My nephew, when he was two- or three-years old, bit into the wall—a nice bite of the corner paint and plaster—because something had not gone as he’d planned. He was so frustrated that all he could think to do was to bite the wall.
My mother was a self-described happy-go-lucky teenager. She stayed up late smoking and dancing. Ran across yards at dawn to get the best catch of fish in the neighborhood. The boys loved her, and her boyfriend wanted to marry her. But, instead, she joined the convent at seventeen, and stayed there for around eight years.
My father was supposed to go to graduate school in Missouri, and packed his apartment into a car. He drove down and found he couldn’t register for classes. He stayed the weekend. He paced for hours outside the registrar’s office, and then took off, back north and asked for his job back. And then he met my mother while she was dressed as a cowgirl. That’s how life works.
It is a family trait, one I’ve inherited in heaps, to make strange decisions. Or to act without thinking—or, rather, thinking correctly—as I can assure you there is typically a lot of brooding. Other times, there just seems to be no clear cause, a dot that’s off the chart.
I met a writer friend for coffee recently, and he said he’d read this book, Pan: From Lieutenant Thomas Glahn’s Papers, written by the Norwegian Knut Hamsun in 1894. My friend told me I would like it, particularly this part where the main character is so frustrated by his love interest, that he takes her shoe off and throws it into the water. (They are on a boat, I presume; the book is next on my reading list.) And while I have yet to read it, I have to admit that I do love this moment. In fact, I often find myself reading and writing for exactly this kind of moment—the one that is surprising and doesn’t always make sense.
Charles Baxter’s Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction (a read that I think would improve a person if a person returned to it often enough) contains an essay titled, “Rhyming Action.” This essay begins with many pages in which Baxter contrasts, delightfully, the work habits, attitudes, and personalities of poets-in-general and fictionators-in-general. He calls poets “the nobility of the writing world.” He comments on their often surprising and always beautiful lives. Of prose writers, he says:
Their souls are usually heavy and managerial. Prose writers of fiction are by nature a sullen bunch. The strain of inventing one plausible event after another in a coherent narrative chain tends to show in their faces…. Prose writers have to spend hours and hours in chairs, facing paper, adding one brick to another brick, piling on the great heap of their endless observations, going through the addled inventory of all the items they’ve laboriously paid attention to, and it makes them surly—all this dawn-until-dusk sitting for the sake of substantial novels with sentences that have to go to the far right-hand margin of the page.
I can vouch for the presence of this sullenness-by-bricklaying. I remember, some years ago, having a story workshopped in which a character wore moccasins. This was too much, a workshopper said, unless the character was Native American, and if that was the case, just when was the story set?—it seemed contemporary. Granted, it was likely some greater flaw in my writing that made the moccasins seem wrong.
Still, in nearly all my interactions discussing poetry with poets, there is great praise of the surprising moment, the twist, the hinge toward the unexpected or ethereal, the word or phrase that snaps the whole poem into another dimension. It seems to be what makes a poem truly great. Meanwhile, fiction can be very good, or even, again, great without this element of surprise. And if a fiction writer wants it—whether “it” be moccasins or general shoe-flinging—it must be done very carefully, perhaps even sneakily.
In another fiction workshop, not quite as long ago, we were reading a book selected by a student. We were all picking books that term, so that we could better understand one another’s taste. Anyway, this fellow student-friend had said that her first reading of this particular book had been a magical experience, and that this was why she wanted to read it—to see how it worked, to break down the magic.
This troubled me. It shouldn’t have. I knew that this was why we all gathered around the table, to figure things out. It was something I often said to my students—“Let’s break this down and analyze it”—and I meant it. It was something I did regularly, pen in hand. It is a healthy and important thing for a writer to do. But as a general rule I don’t want to break apart the stories and books and movies and art with which I fall immediately in love. And the phrase, “to break down the magic,” seems such a sad one. As though we need to set the beauty of that first moment aside for the sake of knowledge, so that, almost mechanically, we can recreate the same book or story or poem.
Of course, this isn’t what the person meant, and it’s not what I mean when I say it to students. It’s simply part of what we all do in order to keep the river of literature flowing with whatever contributions we can muster.
There’s the world of the work and there’s the world in which the work is written. And there will always be writers who advocate for both worlds to be fully known, some who want one world to remain a mystery and the other to be straight-forward, and then there will be those who want mystery on both sides. I fear I am one of these. Though I swear that, in the classroom, I try to act otherwise.
In Robert Boswell’s The Half-Known World—another collection of essays on fiction that I’d highly recommend—he advocates for the mystery, both in the piece and the process. He speaks about the use of omniscience for creating the greater mysteries—meaning something much richer than a secret—and the potential dangers in using an authorial voice that “knows too much.” He writes that, “there can be no discovery in a world where everything is known. A crucial part of the endeavor is the practice of remaining in the dark.”
And where would any of us be if Emma Bovary, in a burst of some emotion and without looking back, hadn’t inexplicably thrown her last five-franc piece over her shoulder to the blind beggar who unwittingly tormented her?
Or without the fearless Flannery O’Connor and her unpredictable twists, whose Parker decides to (perhaps, “is driven to,” or “is inspired to,” would put it better) get the face of God tattooed on his back, thinking, among many other panicked things, that it would finally be a tattoo his wife would enjoy—only to have his wife beat him out of the house with a broom?
Recently, Disney simplified the whole thing. While watching one of their movies with my niece, a troll or a wood gnome came forward in the middle of a song, and said something to the effect of, “People make bad decisions when they’re sad or stressed or scared.”
I’ll leave you with an excerpt from Salvatore Scibona’s novel, The End, a finalist for the National Book Award in 2008. The book is hauntingly brilliant and this moment has stuck with me.
Once, you were eating a pear, you were scraping the meat off the core with your teeth. You were being very meticulous, as you are. (We were walking arm in arm from the theater, where we had made a game of whispering made-up translations of the words of the play, which we had not understood.) We were talking and I made a joke in English, my first one, that you had pared the pear to the bone. And you laughed. And then you popped the core in your mouth and chewed it and swallowed it down. And later we wondered why you had done that. What had come over you, to eat the core of the pear, stem and all? And here is what at long last, two nights later, after we had given up on the hope for an explanation, you said, snatching sense (such as it was) from the jaws of nonsense (so to speak): You said, ‘I did it on purpose.” Which was not a because at all, we both knew. But it was the answer.
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