by Peter Turchi
12 Another substitution cipher, this one made a bit more difficult by removing the spaces between words. For a hint, see the solutions for this chapter.
13 Even today, art that allows for ambiguity, or that opts not to take an explicit stance toward its material, runs the risk of being seen as “defective.” These arguments often arise in response to abstract public sculpture, to fiction presented from the point of view of an unlikeable character, and to satire. Randy Newman’s song “Short People” angered a lot of people who thought it expressed the songwriter’s disapproval of the vertically challenged, and even today some members of his concert audiences who clamor to hear “Rednecks” seem not to understand the lyrics’ ultimate implications. He’s on much safer ground with “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.”
14 Reflecting on his death, Chekhov’s wife, Olga Knipper, wrote: “Awareness of grief, of the loss of such a man as Anton Pavlovich, came only with the first sounds of awakening life, with the arrival of people; and what I experienced and felt, standing on the balcony and looking now at the rising sun, now at nature melodiously awaking, now at the fine, peaceful face of Anton Pavlovich, which seemed to be smiling as if he had just understood something—that, I repeat, still remains for me an unresolved mystery. There had never been such moments as those before in my life, and there never will be again.” “What I experienced and felt . . . remains for me an unresolved mystery.” She was with Chekhov when he died. Who could know better her experiences and feelings? Yet any of us who have lost someone close to us understands how, despite all the facts at hand, mystery persists.
15 At the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, finalists in the top three divisions each compete to solve “the same” puzzle. That is, the answers are the same; the clues are entirely different.
16 In the documentary Wordplay, puzzle solvers as diverse as Jon Stewart, pitcher Mike Mussina, and Bill Clinton are shown talking back to the New York Times Sunday crossword as they work on it.
17 A solution can be elegant, though, only if it’s also correct.
SEVEN CLEVER PIECES
So, how do the pieces of a life fit together?
— JAN KJÆRSTAD
Around 1760, a London engraver and cartographer carefully affixed one of his maps to a thin sheet of mahogany and, using a fine-bladed saw, proceeded to cut it to pieces.
John Spilsbury wasn’t intent on destruction; he had cut carefully along the borders of each country. He called the result a “dissected map” and hoped it would serve as an educational tool, a sort of geography game, for children. He could not have guessed that, 250 years later, inexpensive jigsaw puzzles would be available in virtually every grocery store and drugstore, or that they’d be commonplace in hospitals and hospices and beach houses. He might also be surprised to learn that the quality of physical interaction and connectivity he had given to his map is preserved even in many online jigsaw puzzles, still composed of pieces shaped as if they had been cut from wood.
It may be equally hard for us to imagine that roughly a century ago jigsaw puzzles were, for a brief period, the Cabbage Patch Dolls, the Beanie Babies, the Harry Potter novels, or the Angry Birds of their day. In 1908 a New York Times headline read “New Puzzle Menaces the City’s Sanity.” Jigsaw puzzles weren’t just popular; they were the focus of parties in high society, they spawned clubs and rental libraries, they were sold by subscription, and entire factories were converted in order to mass-produce them. Like so many consumer goods, they became an indicator of class and social standing, as high-quality jigsaw puzzles were (and are) hand-cut from wood, some with unique and even customized shapes, while inexpensive puzzles were eventually die-cut from cardboard by the thousands. Gender roles were a factor as well, as the craze began with women and children constructing puzzles largely cut by women, in home workshops; by 1909 large manufacturers were taking over, including Parker Brothers, which hired women to cut a minimum of 1,400 pieces by hand each day. While the original craze passed by 1910, the passion returned during the Great Depression, when over ten million puzzles were sold in a week.18
John Spilsbury’s “dissected map” of Europe
While some jigsaw puzzles are still designed as educational tools for children, the great majority are made for idle diversion. (Those early fans of jigsaws enjoyed an additional challenge: no picture of the completed puzzle was included. They discovered the image they were constructing as they gave it shape.) And yet somehow a jigsaw puzzle has become a common metaphor for any kind of assembly, particularly one that involves patiently putting many pieces in their proper place to form a whole.
So, how do the pieces of a life fit together? Or, to put it another way, do they fit together at all?
— JAN KJÆRSTAD
About the time jigsaw puzzles were captivating Americans and, back across the Atlantic, the British, thirty-year-old Graham Greene set off on an extraordinary adventure: a four-week walk through the interior of Liberia. In Journey Without Maps, his account of the trip, he says he was in search of “something lost”: “The ‘heart of darkness,’ if one is romantically inclined, or more simply, one’s place in time, based on a knowledge not only of one’s present but of the past from which one has emerged. . . . A quality of darkness is needed, of the inexplicable. . . . One sometimes has a curiosity to discover if one can from what we have come, to recall at which point we went astray.”
Early in the book, Greene writes about the night he saw a young woman sitting at one end of a bar, drinking and crying. The section begins, “A reminder of darkness: the girl in the Queen’s bar. . . . I hadn’t the nerve to say anything [to her] and find out the details. . . . Besides, it’s always happening all the time everywhere. You don’t weep unless you’ve been happy first; tears always mean something enviable.”
