by Peter Turchi
The “quavering of meaning” and “disturbing strangeness” echo Ross MacDonald’s description of the power of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (“But in spite of this explanation the story leaves a residue of horror. The forces of terror and reason remain in unresolved conflict.”) and the unease the reader feels at the end of “A Doctor’s Visit” when Korolyov drives away from Liza as if he’s done his job. Perec’s discussion of crosswords also suggests how a work’s form can stand in useful contrast to its content. A sonnet or villanelle adheres to or responds to a long-established pattern, and its adherence to or response to that pattern offers a certain kind of pleasure, a pleasure that comes from shapeliness and organization. The content, however, might very well “disturb” us, in the sense that it means to disrupt our expectations, to lead us to feel or see or understand something new. Similarly, a narrative built on the basic framework of a detective story (or a quest, a romance, etc.) is in conversation with the reader’s expectations.
THE MANIPULATION OF INFORMATION
[Lolita] was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle—its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a mirror view of the other, depending on the way you look.
— VLADIMIR NABOKOV
This notion of fiction as a combination of puzzle and mystery is by no means limited to stories about detectives and doctors. Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a perhaps surprisingly rich illustration. If you’re familiar with only the film starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard, give yourself the pleasure of reading Capote’s charming tale for which, the author said, he needed to learn an entirely new prose style. The story is a recollection, by an unnamed narrator, of the time when he first moved to New York and, along with many others, fell under the spell of an immensely appealing but ultimately mysterious young woman, Holly Golightly. (Nearly all of the characters have equally implausible names—Sally Tomato, Rusty Trawler—and the novella walks a fine line between wistful romance and plain goofiness. Capote uses a comic tone, among many other devices, to mask the narrator’s yearning, and so transfer that yearning to the reader.)
MISSING DIGIT?
Thomas Snyder’s puzzles include sudoku unlikely to be generated by a computer thanks in part to the wit of their presentation.
The novella opens when Joe Bell, a bartender, calls the narrator to say he has something the narrator needs to see. This slight suspense (what is it?) is quickly defused (the narrator assumes it must have something to do with Holly) but leads to another question: where is Holly now? It turns out that Joe has three photographs—not of Holly, but of an African wood carving that, Joe and the narrator agree, depicts her. They speculate as to her whereabouts (“You know so much, where is she?” “Dead. Or in a crazy house. Or married. I think she’s married and quieted down and maybe right in this very city.”), and that speculation gradually leads the narrator to begin the story that promises to answer the questions, Who is Holly Golightly? And why does she loom so large in the memory of these two men?
The instigating question about Holly’s whereabouts is one of many the narrative raises but never answers. (Others include: Exactly who is our narrator? And what’s he doing, these days, aside from telling us this story?) These are puzzles (somewhere, in the world of the fiction, someone knows where Holly is, or what happened to her; and the narrator could tell us where he lives and what he does, if he chose to), the solutions to which are withheld not to frustrate us but to indicate that those answers—those questions—are not what the novella is about. Neither will the narrative provide an explanation of Holly’s appeal; instead, it will attempt to re-create it. Ultimately, the power someone like Holly has—a power beyond generosity, or glamour, or beauty, or sexual attraction—is mysterious, and Capote has no intention of lessening that mystery.
Early in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the narrator engages in a bit of snooping in order to learn more about his intriguing neighbor:
I discovered, from observing the trash-basket outside her door, that her regular reading consisted of tabloids and travel folders and astrological charts; that she smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes; survived on cottage cheese and melba toast; that her vari-colored hair was somewhat self-induced. The same source made it evident that she received V-letters by the bale. They were always torn into strips like bookmarks. I used occasionally to pluck myself a bookmark in passing. Remember and miss you and rain and please write and damn and goddamn were the words that recurred most often on these slips; those, and lonesome and love.
The bits of trash are partial information, but together they create a portrait of Holly. Most interesting are those scraps of wartime Victory letters that, like the fragments of parchment from which we know Sappho’s poetry, convey meaning despite their being incomplete. Later, we come to infer that those letters are from Holly’s brother, Fred; and those key words the narrator notices create a kind of tone poem summarizing their relationship. We never see an entire letter from Fred, and we don’t need to; a carefully selected group of pieces of the puzzle tell us quite enough. We get the pleasure of assembling them, or intuiting what’s left unsaid.
Mystery can also be created, provocatively, through an abundance of information, particularly when it’s conflicting. Capote builds anticipation about Holly until, finally, he has to present her in a scene. The writer’s challenge is to maintain the air of mystery even as we’re looking at the enigmatic character, something Capote accomplishes through multiplicity of detail. What color is her hair? “The ragbag colors of her boy’s hair, tawny streaks, strands of albino-blond and yellow, caught the hall light.” What general impression does she create? “For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast-cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks. Her mouth was large, her nose upturned. A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes. It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman. I thought her anywhere between sixteen and thirty; as it turned out, she was shy two months of her nineteenth birthday.” By the time we get to the fact of her age, we have so much dynamic information that we never think of her merely as an eighteen-year-old, any more than we think of her as simply pretty or blond. She’s much more complicated than that.
