by Peter Turchi
In hindsight, we understand that the romantic person from the crowd whose life he enters without disapproval, the one who actually turns and smiles at him, the one who helps him temporarily forget his “haunting loneliness,” isn’t his cousin Daisy or Jordan Baker; it’s Gatsby. While Nick tells himself he is disgusted and repulsed by being drawn into Gatsby’s affairs, he is in fact thrilled.
Nick transfers his own romantic yearning to Gatsby. This is what allows him to articulate Gatsby’s unspoken thoughts, to imagine his feelings in past and present. Nick lives vicariously through Gatsby, and so stands in unconscious judgment of his own romantic inclinations. When he’s in the apartment Tom’s rented for his trysts with Myrtle, Nick tells us,
Each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument which pulled me back, as if with ropes, into my chair. Yet high over the city our line of yellow windows must have contributed their share of human secrecy to the casual watcher in the darkening streets, and I was him too, looking up and wondering. I was within and without, simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the inexhaustible variety of life.
Even before he’s met Gatsby, Nick is already “enchanted and repelled”—by life. When he says, “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world,” he’s not only foreshadowing the novel’s closing lines, he’s also revealing that he is those Dutch sailors; and, by extension, he is Gatsby: enchanted by wild promise, repelled by the inevitably disappointing reality that follows.
The promise of mystery and beauty is what Nick sees in Gatsby. When Jordan tells Nick that Gatsby bought the house in order to be across the bay from Daisy, we’re told, “He came alive to me, delivered suddenly from the womb of his purposeless splendor.” Gatsby comes alive for Nick at that moment because Gatsby stands across the bay longing for Daisy in the same way that Nick walks up Fifth Avenue imagining following the ideal mysterious “romantic woman.”
Nick runs away from the threat of engagement in the Midwest, he runs away from the mean-looking brother in Jersey City, he runs away from Jordan. No one is good enough for romantic Nick, who admires gesture but abhors emotion; who wants the world to stand at attention but feels riotous at heart; who desperately wants to join the party that both enchants and repulses him.
And so we have a character of profound contradictions, and we have an authoritative narrator whose self-awareness is in doubt. But this is not a flaw in the novel; rather, it’s what brings the novel to vibrant life. We can’t say what woman—or man—will break Nick out of his shell, will meet with his approval. We don’t know what sort of work he’ll do or where he’ll settle down. We don’t know whether he’ll ever recognize the aspects of his character he has unconsciously exposed to us. At the end of the novel, our understanding of Gatsby and of Nick is both multifaceted and incomplete. Both the fragments and the blank spaces are too numerous and consequential for us to assemble a simple whole. Gatsby and Nick have not been “enlightened,” “corrected,” or “solved.” They have been contemplated; their mysteries have been deepened and enlarged.
SEVEN BOARDS OF SKILL
You know . . . all of this could be rearranged to form quite a different story.
— JAN KJÆRSTAD
Oliver Wendell Holmes suggests that trying to make sense of a life is like trying to assemble a jigsaw puzzle that can’t, ultimately, be put together. But how does a narrative re-create the sense of assembling a puzzle, the desire to complete the story of a life, or part of a life, and at the same time convey the impossibility of assembling the whole?
In The Seducer, Norwegian novelist Jan Kjærstad’s playful, anonymous first-person narrator tells the story of Jonas Wergeland, who is famous nationally as the creator of Think Big, a series of television documentaries about well-known Norwegians. Wergeland sees his task as telling the stories of these familiar public lives in unexpected ways, so as to expose a larger truth; and the anonymous narrator regularly questions his own ability to tell the story of Jonas Wergeland. He suggests he can tell his tale in almost any sequence, as the individual anecdotes are like spokes on a wheel leading to a hub; at the same time, he wonders whether it’s possible to tell “the” story of a life. Jonas and a friend have the following conversation:
“There are some things that occur in biology for which there is no simple explanation.”
“Like what?”
“How a person is formed. How the pieces of a life fit together. Why a person can suddenly change.”
“I thought that was exactly what DNA was—quite literally the story of how the pieces of a life fit together.”
“Yeah, right, a life, in purely biological terms, but what is Life?” . . .
“Amazing as it may seem, the most important experiences in my life are experiences I have heard about from other people.”
Axel waved his arms in the direction of the other people in the restaurant. . . . “In other words, other people’s experiences have become my experiences . . . every human being could be said to be as much an accumulation of stories as of molecules. I am, in part, all the things I have read over the years.”
“So . . . you think a person can actually be changed by hearing a particular story?”. . .
“It’s not the sequence of the base-pairs, the genes, we ought to be mapping out, but the sequence of the stories that go to make up a life,” said Axel. “And who knows? Arrange them differently and you might get another life altogether.”
This suggests that a better analogy for the story of a life may be a tangram.
