A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic

by Peter Turchi

  The curator of the French exhibition of self-portraits claimed the paintings answered the question “Who am I?” Yet Rockwell seems not to be answering that question so much as asking it: “Who am I, to be making this self-portrait? Who am I to assert myself into such lofty company?” The portrait conveys a sense of humility, even self-mockery. The image is surprisingly complex—the artist painting himself looking into a mirror and painting himself, with every “self” distinct—and at the same time harmonious with the tone of Rockwell’s most famous work, and his public persona. In representing himself three times, he gives us the comic figure (in the mirror), the Great Man (on the canvas), and then something we might be tempted to call the actual man, the painter at work. But the very fact that the three characters are different tells us that the implied fourth—the actual Norman Rockwell, who designed and executed the image—is not any one of these, exactly, but some combination of them, and of other characteristics we can’t see. Norman Rockwell is the man who can stand back from himself well enough to see—and depict—these three different selves.

  Like Erik Weisz playing Harry Houdini, Samuel Clemens playing Mark Twain, and David Shields playing David Shields, in his triple self-portrait Rockwell is on center stage yet out of sight. The curator who thought self-portraits are “the most intense unmasking of the artist’s identity” missed the point. In their self-portraits, artists aren’t exposed like poor stammering O. Z. Pinhead, the defrocked wizard. They are no more exposed than Houdini in that famous photograph reproduced at the start of this chapter. While the escape artist may be shackled and nearly naked, Houdini is neither vulnerable nor captive: he’s in complete control. This was, after all, a publicity photograph. Rockwell, too, presented his audience with carefully calibrated images of himself. The casual viewer of his self-portrait might merely be amused or charmed. A more thoughtful viewer might recognize that Rockwell is, like Whitman, reminding us that we each contain multitudes. As writers, though, we recognize the true magic of the effect: while the artist appears to be captured on the page in front of us, in fact he is presenting exactly what he wants us to see, having found precisely where to stand in relation to his work.

  22 One of the most famous footnotes in show business is that Houdini died as the result of an unexpected punch to the abdomen delivered by a “fan” backstage, a sort of adulatory test of strength. In fact he succumbed to the effects of a ruptured appendix which may or may not have been caused by the attack. In either case, he proved mortal.

  23 Houdini and Conan Doyle were friends for some time, as Conan Doyle believed there was no doubt that spirits can contact us from the afterlife. The two had a falling-out due to Conan Doyle’s insistence that Houdini was an actual medium, able to convey messages from spirits, while Houdini insisted he was an illusionist. Conan Doyle told his side of the story in The Edge of the Unknown, the last book he published before he died (of a heart attack). Houdini told his in A Magician Among the Spirits.

  24 Some writers fear omniscient narrators might lessen the reader’s intimate connection to her characters; others worry that readers might disagree with a narrator who expresses opinions. But the narrator’s attitude toward his or her story animates most great fiction. Was it really the best of times and the worst of times? Do all ships at a distance really have every man’s wish on board? Is it really a universal truth that a single man with a fortune must be in want of a wife? Maybe not, but we’re delighted to be in the company of an entertaining speaker with strong opinions.

  25 Frederick Reiken’s excellent essay on this pitfall of first-person fiction, “The Author-Narrator-Character (ANC) Merge,” is available online and in the anthology A Kite in the Wind.

  26 And he didn’t go far to assemble the materials for his fantasy world; Dorothy was the name of his wife’s beloved and recently deceased niece, and “Oz,” as every fan of the books or film knows, came from the label on the bottom drawer of his filing cabinet: “O–Z.”

  27 I am trying to be a good friend here, so I have suppressed identifying details, but take every reviewer’s word for it: the book is not good.

  THE LINE, THE PYRAMID, AND THE LABYRINTH

  Line experiences many fates.

  — WASSILY KANDINSKY

  THE HEAD OF THE LINE

  Some of our earliest experiences are related to lines. We trace lines, are told to color within the lines, and, in school, line up (the role of “line leader” being the first—and, in a few cases, the greatest—public honor some of us receive). An early game, for many children, is a simple sprint along a path (“Race you to the corner!”), where deviation from the line is poor sportsmanship (“You cheated!”). Board games from Candyland to Life require the players to make progress along a clearly marked path. But those journeys are a bit trickier; and as we develop, as our patience increases, movement along the line from beginning to end becomes more complicated. In Chutes and Ladders,28 a player’s straightforward journey is influenced by ladders accelerating progress and chutes retarding it. In Trivial Pursuit, specific questions have to be answered before a player’s or team’s token can go forward.

  We see the same phenomenon in sports. In theory, baseball involves completing circuits along a predetermined path more often than the members of the opposing team; but first there’s the business of a ball to hit, and avoiding being put out. Golf involves hitting a ball from tee to green eighteen times—but high grass, sand, and water are there to impede progress. Football, on paper, is a walk in the park: all you need to do is carry a ball across a goal line. But there are those eleven hostile people who insist on getting in the way. . . . These games and sports, and others like them, occupy us not despite their obstacles, but because of them.