A perhaps even greater challenge to maintaining the mystery of Holly is her voice, as her speech—her diction and syntax and allusions—will necessarily expose her intelligence and insight. In keeping with Holly’s physical description, Capote makes her voice a unique mélange. Her first conversation with the narrator begins, “I’ve got the most terrifying man downstairs. . . . I mean, he’s sweet when he isn’t drunk, but let him start lapping up the vino, and oh God quel beast! If there’s one thing I loathe, it’s men who bite.” She continues,
I think he thinks I’m in the bathroom, not that I give a damn what he thinks, the hell with him, he’ll get tired, he’ll go to sleep, my God he should, eight martinis before dinner and enough wine to wash an elephant. Listen, you can throw me out if you want to. I’ve got a gall barging in on you like this. But that fire escape was damned icy. And you looked so cozy. Like my brother Fred. We used to sleep four in a bed, and he was the only one that ever let me hug him on a cold night. By the way, do you mind if I call you Fred?
The pidgin French, the colloquial vulgarity and surprising figures of speech, coupled with occasional flights into higher diction and self-consciousness, make Holly’s dialogue lively and unpredictable, unsettled and fractured—all of which hints at her deeper character. So it’s no surprise when she takes off her dark glasses and, through the narrator, we see her eyes are “a little blue, a little green, dotted with bits of brown.” Even as she stands in front of us, exposed, Holly is irreducible.
Structurally, Capote manipulates the release of information both for the sake of compression, to get the maximum effect from scenes, and to disrupt a merely chronological recollection of the past—and he does both so subtly that the reader is never jarred from the fluid,
apparently logical narrative. The first scene he recollects from his past with Holly, the night he first saw her, begins when he hears Mr. Yunioshi, on the third floor of the brownstone they share, calling down to “Miss Golightly,” who is at the bottom of the stairs (and whose first words introduce that multifaceted voice: “Oh darling, I am sorry. I lost the goddamn key”). Holly and Yunioshi argue briefly; she reconciles by saying that, if he promises not to be angry, “I might let you take those pictures we mentioned.” The implication is underscored by Yunioshi’s “audible change of breath,” the punch line provided when he asks, “When?” and she laughs and says, “Sometime.”
The scene—our introduction to flirtatious, careless Holly—seems to be over. But the narrator, who has been overhearing all of this, opens his door a crack, looks down, and provides the aforementioned description of her hair and apparent age. And then we learn “She was not alone.” She’s accompanied by Sid Arbuck, a short, “vast” man who nuzzles her neck as she opens the door, a man who clearly expects entrance to her chambers in return for the dinner he just bought. But Holly turns him away (“The next time a girl wants a little powder-room change . . . take my advice, darling: don’t give her twenty cents!”), simultaneously confirming our sense of the kind of girl she is and complicating it. She expects money, but she’s no prostitute. More to the point structurally: by situating his narrator on the second floor, and by playing the first part of the scene entirely through dialogue, Capote is able to compress three scenes into one—the conversation with Yunioshi, the narrator’s solitary gaze as he sees Holly for the first time, and the rejection of Sid Arbuck are three acts in a very brief play, the undeniable star of which is Holly.
Capote manipulates information even more dramatically and deftly in the novella’s long climactic sequence. In one eventful day he and Holly go to Central Park; they decide to go horseback riding; the narrator’s horse runs away with him, and it takes Holly and a mounted policeman to stop them; they go back to his apartment, where he takes a bath to soothe his bruises; police detectives arrive and arrest Holly for involvement with gangster Sally Tomato; Joe Bell brings copies of the evening newspapers; the narrator reads about what Holly has been up to; then he goes to Joe Bell’s bar and begins making phone calls to try to get her out of jail. It might seem that the focus of the sequence is Holly’s being arrested. But all of that business about the Mafia and Sally Tomato is comic window dressing, a bit of drama in the background that we are never asked to take seriously, and which is important to the novella primarily because it forces Holly to leave New York.
The heart of the sequence is the narrator’s moment of wild abandon with Holly (after the horse chase he says, for the only time, “I love you,” and she kisses him on the cheek), their deepest intimacy (when the narrator is in the bath, Holly is naked, too, though theirs is a chaste relationship). But he introduces it, misleadingly, as the day Holly “had the opportunity to save my life,” intentionally steering our attention away from the emotional poignancy, a wistful combination of desire and loss that is both at the novella’s center and nearly always pushed into the background. After the horse chase, the narrative cuts directly to the headlines and to a gossip column quoted at length. Only after reading it do we learn that, after the horseback adventure, they went to his apartment, where Holly was arrested; and then we see Joe Bell bring the newspapers that have already been quoted. This disruption of chronology breaks up a potentially monotonous progression (and then, and then, and then); more than that, it creates jolts of surprise followed by the satisfaction of explanation. More generally, rearranging information allows Capote to control the rhythm of the narrative without allegiance to the sequence of events. This may seem like a very modest sort of manipulation, but Capote’s energetic and unpredictable movement through time in the novella creates a sense of excitement when, in fact, nothing much of dramatic consequence occurs. The novella is not, ultimately, about events; it’s about an extraordinary young woman who captivated our narrator for a year or so, who looms large in memory, and who, if the narrative succeeds, captivates us as well.