The classical tangram is a Chinese puzzle game based on a square cut into seven pieces: five right triangles, a square, and a parallelogram. Tangrams were brought to the United States in the early nineteenth century and were highly popular then and again, throughout Europe, during World War I. The game requires players to re-create images by using all seven pieces without overlapping any of them. When presented as a puzzle, the images give no indication of how the individual pieces are deployed. While it’s fairly obvious how some of the shapes can be re-created—
—others are more challenging:
Every writer knows that there are countless ways to tell any given story—that every story is defined by sequence and selection. The tangram reminds us that what we tell the reader first, and what we emphasize (a character’s dialect, a dramatic incident from her past, her romantic interest in a colleague, her participation in public demonstrations for social justice), will go a long way toward defining her in the reader’s eyes. Rearranging the same parts can create a significantly different effect. The tangram also offers a different way to think of persuasive character change, including epiphanies, those moments of illumination or understanding that often serve as the climax of psychologically realistic fiction. If the character change or moment of insight seems too obvious or easy, it may be because the reader could see it all along. If the character change or insight seems unbelievable, it may be because the reader feels the character’s final “form” can’t be produced from the parts presented—it seems something has been added at the last minute (as if we used the seven pieces of the tangram, but also a circle). The self is always under construction. The multiplicity of selves is what allows change. If the change in character or insight is persuasive, it’s because it is both surprising and plausible. We can see how the character at the outset became the character at the end, and the story enacts the transformation.
The tangram also helps us to see that no character, or person, is ever “finally” assembled. A typical jigsaw puzzle has one correct final shape. Tangram’s “seven clever pieces” (alternately translated as “Seven Boards of Skill”) can be arranged to create a great many possible shapes, as different as dog from cat, robot from acrobat.
Similarly, unresolved characterization shows the reader two or more of the shapes that can be made from the pieces available. While the narrative may show a preference
for one, it does nothing to make the others invalid. Is Nick Carraway a man whose insight into and perspective on the people around him allows him some unique and provocative understanding? Absolutely. Is he a man whose motivations and responses are deeply confused in a way he seems unable to recognize or understand? It seems so; and he can be both.
In The Seducer, Jonas Wergeland faces a particular challenge when he creates a documentary about the real-life Nobel Prize–winning novelist Knut Hamsun:
The writer showed him what a little way we have come in terms of understanding a man, or how the pieces of a life fit together. In studying Hamsun, Jonas discovered how dangerous it could be to hang onto some time-honored psychological theory, to saddle an individual with an identity, a persona, an essence: and equally dangerous to cherish the belief that there has to be some sort of continuity, a thread running through life, as if without this comfort one were liable to become lost in a maze. Some notions prevented one from imagining that there could also be leaps, that there could be interruptions in a life, that it might not hang together at all, at any rate not in the way one thought. It was only when one held him transfixed, in a still shot, so to speak, that he became either a Nazi sympathizer or the great writer. But Hamsun was both at the same time, and something more, something you could never quite put your finger on. . . . It is paradoxical—but also very comforting—that an author, a wordsmith, should constitute a mystery that defies description.
BOUNDLESS ALTERNATIVES
From the very opening of Lolita we’re confronted with multiple views of the main characters. We’re told “Humbert Humbert” is a pseudonym for the book’s narrator, and that while “Dolores” is the girl’s actual name, “‘Haze’ only rhymes with the heroine’s real surname.” The second paragraph of what we might think of as the novel proper tells us that the title character is many-faceted: “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.” The young woman called Dolores Haze is obscured from our view by Humbert’s projection of Lolita the Ideal Nymphet. We catch glimpses of her, but the “real” Dolores Haze is conveyed as a series of fragments. She is sometimes the innocent child, sometimes the scheming adolescent. Even at the end, when we meet her as pregnant Dolly Schiller, we don’t see the “true” Dolores so much as we see another one.
Lolita is a projection of Humbert’s ideal love object, much as Gatsby is a projection of Nick’s romantic self and Daisy is a projection of Gatsby’s. To different degrees, and for very different reasons, Humbert and Nick are torn in their response to the objectified person who enchants them. Humbert is demented by sexual desire for the ideal nymphet, but at other times he calls Lolita/Dolores “a most exasperating brat” and “a disgustingly conventional little girl”; he recognizes that he is doing great damage to a child; he tells us he engages in acts of “adoration and despair” and that he feels “an oppressive, hideous constraint as if I were sitting with the small ghost of somebody I had just killed.” His view of himself is equally kaleidoscopic; Humbert calls himself “courageous,” “blind [and] impatient,” a failed father, a monster, and a lover. He anticipates every criticism we have of him. He is at once one of the most despicable characters in fiction, one of the most erudite, and one of the funniest.
Humbert is highly self-analytical. Early on he tells us,
I leaf again and again through these miserable memories. . . . When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past.
