by James Wood
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The plot I have described could belong to almost any conventional novel, new or older—marriage, adultery, bourgeois life, unhappiness, thwarted ambition. But the book’s form is unconventional, and perfectly supports and shapes those elements of the book’s content that are also somewhat unconventional. Offill’s narrator speaks to us in extremely short, double-spaced paragraphs. There’s a great deal of terrain between these paragraphs, and though they do ultimately create a continuous narrative, they often hang in isolation, like Lydia Davis’s very short, single-paragraph stories. Some of the entries are peculiar, a little whimsical or opaque or sardonic; the narrator uses humor as a buttress against painful emotion. So the narrative is a kind of interrupted stream of consciousness, allowing, like any cleverly paced interior monologue, for a managed ratio of randomized coherence: we witness a mobile, and sometimes eccentric, mind composing a narrative before our eyes. Because the book presents itself as a kind of haphazard dispatch, we have an uncanny—quite possibly fallacious—sense of autobiography, of some kind of personal authorial “truth” being disclosed, of fiction appeasing our need for “reality hunger”—an atmosphere encouraged by our knowledge that the author, like her narrator, is a writer who has taught creative writing, that she is a mother, and that like her narrator she spent a long time working on this, her second novel (fifteen years elapsed between first and second books).
More interestingly, the novel’s prismatic and discontinuous form allows Offill to dart around, and thereby to build a sense of her narrator as self-divided, full of appealing contradictions; she is the more vital because she is so many things at once. She’s thin-skinned, sensitive, but also tough and very funny. She feels strongly, but she blocks feeling with sarcasm and satire. She doesn’t quite know herself, but also seems to know herself perfectly:
Three things no one has ever said about me:
You make it look so easy.
You are very mysterious.
You need to take yourself more seriously.
So the book, like its narrator, faces in many directions at once, and shows different colors to the light. It’s an account of a marriage in distress but also a song in praise of marriage. It’s tartly honest about the frequent boredom and fatigue of being a parent, yet it also understands all the joys and consolations of being a parent. If it laments the work that has not been done—this woman who could have been a great “art monster”—it also embodies the work that has been finely done, for Dept. of Speculation is that archetypal modernist and postmodernist document: a successful novel about the difficulty of writing a successful novel.
And it is the novel’s form that allows for this lovely, complex variety of elements.1
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Plot is really just practical form—the form the writer creates, as he or she is creating a work of fiction (working through authorial choices having to do with who is narrating the story, how to arrange all the elements, pacing, and so on). Moral form is the finished outline, the significant shape we can discern of a plot, the sense we make of something once we are able to hold that plot in our minds. Plot is reading Pride and Prejudice, excited to know who will marry whom, turning each page with happy surrender, led by the knowing brilliance of the author. Moral form is closing that novel and seeing that it is a story about a woman getting a man wrong and then getting him right—a story about error and correction; or, a story about two good marriages (Elizabeth and Darcy, Jane and Bingley) and three much less good ones (Charlotte and Mr. Collins; Lydia and Wickham; Mr. and Mrs. Bennet).
Plot is reading Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, in the excited ignorance, subtly manipulated by Ferrante, of discovering how two intelligent girls will escape the limitations of their impoverished Neapolitan life, sure that the book’s title refers to the narrator’s friend. Moral form is understanding, after the fact, that My Brilliant Friend is in fact a singular bildungsroman, that only Elena the narrator will escape, and that the “brilliant friend” is not Elena’s friend Lila, but in fact Lila’s friend Elena, our narrator.
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Put it another way: plot is reading, form is literary criticism. Form is what we are left with when plot is no longer manipulating us, but when we—as readers, as critics—are manipulating plot. The plot of Anna Karenina is all the events and occurrences that lead to Anna’s eventual death. The form of Anna Karenina is the finished story about a woman who committed adultery and who is finally punished—sacrificed—for that mistake. This is the punitively judgmental form of all the major nineteenth-century novels of adultery: the woman errs, the woman must die. (Until lovely Chekhov, toward the end of that moralizing tradition, compassionately unravels the terminality of this deadly cultural fable in “The Lady and the Little Dog.”) When the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova complained to Isaiah Berlin about the murderous morality of Anna Karenina, she was complaining about the significance of its moral form: “Why should Anna have to be killed?… The morality of Anna Karenina is the morality of Tolstoy’s wife, of his Moscow aunts.”2
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In these cases, we modify our immediate experience of plot (our reading experience) by our later experiences of form (our post hoc literary-critical experience): reading for significance is always a negotiation between our excited discovery of the work and our comprehension of the work after the excitements of discovery have faded a bit. A sign of the modernity, or postmodernity, of a novel like Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation is that plot (in the sense of reading to find out “what happens next”) has been so subsumed by form. Plot has become the form the book takes. Crudely put, there is more literary criticism and less discovery involved in reading a novel like Offill’s.
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Plot is what is happening; form is what happened.