  TIME/LINE

  Lyric and narrative poetry are often distinguished by their relationship to time. A lyric poem can describe a moment, or even seem to hover outside of time, while a narrative, in relating one or more events, necessarily moves in time. I once heard a poet suggest that narrative’s reliance on time meant that it is, by definition, linear. The implication was that while the lyric operates freely in any number of lovely ways, narrative is shackled to time like an old-school prisoner. The lyric is the music of heavenly spheres, while narrative is a steady progression of bowling balls tumbling from the closet: ca-thunk, ca-thunk, ca-thunk.

  Many people, including the German aesthetician Gotthold Lessing, have asserted that the province of both poetry and prose, written forms, is time, while the province of visual art is space. But while time is certainly an element of narrative—any two events are related by sequence, causality, or both—narrative has no set or particular relationship to time. E. M. Forster helpfully defined story as a sequence of events, or a “chopped-off length of the tapeworm of time” (as opposed to plot, a series of events related by cause and effect), but that length can be (and is) re-chopped and rearranged in any number of ways. Narratives leap through time, go backward in time, and even, like a lyric poem, stand still in time. Charles Baxter’s First Light moves back through the years, ending with the birth of one of the characters we’ve known as an adult; Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 seems to swirl in a vortex of time before spinning forward, to the main character’s eventual decision to light out for Sweden, but also backward, to the shocking death he witnessed. Tobias Wolff’s much-anthologized “Bullet in the Brain” begins with a scene in a bank in which the main character is shot in the head, then freezes time to tell us all that the dying man does and doesn’t think. The story does not return to the present; time does not resume its movement forward.

  A Ladders to Salvation game board

  This is simply to say that time in fiction is as elastic as it is in life. The three hours or so over which a professional football game is played pass in different ways for the head referee; the starting quarterback; the third-string quarterback on the sideline; the playback operator sitting in a truck in the parking lot; the studio commentator preparing halftime and postgame comments; the shivering c
heerleader, her back to the action, smile frozen to her face; the passionate fan; her tolerant husband; the stadium concession worker cooking bratwurst; the small boy in the upper deck who can’t see over the people in front of him and desperately needs to go to the bathroom, etc., etc. Even for the fan watching the final quarter on television, time moves in many different ways. There is the passage of fifteen minutes on the game clock, which will take place over something closer to forty-five minutes on the kitchen clock. Assuming he cares about the outcome, the part of those forty-five minutes spent actually watching the football field will pass differently than the time when the game is “interrupted” by commercials (though nonfans in the house might find the commercials a great relief). If his team is holding on to a slim lead, the time on the game clock is likely to seem to move with excruciating deliberation; if his team is behind, the seconds fly past like pennies on a gas pump. Between plays, he’ll see carefully chosen clips from earlier in the game, even from previous games. Since the precious few moments of actual activity on the field have a heightened dramatic charge, significant moments will be replayed, often more than once, in slow motion, so that something that happened in a fraction of a second—a ball slipping from a player’s hand just inches from the goal line—will be elongated in a kind of glorious ecstasy, or agony.

  When you get home baby, write me a few of your lines

  When you get home baby, write me a few of your lines

  It would be consolation

  To ease my worried mind.

  — Fred McDowell

  Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?

  those curves, angles, dots?

  — Walt Whitman

  Developing a structure is seldom that simple. Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme.

  — JOHN McPHEE

  To say that the province of fiction is time, then, does not tell us much. While narrative may involve events, and while events take place in time, and while time itself might seem to move in one direction at a constant speed (though that is rarely the way we experience it), there is nothing particularly linear about narrative—or, more accurately, the narrative line is no simple thing. It is certainly not the sort of line most of us learned about in geometry class, without width or depth, straight and infinite.

  In discussing fiction, we might refer to a particular story’s or novel’s linearity, but this is not usually praise. Readers don’t tend to say “I love how linear this is.” Instead, the term—often invoked but rarely defined—is used as a kind of vague criticism. “This story just seems so linear” means the story is direct, predictable, relentless, obvious, tedious, and/or dull; it means the story lacks reversal, misdirection, tension, suspense, or surprise.

  Most of us are of at least two minds regarding linearity. We use the terms “line of thought,” “line of argument,” and “linear thinking” both as high praise and as harsh criticism. How clear is her thinking? She articulates her line of thought with tremendous precision. What’s his problem? Linear thinking—he’s entirely incapable of thinking outside the box. Toeing the line can be a sign of virtue or repression; walking a fine line, dangerous. Some lines are pickups, some are put-downs. It’s considered admirable to have a line of work, less admirable to give someone a line. More and more of us either need or want to be online throughout the day, though being forced offline can be a relief. Defending the front line is a good thing; adhering to the party line, maybe not so much.

  In the game Quoridor, each player attempts to construct a safe line of passage for her piece while impeding the progress of her opponent(s).