In the next few paragraphs Greene is moved to reflect on three other memories of darkness: a trip he took to Berlin, where he saw “a man and woman . . . copulating . . . under a street lamp, like two people who are supporting and comforting each other in the pain of some sickness”; his first memory, of a dead dog his nurse picked up out of the street and put at the bottom of the baby carriage he was riding in; and his first awareness of “the pleasure of cruelty,” which he discovered at the age of fourteen, related to adolescent lust. “There was a girl lodging close by I wanted to do things to,” he tells us. “I could think about pain as something desirable and not something dreaded. It was as if I had discovered that the way to enjoy life was to appreciate pain.”
Then, without transition, he returns to the scene of the girl at the bar: “She embarrassed everybody. They cleared a space. . . . I thought for some reason even then of Africa, not a particular place, but a shape, a strangeness, a wanting to know. . . . The shape, of course, is roughly that of the human heart.” Pain, darkness, the origin of man, the relationship of tears to happiness, the inexplicable, and the desire to understand both oneself and others are all bound together in those unsettling opening images. The crucial tension is between “wanting to know” and resisting the urge to talk to the young woman who was crying—or rather, between whatever explanation she might have offered and something both more fundamental and more mysterious about human suffering.
At the very outset, in an epigraph to his book, Greene acknowledges an essential dilemma at the core of his quest for understanding. The quotation comes from miscellaneous notes and reminiscences by Oliver Wendell Holmes:
The life of an individual is in many respects like a child’s dissected map. If I could live a hundred years, keeping my intelligence to the last, I feel as if I could put the pieces together until they made a properly connected whole. As it is, I, like all others, find a certain number of connected fragments, and a larger number of disjointed pieces, which I might in time place in their natural connection. Many of these pieces seem fragmentary, but would in time show themselves as essential parts of the whole. What strikes me very forcibly is the arbitrary and as it were accidental way in which the lines of ju
nction appear to run irregularly among the fragments. With every decade I find some new pieces coming into place. Blanks which have been left in former years find their complement among the undisturbed fragments. If I could look back on the whole, as we look at the child’s map when it is put together, I feel that I should have my whole life intelligently laid out before me.
Holmes is explicitly addressing the challenge of autobiography. “Who am I?” he is asking. “Who have I been? How have I become who I am?” With a change in pronouns, these questions are also essential to biography; and they are often just beneath the surface of fictional narratives.
When we sit down to write a story or novel and begin to imagine our characters, we typically work to gain a deep understanding of them. We strive to “assemble” their lives. We’re likely to find “new pieces coming into place”; we find connections among the blank spaces and the fragments; we may even, eventually, find the “whole laid intelligently out before” us.
To gain such a comprehensive view of characters, the people in a fictional world, might seem like the ultimate goal. But the crucial elements of Holmes’s quotation are its conditional statements: “I find a certain number of connected fragments”; “I might” put them in their natural connection; “If I could look back on the whole . . . I feel I should have my whole life intelligently laid out before me.” If only we could stand back far enough, if only we had enough time, if only we could find the right point of view, if only we could determine what shape allows all the pieces to fit—if only we could do all of that, we would understand. All the pieces of the dissected map of the self would find a place, all the blanks would be filled. The image would be complete.
Inherent in Holmes’s assertion is the belief that it can’t be done.
Jigsaw puzzles feature prominently in Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. Kane’s disenchanted wife, Susan, passes the time assembling puzzles of outdoor scenes, yearning to escape the mansion he claims to have built for her. As in The Thin Man, assembling a jigsaw puzzle is used as a metaphor for assembling a story: in this case, the life of Charles Foster Kane. Mystery has gathered around Kane’s dying word, “Rosebud,” and a woman suggests to Jerry Thompson, the investigative reporter trying to learn all he can about the man, “If you could have found out what Rosebud meant, I bet that would have explained everything.” This counterargument to Holmes has something in common with claims made by over-reaching counselors and psychotherapists: if only you can recognize why you’re angry at your mother, if only you correctly interpret your dreams, your problems can be solved. Through a moment of dramatic irony, Citizen Kane manages to have it both ways. We, the viewers, see the name “Rosebud” on Kane’s boyhood sled as it burns in an incinerator, but none of the characters in the film do—at least none who are aware that the name was Kane’s final utterance. Like Nick Charles in The Thin Man, Thompson knows from experience that the human psyche is not so neatly packaged: “Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get or something he lost,” he says. “Anyway, it wouldn’t have explained anything. I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life.” As in a Chekhov story, the viewer is given what appears to be a final piece to the puzzle, then left to decide what, if anything, it resolves.
Susan Alexander passing time, puzzling over her husband
The jigsaw puzzle of objects and artifacts left behind by Charles Foster Kane
Once one image is placed against another, once a particular song is paired with a particular set of images, you see how they interact, how they come to life. It’s something like the pieces of a DNA sequence coming together.
