN FOUR PARTS, <i> By Janet Kauffman (Graywolf Press: $18; 144 pp.)</i>

For some time now a discussion has been in progress, its tone ranging from angry denunciations to polite murmurs, about what a story is and how it should be told. There’s no question that Janet Kauffman’s provocative new novel, “The Body in Four Parts,” in addition to its other pleasures, continues this argument.

At the heart of this debate, on one hand is the traditional plot structure of rising tension, then a crisis, then resolution (some say detumescence). On the other, are all the alternative (and some say are more feminine) forms of telling a story. The plot of Kauffman’s novel, for example, is hardly the stuff of an Arnold Schwarzenegger adventure. Basically, two women drive from Michigan to eastern Pennsylvania to pick a bunch of watercress. On the way there they befriend a possibly-befuddled hitchhiker and drop him off, then on the way back they pay him a short visit. There are no dramatic incidents to speak of, but what, some might ask, is dramatic and what is not?

At least one of the other themes of the book, probably the main one, is multiplicity. The world (the body, the self) is presented in our parts: earth, air, fire and water, in sections with those names. The narrator (unnamed) has three siblings (plus fourth friend), each of whom represents one of these classic elements. Her sister Dorothea (also called Dot or S.) lives underwater. Her twin brothers Jack (air) and Jean-Paul (fire) appear briefly, and the narrator (earth) takes her friend with her to find the cress.

But the doubling doesn’t stop there. Dorothea has also left behind a set of stories she has written about another character, Jonasine, who is traveling in the belly of a whale, thus seeing her world from the inside as well as outside. We are multiples, Kauffman insists, and to isolate one voice or point of view is to misrepresent our reality, not only to others but to ourselves. Our bodies are made from cells, and words themselves are complex, slippery and shifty.

“Overlapping should be the name of the place. We’ve got it all: simultaneous weathers, the ancient elements . . . embodied, disembodied. Intersections of purple loosestrife, bottles and cans, concrete walkways, semiautomatic weaponry, duckweed.” Contrast this, for example with the clean, well-lit clutterless prose of that malest of writers, Hemingway. Instead, Kauffman’s language is rich, luxurious and heaped-on, a slurry of earth and water. And if fire and air (those male relatives) seem a bit neglected in this novel, it doesn’t seem a great loss. This is, after all, a world of floods and drought, of cycles.

In any case, as you may have already guessed, “The Body in Four Parts” is not one of those docile books you can curl up with and imagine that the life you’re reading is someone else’s. Another word for the narrative here is a reverie. (If Freud in his “The Interpretation of Dreams” was the father of modernist literary criticism with its insistence on correct, single interpretations, then Kauffman’s plot surely has as its antecedent Jungian creative visualizations.)

This doesn’t mean, however, that Kauffman’s is a book simply to embrace or not; it raises questions about narrative I certainly hadn’t found myself asking before I picked it up. Never having considered myself any great defender of traditional storytelling, nonetheless, I found myself asking what, outside the beautiful prose, I was reading this book to discover? When we are forced to hear the dreams of others, how often do we who aren’t analysts want to run screaming from the room and shout, “Enough”? (Maybe that’s why therapists are able to charge so much.)

Given a seemingly endless parade of psychic images, where is the reason to stop at any one, rather than another? And if a novel is written to illustrate an idea or point of view, even if it is about multiples, how long before we get it? If, as readers, we think, “Well, this is perfectly all right for 4 or 10 or 30 pages, but not over 100,” whose fault is this lack of attention? The blessed thing, it occurs to me, about traditional plot, as predictable as it can sometimes be, is that it teases us with the idea there is a mystery we can imagine we are unraveling, or traveling toward.

Speaking for myself, I guess I have to say that I’m not sure about the answers to these questions, although I loved asking them. And though at times I grew restless within the elemental blur of self and world, and at moments became impatient with the dreamy pace, this wet world of women talking and driving and feeling and paying visits has stayed with me far longer than many another novel of singular clarity and conventional crises.