by Peter Turchi
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is one example of a memoir as a quest to understand someone else, and the quest to know oneself. In the book she tells the story of her father’s death, possibly an accident, possibly a suicide, which occurred not long after she told her parents she was gay. She also tells us that, in response to her coming out, her mother revealed that Bechdel’s father had a series of relationships with young men. An English teacher particularly fond of the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald, he devoted himself to restoring and decorating his home, more attentive to furniture than family. She writes, “He was an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Daedalus of décor,” using his artifice “not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not.” While her father’s secrets and disclosures might seem particularly dramatic, every family has its secrets and disclosures; and while Bechdel’s book is in part an attempt to articulate her understanding of her father, and of her relationship to him, it also argues for the impossibility of understanding, in the sense that there is no clear cause and effect, no single logical sequence to his life and death. Instead, there are possibilities to ponder.
A page from Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Most of the details . . . have long since been transformed or rearranged to bring others of them forward. Some, in fact, are obviously counterfeit; they are no less important. . . . The myriad past, it enters us and disappears. Except that within it, somewhere, like diamonds, exist the fragments that refuse to be consumed. Sifting through, if one dares, and collecting them, one discovers the true design.
— JAMES SALTER
Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps isn’t about a mysterious or partially known individual; it’s a meditation on an actual journey. But Greene was accompanied by his young cousin, Barbara, and years later she wrote her own book about their trip. In Too Late to Turn Back, she tells us a great many things Graham didn’t see fit to include, including the fact that, while he would have us believe he walked through the jungle, more often he was carried by natives. To read her book is to see their trip from quite a different perspective; and to read both books forces the reader to recognize that there’s not just a third, unwritten book—the “true” or complete story—but the story as it would have been told by one of their native guides, the story as it would have been told by the various villagers they visited, and so on. We’re reminded that our perspective of any event is, like our view of Anish Kapoor’s Memory, partial, limited. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s short story “In a Grove,” on which Akira Kurosawa based his film Rashōmon, and Robert Coover’s “The Babysitter” are two extreme examples of narratives that force the reader to recognize contradictory and equally persuasive views of the same events. As any policeman interviewing witnesses after a traffic accident can attest, narrative has its own tangram-like quality.
Several years ago the Norwegian government sponsored an international competition for site-specific art. The winning projects would be placed in various locations, many of them remote, in northern Norway (though by just about any standard, “remote” is a redundant modifier for northern Norway). The works are tremendously varied, and many, like the one above, are set in places where, if it weren’t for a published guide to the artwork, almost no one would see them.
Head, by Markus Raetz
Head, by Markus Raetz, is set in Eggum, on the shore of Vestvågøy, one of the Lofoten Islands. There’s a rocky beach, but the public road ends before you get to the sculpture, so to see it you need to park and get past a fence, then walk. Mounted on a pedestal, the sculpture appears to be a simple, even generic, bust—a head looking out to sea. It’s made out of stone. It seems safe to say that a character set in stone is a resolved character.
But here’s what you see if you stand “in front of” or “behind” the statue.
The identical figure, only upside down. Which is to say, entirely opposite. And as you circle the statue, it reveals something else.
What’s initially intriguing is that, depending on where you stand, the head can appear to be either right-side-up or upside-down. But from other vantage points the sculpture doesn’t clearly depict a head at all. We might see these as transitional views, but if we were to stand still, our perception, like that of one of those blind men beside the elephant, would be both limited and badly misleading. Who’s to say which view is “correct”? We might favor the perspective that reveals a human head, but that’s like favoring the image of Jay Gatsby the wealthy party host, or Lolita the ideal nymphet. If we take a single photograph of this character, he is clear, vivid, easily understandable. If we view him from all sides, he’s mysterious, enchanting.
THE UNQUIET DARKNESS
Many fragments come to me, are discovered, reappear. I wander about the room picking up or remembering things which are narcotic, which induce me to dream.
— JAMES SALTER
James Salter’s novel A Sport and a Pastime, set in the 1950s, focuses on a trio of characters very much like Nick, Gatsby, and Daisy. Salter’s narrator, however, is more obviously questionable in his authority as he tells us about the affair of Philip Dean, his friend, with a young woman. The narrator is clearly inventing details, even scenes, as he imagines the couple’s relationship. The novel begins in late summer: “September. It seems these luminous days will never end.” The usual connotations of late summer turning to autumn, emphasized by the explicit recognition of an inevitable ending, make the novel’s temporal setting a kind of twilight. The penultimate paragraph reads,
But of course, in one sense, Dean never died—his existence is superior to such accidents. One must have heroes, which is to say, one must create them. And they become real through our envy, our devotion. It is we who give them their majesty, their power, which we ourselves could never possess. And in turn, they give some back. But they are mortal, these heroes, just as we are. They do not last forever. They fade. They vanish. They are surpassed, forgotten—one hears of them no more.