— MARTIN SCORSESE, on his documentary about George Harrison
To the extent that a piece of fiction focuses on character, we might think of it as a fictitious biography or autobiography. A key to writing a biography is to find the story of the life—to make sense of the whole. The biographer, like the fiction writer, sees a shape, sees a way to understand the character, and then sets about ordering information, emphasizing some things, deemphasizing or even eliminating others, in order to present the reader with a particular understanding of the person.
At least, that’s one way a biography can work. So we have biographies of Thomas Jefferson the statesman, Jefferson the architect, Jefferson the author of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson the inventor, Jefferson the American hero, Jefferson the slave owner, and Jefferson the hypocrite, among many others. As interesting as any of those books might be, the fiction writer recognizes there’s something wrong; the clear view of the subject we’re offered is the product of simplification and distortion.
The more interesting story, the truer story, is the one that attempts to capture all those fascinating, perhaps not clearly related, even contradictory aspects of the man. That story would engage the reader in the challenge of understanding, refusing to resolve the contradictions, refusing to reduce the highly complex individual to a simpler one. If what we want is a deeper truth, a biography that allows for the possibility that Jefferson was, in addition to many other things, a great statesman, a brilliant writer, and a slaveholder who fathered children with one of his slaves—a biography that acknowledges a complicated life—we have to surrender some of the comforting reduction those other versions offer. The patience and willingness to embrace complexity seems particularly important these days, when much of the rhetoric of business and politics is devoted to reducing and simplifying people and problems. Easy understanding comes at a high price. One of the things fiction and poetry can do is to remind us of the value of refusing to rush to judgment, the need not just to recognize, but to accept, complexity and mystery.
Characterization is achieved . . . through a process that opens up and releases mysteries of the human spirit. The object is not to “solve” a character—to expose some hidden secret—but instead to deepen and enlarge the riddle itself.
— TIM O’BRIEN
A great deal of fiction is about the tension between who a character is and who he wants to be; between who he is and who he believes himself to be; or about a character in transition, such as the standard coming-of-age story. When fiction emphasizes the tension between a character’s two or more selves, when it dwells on the fact that multiple selves exist simultaneously, when it refuses to settle for a single or fully explicable depiction of character, it makes use of what we might call unresolved characterization.
Unresolved characters result when a piece of writing emphasizes the challenge of trying to assemble the pieces and on recognizing the unfilled spaces. The narrative draws our attention to the fact that some pieces are missing, never to be found, as well as to the fact that some pieces seem not to fit. The focus is on stress fractures in the surface of character, places where the tectonic plates of personality shift, collide, and reveal something new. Unresolved characterization is an attempt to represent what Graham Greene calls that “strangeness, or wanting to know” without “solving the problem.” Unresolved characterization frames the questions that define a character.
There is a large body of fiction that does this, and it includes some of the greatest American novels, including Moby-Dick, The Great Gatsby, and Lolita. It also includes books as varied as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, and Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home. We focus, in The Great Gatsby, on who a man says he is, what he does, who he was, who he wants to become, and why; we focus, in Lolita, on the tension between what a man has done, why he says he’s done it, who he says he is, and what we think of him—and on a girl, the man’s fantasy of who that girl is, or might be, who he thinks he knows she is, and who she became. In all of those books, the main character, the first-person narrator, is ostensibly telling the story of a mysterious figure, a mythical or fantastic or heroic or tragic character; at the same time, and with different degrees of consciousness, the narrator is investigating and revealing him- or herself. In every case, the presumed subject of the narrative—Ahab, Jay Gatsby, Delores Haze, Kurtz, Phi
lip Dean, Bechdel’s father—remains elusive. In most cases, as the narrators tell their tales, they too are exposed as curiously complicated, mysterious, perhaps not entirely trustworthy. Even after we read the final page, these characters remain unknown in some essential way. The story or novel actively provokes and prolongs our wondering.
To call these characters “unresolved” is not to suggest that something about the writing is incomplete. An unresolved character is not one the author has failed to explore or understand. Rather, an unresolved character is one that the author has explored deeply, depicted in some detail, come to understand—and then explored more deeply. That sense of wonder can be provoked by absences—things that haven’t been explained for us—and by ambiguity and contradictions: multiple, competing understandings of character. Like Holly Golightly, such characters resist being pinned to the page. The writer’s goal is to present a person in fiction with something approaching the complexity, the irreducibility, of people in life—the people who most fascinate us.
Twilight, by Charles Ritchie
Because Charles Ritchie’s primary subject has been his neighborhood as seen from his home studio, and because he typically works very early in the morning, many of his images depict scenes perceived in dim light, either at night or in the very first light of day. Twilight occurs between daylight, when we can see clearly, and night, when, without the moon or artificial light, we can see almost nothing. In twilight, we strain to perceive. We can’t be absolutely certain whether we’re seeing what’s actually in front of us or if we’re seeing what we know is there, or think is there, or imagine could be there. “If night obscures, and day reveals,” Ritchie has said, “the transition between them explores nuances of presence and absence.”