While a thoughtful reader could read The Great Gatsby without immediately recognizing the depth of Nick Carraway’s confusion, Nabokov immediately confronts us with a dynamic, complex, perplexing narrator. Humbert’s extremes are so extreme that readers often don’t know what to make of his contradictions, how to assemble the parts, and the easiest solution is to find him morally reprehensible. But Nabokov refuses to let the thoughtful reader stop there. Humbert the despicable may dominate because of the emotional impact of his deeds, but the novel’s power is a result of the fact that we cannot overlook the other Humberts. And as persuasive as we might find Humbert’s expression of regret in the final paragraphs, Nabokov makes it impossible for us to simply take them at face value, to accept Humbert’s last words as a confession, or apology, and to see him as sympathetic after all.21 In giving us so many different possible views of his main character, Nabokov illustrates the danger, the foolishness, of trying to reduce a human being to a single, simple image. To underscore the point, he gives Humbert a reflection to that effect:
I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. . . . Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed . . . similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us. We have it all arranged in our minds, and the less often we see a particular person the more satisfying it is to check how obediently he conforms to our notion of him every time we hear of him. Any deviation in the fates we have ordained would strike us as not only anomalous but unethical. . . . I am saying all this in order to explain how bewildered I was by Farlow’s hysterical letter.
To the extent that we look for a pattern in our friends and neighbors, assembling them, what fascinates us is the challenge; we’re most interested in people when they do something “out of character”—something that forces us to reevaluate them or reconsider what we thought we knew. Similarly, as writers we might tend toward logical or conventional patterns in our characters—not stereotypes, but understandable people. Resolved characters. That’s not surprising, because when we read, we look for ways to understand character. If we aren’t persuaded, we might say, “I don’t believe this character would do that”; if we are, we might say, “I know exactly what kind of woman this is.” We look for behavioral and psychological consistency. While unresolved characters are made of more challenging patterns, they still need to make sense to us. We need to believe that Humbert Humbert is an accomplished academic fluent in several languages, a wit, and a despicable sexual deviant; we need to find Nick Carraway’s understanding of Gatsby and the people around him persuasive even as we entertain doubts about his self-understanding.
If, as readers, we can’t believe the range of thoughts and behaviors attributed to a character, if all we have are a few isolated pieces of a puzzle, or if we seem to have pieces from four different puzzles, the depiction of character has failed. It isn’t enough for there to be contradictions and mysteries: some of the pieces we’re given need to interlock, or sit snugly against one another, and the spaces we’re left with need to be precisely shaped. Precision is not opposed to mystery; precision is necessary to define mystery. The tangram game is pointless if the player can re-create each image with any number of random pieces.
Memory, by Anish Kapoor
THE PUZZLE THAT HAS NO NAME
The inner nature of a human being is not as easily mapped out as all that. . . . It is, in essence, pretty much unfathomable.
— JAN KJÆRSTAD
The tangram is a useful analogy—but, like all analogies, it is inexact. While it allows that a number of chosen pieces can form many different wholes (a boy, a duck, a boat; or Thomas Jefferson the inventor, Thomas Jefferson the statesman, Thomas Jefferson the slave owner), it doesn’t sufficiently illustrate the challenge of seeing those images simultaneously, and trying to understand what they—and the gaps between them—combine to form. The best model may nee
d to be three-dimensional.
One possibility is Anish Kapoor’s sculpture Memory. Imagine a gallery in a museum. The gallery has three openings. One, a doorway, is almost completely blocked by a large, curving metal object. Through a second we can see more of the steel oblong, which looks to some viewers like part of an old submarine.
The third opening looks, as we approach, like a black square on the wall.
As our eyes adjust, we realize we’re looking into the completely dark interior of the object. To go from one opening to the next requires walking through other galleries. There is no opportunity to see the object in its entirety. Instead, we have three partial views. At any point we have to remember at least two of them; we can only picture the whole by imagining it, creating it in our minds. Nothing is missing. The room is brightly lit, the air is clear. But our view is fragmented, and we can only speculate about what we can’t see. We might assume that the parts of the object out of sight are consistent with those that are visible, but for all we know, the rest of the sides are made out of rubber, or bottle caps. We make similar assumptions about the stranger across the aisle on the bus. This is how we see our neighbors; it’s how we see the people nearest to us, and even ourselves. We base our sense of the whole on what we can perceive, which is necessarily partial. We can only see mirror images and photographs of the back of our head, the small of our back; and of course we’re blind to other aspects of ourselves as well.
Most of us are struck by the mystery of an individual when someone close to us—a parent, a sibling, a spouse—dies. We inevitably think of things we wish we could ask that person we knew so well, that person we sat beside quietly in the doctor’s office, that person whose secrets might not have seemed profound when, any day, we could have asked, “But why on earth did you—?”