Dean is fading; Dean is vanishing; the narrator is struggling to see him.
In The Great Gatsby, several of Nick Carraway’s most significant reflections occur at twilight. Here’s that passage from the party in Tom’s New York apartment, with the references to light emphasized: “I wanted to get out and walk . . . through the soft twilight, but each time I tried to go I became entangled in some wild, strident argument . . . 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.” After the confrontation in the Plaza Hotel, Tom and Nick and Jordan ride together in Tom’s car. As they’re leaving the city, before we know about the accident that claims the life of Tom’s mistress, Nick tells us, “So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight.” Gatsby tells Nick the true story of his youth “toward dawn” of the day of Gatsby’s death. Nick first sees Gatsby at twilight: “I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbor’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets. . . . When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.” That closing line of the first chapter also describes Gatsby’s disappearance from Nick’s life at the end of the novel.
These references to twilight, dying light, and partial light are not just happy coincidence; together with the novel’s numerous uses of the word “ghostly,” they underscore the fact that Gatsby is dead, that Nick is recollecting him in melancholy tranquility. While death might seem to be the ultimate finality, it is in fact the capstone of mystery. We’re left with fragmentary evidence of the deceased; we’re left to contemplate all that we don’t know about them. Dolores Haze is dead and Humbert is writing in anticipation of his own death in Lolita. If life is daylight, and death is darkness, recollected life is twilight; and to the extent that a first-person narrative depicts an act of recollection on the part of the narrator, its characters and events are nece
ssarily seen in dim light, the narrator struggling to make out the essential.
Self-Portrait with Night 1, by Charles Ritchie
After Gatsby’s funeral, when Nick has packed his trunk and is ready to leave, he takes one last walk down to the beach. Here is the paragraph that leads to the novel’s famous final lines:
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
There are hardly any lights; the inessential houses melt away; trees have vanished. Nick strains to perceive, strains to understand. As a result, we are allowed what Graham Greene said he set out to find: a glimpse, beyond surface detail, into the darkness of the human heart.
Houdini the escape artist
18 Other tremendously popular diversions during the Depression included miniature golf and the board game Monopoly. Difficult times drive at least some of us to new forms of amusement.
19 As I write this, a former National Football League player charged with murder is in jail awaiting trial. In the days immediately following his arrest, several newspaper columnists argued that the team that signed him should have known what was coming, as the player had admitted to smoking marijuana in college. Others suggested that his alleged act could be explained by the fact that his father had died several years earlier. This sort of hasty, nonsensical connecting of dots goes on all the time.
20 In earlier drafts of the novel, Fitzgerald told the reader less about Gatsby’s past but had Gatsby explain himself more explicitly. In the draft published as Trimalchio by Cambridge University Press, Gatsby says things like “It’s all so sad,” and “I might be a great man if I could forget that once I lost Daisy. . . . I used to think wonderful things were going to happen to me,” and “Daisy’s all I’ve got left from a world so wonderful that to think of it makes me sick all over,” and perhaps worst of all, “I thought for awhile I had a lot of things, but the truth is I’m empty, and I guess people feel it. That must be why they keep on making up things about me, so I won’t be so empty. I even make up things myself.” By adding biographical information and removing self-analysis, Fitzgerald deepened the mystery around the character.
21 He does this in part by having Humbert make a crude joke in the midst of his apparently sincere final statement to Lolita, now Dolly Schiller.
THE TREASURE HUNTER’S DILEMMA
Long after I had grown up and was practicing the calling of writer, I frequently tried to disappear behind my creations. . . . I came to aspire to replace the crude invisibility of the magic cloak with the invisibility of the wise man who, perceiving all, remains always unperceived.
— HERMAN HESSE
Harry Houdini gained tremendous fame and no small fortune by extricating himself from apparently precarious and life-threatening situations. Houdini allowed himself to be hung upside down high above a Manhattan street in a straitjacket; to be handcuffed and locked in a tank of water; to be shackled and tied up in a sack, the sack then placed in a solid trunk, the trunk chained shut and tossed in a freezing river. And he escaped. Just as Sherlock Holmes offered readers hope that the rational mind could overcome villainy, Houdini’s fundamental appeal was based on the belief that cleverness, combined with courage and strength, allowed him, and so might allow his viewers, to defeat death.22
Secondarily, Houdini is remembered as a man so torn by his mother’s death that he devoted himself to exposing fraudulent “seers” and their séances, in the hope that he could find one who could reunite him with her.23
But almost no one remembers Houdini as a magician—which is what he most wanted to be.