At one point the narrator is in Holly’s bedroom (“strewn, like a girl’s gymnasium”) as she searches for shoes, a blouse, a belt. “It was a subject to ponder,” he tells us, “how, from such wreckage, she evolved the eventual effect.” Capote’s narrative, composed of compounded and rearranged scenes, partial memories, even scraps of trash, suggests some of the mechanics behind the magic.
To say that fiction relies on the conscious management of information might seem cold, manipulative; but the goal is something like magic—an orchestration of artifice intended to evoke genuine emotional response.
THE POETRY OF PROBLEMS
The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement. Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and strengthened by it. . . . For life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of it. By playing at Chess, then, we may learn . . . Foresight . . . Circumspection . . . [and] Caution.
— BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, “The Morals of Chess”
Chess, long considered the ultimate game of abstract reasoning, has been the focus of any number of battles pitting Man against Machine: the wide variety of chess players and celebrities who took on the Turk; chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov vs. Deep Thought, Deep Blue, and Deeper Blue; and, say, a precocious twelve-year-old in the backseat of a car deeply engaged in a handheld computer chess game.
Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual, told in ninety-nine chapters and an epilogue, is set in a Parisian apartment building in which one inhabitant, Bartlebooth, assembles fiendishly difficult jigsaw puzzles created from paintings he made as a young man. Perec wrote, “It would have been tedious to describe the building floor by floor and apartment by apartment; but that was no reason to leave the chapter sequence to chance. So I decided to use a principle derived from an old problem well known to chess enthusiasts as the Knight’s tour; it requires moving a knight around the 64 squares of a chess-board without its ever landing more than once on the same square. . . . For the special case of Life: A User’s Manual a solution for a 10 × 10 chess-board had to be found. . . . The division of the book into six parts was derived from the same principle: each time the knight has finished touching all four sides of the square, a new section begins.” Perec’s 10 × 10 Knight’s Tour was diagrammed by Steve Hodges and redrawn by Daniel Thomasson, who highlighted the error, or departure from the strategy, between chapters 65 and 66.
According to Matthew Gidley, “Perec overlaid the knight’s tour onto the ten-by-ten Graeco-Latin bi-square. Each box in which the knight landed gave coordinates referring to the ‘schedule of obligations.’ These lists provided the objects, emotions, places and periods in time which would feature within each chapter. One movement of the knight equalled one chapter. Secondly, Perec superimposed all of this onto the drawing of the townhouse to determine the location where the action would take place. The result was a sprawling, panoramic history of the house and its inhabitants, past and present.”
Chess problems are not (usually) moments or situations taken from actual matches; they are most often specially devised exercises. Rudimentary chess problems help beginners learn basic strategy, while more sophisticated problems challenge even experienced players. The creator of the problem establishes a situation (the specific white and black pieces and their positions on the board), a goal (usually to put the king in check or mate), and other constraints (most often, the number of moves allowed). “Problems,” Nabokov wrote, “are the poetry of chess. They demand from the composer the same virtues that characterize all worthwhile art: originality, invention, harmony, conciseness, complexity, and splendid insincerity.” While that consideration of “splendid insincerity” may sound uniquely Nabokovian, the creator of a
ny puzzle or problem is, simultaneously, providing clues to the solution and trying to lead the solver astray. One of the pleasures of puzzles involves misdirection. Just as a magician withholds or conceals certain information (say, a pocket attached to a large sheet of paper) in order to create a particular effect (the sheet is torn into tiny pieces, stuffed into a fist, and an intact paper hat is produced), puzzle makers steer us toward false solutions, engaging us in a game of wits. These same tactics can even be found in a well-constructed jigsaw puzzle, as Georges Perec explains in the opening pages of Life: A User’s Manual:
The art of jigsaw puzzling begins with wooden puzzles cut by hand, whose maker undertakes to ask himself all of the questions the players will have to solve, and, instead of allowing chance to cover his tracks, aims to replace it with cunning, trickery, and subterfuge. All the elements occurring in the image to be reassembled . . . serve by design as points of departure for trails that lead to false information. The organized, coherent, structured signifying space of the picture is cut up not only into inert, formless elements containing little information or signifying power, but also falsified elements, carrying false information. . . . From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzle-maker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.