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There’s an obvious philosophical or metaphysical dimension to this idea. Many of us find it hard to see or think about the shape of our life stories. We live caught up in plot—the rush of day-to-day instances, the full calendar of appointments and obligations, the coincidences and events that are sprung on us by chance. We live in an eternal discovery phase. Perhaps once or twice a year, on some significant day like New Year’s Eve or a birthday, we try to reflect on the form of our lives, about what has been and what is to come. At those moments, we try to turn plot (chance) into form (fate, destiny, providence, shape). Something similar occurs at a funeral or memorial service: we gain a reflective sense of an entire life, now finished, we get to think about the shape of a life. We can do so because death has stopped that life: death has imposed its stern type of form, a metaphysical meaning and shape. That is what Walter Benjamin says about fiction in his essay “The Storyteller” (1936). He argues that classic storytelling (he means oral tales, old fables, and suchlike) has always been structured around death. Death guarantees the authority of the storyteller’s tale; death makes a story transmissible. In modern life, he continues, where death has dropped out of daily lives and become almost invisible, and where “information” from the newspapers has crowded out mortal storytelling, it becomes harder and harder to tell gravely meaningful stories.
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So fiction—here I’m extrapolating from Walter Benjamin—ideally offers us a power we tend to lack in our own lives: to reflect on the form and direction of our existence; to see the birth, development, and end of a completed life. The novel provides us with the religious power to see beginnings and endings. “The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in,” goes a verse in Psalm 121. Godlike readers of other people’s fictional lives, we can see their going out and their coming in, their beginnings and endings, their expansions and withdrawals. Fiction allows this in different ways. Sometimes by scope and size—the long, populous novel, full of many different lives, births, and deaths. Or by compression and concentration: the novella that depicts a single life from start to finish, as in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, John Williams’s Stoner, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, Alice Munro’s long story “The
Bear Came Over the Mountain,” and the work of W. G. Sebald. Yes, even though Sebald thought that Godlike omniscience was impossible or unpalatable in narration, one of the most generous gifts of his fiction (I am thinking especially of The Emigrants and Austerlitz) is the way it allows us to regard whole lives, to think about the shape and fate of a finished life.
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And form does something else, too. Recall Benjamin’s uncannily prescient complaint from 1936, that true storytelling is being supplanted by a superabundance of “information.” Karl Ove Knausgaard says much the same in the first volume of My Struggle, when he alleges that death now plays a “strangely ambiguous” role in our lives: “On the one hand, it is all around us, we are inundated by news of deaths, pictures of dead people; for death, in that respect, there are no limits, it is massive, ubiquitous, inexhaustible. But this is death as an idea, death without a body, death as thought and image, death as an intellectual concept.” In a world in which the screen has replaced the window, we know more than Benjamin could possibly have foreseen about the terrible unseriousness of existence amidst futile distractions of information, the too-persuasive authority of data, the allure of rival and generally inferior forms of narrative (TV, YouTube, video games, GIFs).
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When literature competes directly with such attractions, it tends to lose.
But think instead of literature as a site of concentration, critique, surplus—concentration as critique: literature as the stillness at the eye of the storm, a kind of prayerful attention. Think of fictional form as something closer to the poem than to the diary. Art insists on concentration by virtue of having form. Life, as I suggested, strikes us as essentially formless; and technology, though full of cute, discrete objects, is essentially formless too. It’s protean. It’s about the process of endlessly becoming, proud of its built-in obsolescence. 6S is always becoming 7, 7 is becoming 8, 9, X, and so on. Technology dreams of infinity. When video games are extolled for being like novels—for their “fiction-making qualities”—the emphasis is generally on the multiplicity of options and choices, not on the determinism of form. The game player can choose many possibilities from endlessly tempting menus. In the same way, the best TV dramas are likened to the novel because their ever-unfolding serialism—episode after episode, season after season—is thought to resemble the serial novels of the nineteenth century.
Yet literary form, while of course expansive and multifarious, can also possess a certain negative power. It shows us where things stop. It places an almost sacred border around the artwork and says, “This is not identical with the claims of the world. This is different from the world. This is a space that demands a certain degree of strangeness, apartness, submission, significance.” Form absorbs but can finally resist the world, is superbly autonomous. Really, universally, human relations stop nowhere, said Henry James. And, he went on, “the eternal problem of the artist is to draw a circle within which such relations merely appear to stop.”3 The stopping of an endless prolongation may be one of form’s most important virtues, the artifice by which everything earns its own perfect justification, the artifice which charges everything inside the charmed circle with chosen meaning.
Sympathy and Complexity
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In 2006, the municipal president of Neza, a tough area of two million people on the eastern edge of Mexico City, decided that the members of his police force needed to become “better citizens.” He decided that they should be given a reading list, on which could be found Don Quixote, Juan Rulfo’s beautiful novella Pedro Páramo, Octavio Paz’s essay on Mexican culture The Labyrinth of Solitude, García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and works by Carlos Fuentes, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Agatha Christie, and Edgar Allan Poe.1
Neza’s chief of police, Jorge Amador, believes that reading fiction will enrich his officers in at least three ways.