Born in Budapest, Erik Weisz wanted to be a magician so badly that he adopted the name of the Parisian magician Jean Robert-Houdin, author of a fabulous and, in the mid- to late nineteenth century, famous memoir. Young Erik practiced Robert-Houdin’s tricks, but when those led him only to carnival midways and burlesque shows, he began borrowing, from other performers, other kinds of tricks, including escapes. According to Jim Steinmeyer, magic historian, designer of illusions large and small, and author of Hiding the Elephant: “There wasn’t anything magical about it. . . . Houdini seldom took real chances with his escapes. . . . [They] were thrilling examples of showmanship and . . . vaudeville. Houdini never failed in an escape. . . . His specialty was convincing each person that they had witnessed a near catastrophe.”
Orson Welles, who, as a boy, saw Houdini during his last tour, in 1926, called the magic “awful stuff.” Despite his hyperbolic claims to the contrary, there is no evidence that Houdini invented or designed a single illusion—he simply imitated those of other magicians or, just as often, bought them. All magicians borrow and steal from one another, but the best make the illusions their own. Steinmeyer argues that a low point in the career of Houdini the magician came in 1918, at the height of his fame, in New York’s Hippodrome, when Houdini made a live elephant disappear on stage—and the trick was a flop. Audience response was so halfhearted, the presentation so unimpressive, that he dropped it from his act.
The Treasure Hunter’s Dilemma
One fellow magician said, “As an illusionist, [Houdini] never left the commonplace. [But] his escapes were incomparable. I frequently wondered at the indifference of the one and the perfection of the other and finally was forced to the conclusion that his want of originality was the answer.” That “want of originality”—both a lack of originality and a desire for it—made Erik Weisz into world-famous Harry Houdini. He was his most captivating, his most exciting, his most mythical, when he—not a deck of cards, not an elephant—was squarely at the center of attention.
I don’t think of myself as Bob Dylan. It’s like Rimbaud said, “I is another.”
— Bob Dylan
THE (WO)MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN
Fiction is a kind of magic, in that it leads the audience to suspend disbelief and, in some cases, be transported to a state of wonder. A story or novel is also like a magic trick in the way that information (characters and events in one, cards and balls and attractive young women in glittering costumes in the other) is both offered and concealed to create dramatic effects. Magic is an entertaining illustration of information design—or, as Edward Tufte puts it, disinformation design, as the magician’s aim is to persuade the audience to see something apparently wondrous (a woman is sawn in half then restored, a card chosen at random turns up in the center of a baked cake) when in fact something much more mundane (a blade retracted, a “choice” was forced) has occurred.
A magician is a performer; and one of his first challenges is to create and embody a particular magician character. He might be a bold baritone, she might be a boisterous blonde, he might perform without speaking, she might maintain comic banter, he might present himself as a bumbler, she might seem aloof. Whatever the details, that character is every magician’s first illusion.
As writers, we may or may not think of ourselves as wanting to be the focus of attention, but in asking people to stop and listen, to sit down and read what we have to say, we are dimming the houselights, taking center stage. Some forms of writing—kitchen appliance instruction manuals, for instance—mean to be anonymous, authorless. That illusion is part of their authority. Only if something seems unclear or wrong do we wonder, “Who wrote this?” Certain fiction written in the third person aims for a similar effect: the focus is meant to be entirely on the characters and events, not on t
he godlike presence telling us about them. But a great deal of third-person fiction has a narrator readers might think of as a character called the Author (as in the work of Henry Fielding, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Leo Tolstoy, Flannery O’Connor, John Barth, Lorrie Moore, and David Foster Wallace), and of course all first-person fiction has an identifiable narrator. No matter whether our narrator feigns objectivity or offers an opinion in every sentence, stands in the wings or hogs the spotlight, she exerts tremendous influence over what the reader sees and what he thinks of it.
[My book will be] immensely flavored with me. . . . [It will be] about me, [with my experiences] transmuted and recreated in writing.
— THOMAS WOLFE, on Look Homeward, Angel
We write to share our experiences and/or the way we see things and/or what we imagine. But the creation and control of a narrator is particularly challenging when that narrator is most like us—when most of her experiences, her attitudes and opinions, are ours. We’re interested in what we’ve done, and what we think; we agree with ourselves. To write for readers is to make that experience and those ideas interesting to others, to make our perspective persuasive—and, ideally, to learn something about our own predilections and blind spots.
We might resist thinking of stories and poems as illusions, since the word “illusion” has a negative connotation and is often used synonymously with “fake,” or something intentionally deceptive created with ill intent. But as writers we create illusions in the form of alternate realities, realities we very much want readers to believe in, temporarily. Even a depiction of an actual place is a kind of alternate reality. The American West doesn’t look the same in Cormac McCarthy’s fiction as it does in Larry McMurtry’s, Pete Dexter’s, Wallace Stegner’s, Willa Cather’s, or James Michener’s—or, for that matter, as it does in nonfiction by John Wesley Powell, Joseph Wood Krutch, and John C. Van Dyke. Instructions to magic tricks often refer to “the effect.” “The effect” is what the audience thinks it sees. As writers, we are constantly working to create carefully considered effects.