  Prehistoric people seem to have recognized the significance of certain lines: think of the careful placement of openings in walls to align with the sun’s rays on the solstice, the arrangement of monumental blocks of rock at Stonehenge. Geometric shapes and patterns cut into the earth (even, we’ve recently learned, in the apparently not-always-forested Amazon rainforests) may or may not have served as runways for alien spaceships, but they certainly indicate an early interest in man-made shapes. Long before tractors made them easier to create, farmers understood that orderly rows of crops increased efficiency of labor, fertilizer, and water; they also understood that some crops should be planted in lines parallel to the contours of the earth.

  Linear thinking is often related to analysis and argumentation, something respected and promoted by Pythagoras, Euclid, and mathematicians, logicians, philosophers, and scientists who followed them. Linearity was also crucial to the Industrial Revolution—think conveyor belts, assembly lines, and your car’s alignment. Linearity, then, can be a virtue; but in fiction, as in games, our imagination is most energetically engaged when straightforward progress is challenged.

  Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns

  Driven time and time again off course . . .

  — Homer

  A BRIEF DETOUR TO THE SITE OF THE GREAT PYRAMID

  Discussions of fiction often involve wanton abuse of the terms of Euclidean geometry. In a single conversation, one person might refer to a story’s narrative line, another to its narrative arc, and still another to Freytag’s triangle, and everyone will proceed as if these three things—a line, an arc, and a triangle—were interchangeable.

  Gustav Freytag’s 1863 text The Technique of the Drama contains exactly one illustration. It appears in his chapter titled “The Construction of the Drama,” which he begins by telling his readers, “Through the two halves of the action which come closely together at one point, the drama possesses—if one may symbolize its arrangement by lines—a pyramidal structure.” What is often referred to as “Freytag’s triangle” in writing handbooks is not called a triangle in his book, for the very sound reason that it is not a triangle.

  A triangle, as most third graders know, has three sides. Freytag was not describing drama as something with three sides. He was instead elaborating on Aristotle, in order to apply his ideas to Shakespeare, among other playwrights. In the Poetics, Aristotle says, “Every tragedy consists of a complication and a resolution. . . . By complication I mean everything from the beginning up to and including the section which immediately precedes the change to good fortune or bad fortune; by resolution I mean everything from the beginning of the change of fortune to the end.”29

  Freytag has more to say on the matter but makes his way to this: “[The] two chief parts of the drama are firmly united by a point of the action which lies directly in the middle. This middle, the climax of the play, is the most important place of the structure: the action rises to this; the action falls away from this.” Several pages later, introducing his diagram, he calls the starting point of the pyramid the introduction, the top point the climax, and the ending point the catastrophe. Three points, two sides, clear enough.

  But in the very next sentence the pyramid begins to shudder: “Between these three parts lie [the parts of] the rise and the fall. Each of these five parts may consist of a single scene, or a succession of connected scenes, but the climax is usually composed of one chief scene. These parts of the drama, (a) introduction, (b) rise, (c) climax, (d) return or fall, (e) catastrophe, have each what is peculiar in purpose and in construction.”

  The situation gets worse, but let’s pause here. Gustav Freytag was a scholar, poet, novelist, critic, playwright, editor, and soldier. His best-known creative work seems to have been a novel translated into English as Debit and Credit, “the purpose of which” was, according to the introduction to the translation of The Technique of the Drama, “to show the value and dignity of a life of labor.” And here, as he tries to explain dramatic structure with an overly simple illustration, we see evidence of hard labor. To Freytag’s credit, he recognized that things were much more complicated than his pyramid makes it seem. There are not three important points, but five (so far). The five can each consist of a single scene or more; but usually the climax is a single scene. His qualifications are like minor tremors.
He continues:

  Between them stand three important scenic effects, through which the parts are separated as well as bound together. Of these three dramatic moments, or crises, one, which indicates the beginning of the stirring action, stands between the introduction and the rise; the second, the beginning of the counter-action, between the climax and the return; the third, which must rise once more before the catastrophe, between the return and the catastrophe. They are called here the exciting moment or force, the tragic moment or force, and the moment or force of the last suspense. . . . In the following sections, therefore, the eight component parts of the drama will be discussed in their natural order.

  We can almost hear the sweat dripping off the poor man’s brow. Any writer who has seen a metaphor collapse can sympathize; but of course the proper course of action is to start over and try to get it right. Not Freytag. Having imagined a simple illustration, he seems to have had no interest in creating a more detailed one, one that would account for his eight important points (some of which, he explains, are optional). The copy of The Technique I consulted—like, one imagines, every copy of the book read by anyone sympathetic to the author’s struggles—is filled with notes, an indication of where the missing points might belong on the diagram, and black bumps indicating interruptions of the path up to the climax and the path down to the appropriately labeled catastrophe. In the years since Freytag wrote, other writers have depicted “his” pyramid in a variety of ways, with any number of slopes and angles, to illustrate those three—or five, or eight—parts, and their relative duration. All of which is to say that Freytag’s pyramid was never a precise illustration of how narratives are constructed.