First, by allowing them to acquire a wider vocabulary … Next, by granting officers the opportunity to acquire experience by proxy. “A police officer must be worldly, and books enrich people’s experience indirectly.” Finally, Amador claims, there is an ethical benefit. “Risking your life to save other people’s lives and property requires deep convictions. Literature can enhance those deep convictions by allowing readers to discover lives lived with similar commitment. We hope that contact with literature will make our police officers more committed to the values they have pledged to defend.”
How quaintly antique this sounds. Nowadays, the cult of authenticity asserts that nothing is more worldly—more in the world—than police work; thousands of movies and television shows bow to this dogma. The idea that the police might get as much or more reality from their armchairs, with their noses in novels, no doubt strikes many as heretically paradoxical.
One does not have to be as morally prescriptive2 as the Mexican police chief to feel that he has taxonomized three aspects of the experience of reading fiction: language, the world, and the extension of our sympathies toward other selves. George Eliot, in her essay on German realism, put it like this: “The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies … Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.”3
Since Plato and Aristotle, fictional and dramatic narrative has provoked two large, recurring discussions: one is centered on the question of mimesis and the real (what should fiction represent?), and the other on the question of sympathy, and how fictional narrative exercises it. Gradually, these two recurrent discussions merge, and one finds that from, say, Samuel Johnson on, it is a commonplace that sympathetic identification with characters is in some way dependent on fiction’s true mimesis: to see a world and its fictional people truthfully may expand our capacity for sympathy in the actual world. It is no accident that the novel’s rise in the mid-eighteenth century coincides with the rise of the philosophical discussion of sympathy, especially in thinkers like Adam Smith and Lord Shaftesbury. Smith, in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), argues what is merely axiomatic today, that “the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others” is mobilized by “changing places in fancy with the sufferer”—by putting ourselves in the other’s shoes.
Tolstoy writes about this in War and Peace. Before Pierre is taken prisoner by the French, he has had a tendency to see people as hazy groups rather than as particularized individuals, and to feel that he has little free will. After his near-death at their hands (he thinks he is going to be executed), people come alive for him—and he comes alive to himself: “This legitimate peculiarity of each individual, which used to excite and irritate Pierre, now became a basis of the sympathy he felt for, and the interest he took in, other people.”4
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Ian McEwan’s Atonement is explicitly about the dangers of failing to put oneself in someone else’s shoes. The young heroine, Briony, fails in this way in the novel’s first section when she wrongly convinces herself that Robbie Turner is a rapist. But putting oneself in another’s shoes is what McEwan is signally trying to do as a novelist in this same section, carefully inhabiting one character’s point of view after another. Briony’s mother, Emily Tallis, stricken with a migraine, lies in bed and thinks anxiously about her children, yet the reader cannot but notice that she is in fact a very bad imaginative sympathizer, because her anxiety and anger get in the way of her sympathy. Reflecting on her daughter Cecilia’s time at Cambridge, she thinks about her own comparative lack of education, and then quickly, but unwittingly, gets resentful:
When Cecilia came home in July with her finals’ result—the nerve of the girl to be disappointed with it!—she had no job or skill and still had a husband to find and motherhood to confront, and what would her bluestocking teachers—the ones with silly nicknames and “fearsome” reputations—have to tell her about that? Those self-important women gained local immortality for the blandest, the most ti
mid of eccentricities—walking a cat on a dog’s lead, riding about on a man’s bike, being seen with a sandwich in the street. A generation later these silly, ignorant ladies would be long dead and still revered at High Table and spoken of in lowered voices.
In Adam Smith’s terms, Emily is quite unable to “change places” with her daughter; in a novelist’s or actor’s language, she is no good at “being” Cecilia. But of course McEwan is himself wonderfully good here at “being” Emily Tallis, using free indirect style with perfect poise to inhabit her complicated envy.
Later in the section, as Emily sits by the light, she sees moths drawn to it, and recalls being told by “a professor of some science or another” that
it was the visual impression of an even deeper darkness beyond the light that drew them in. Even though they might be eaten, they had to obey the instinct that made them seek out the darkest place, on the far side of the light—and in this case it was an illusion. It sounded to her like sophistry, or an explanation for its own sake. How could anyone presume to know the world through the eyes of an insect?
Emily would think this.
McEwan knowingly alludes to a celebrated dilemma in the philosophy of consciousness, most famously raised by Thomas Nagel in his essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Nagel concludes that a human cannot change places with a bat, that imaginative transfer on the part of a human is impossible: “Insofar as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat.”5 Standing up for novelists, as it were, J. M. Coetzee in his eponymous novel has his novelist-heroine, Elizabeth Costello, explicitly reply to Nagel. Costello says that imagining what it is like to be a bat would simply be the definition of a good novelist. I can imagine being a corpse, says Costello, why can I not then imagine being a bat? (Tolstoy, again, in an electrifying moment at the end of his novella Hadji Murad, imagines what it might be like to have one’s head cut off, and for consciousness to persist for a second or two in the brain even as the head has left the body. His imaginative insight foreshadows modern neuroscience, which does indeed suggest that consciousness can continue for a minute or two in a severed head.)