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

by Peter Turchi

  “Child, rekindle the flame;

  I’ll be back in a flash with something tame.”

  She changed clothes, donned a blond wig, and went out with the bag.

  Instead of going on to school, Petie Pete had climbed back up the pear tree. In disguise, Witch Bea-Witch came by again, hoping he wouldn’t recognize her, and said:

  “Petie Pete, pass me a pear

  With your little paw!

  I mean it, don’t guffaw,

  My mouth waters, I swear, I swear!”

  But Petie Pete had recognized her and dared not come down:

  “Pears I refuse old Witch Bea-Witch,

  Who would bag me without a hitch.”

  Then Witch Bea-Witch reassured him:

  “I’m not the soul you think, I swear,

  This morning only did I leave my lair.

  Petie, Pete, pass me a pear

  With your little paw so fair.”

  She kept on until she finally talked Petie Pete into coming down and giving her a pear. At once she shoved him down into the bag.

  Reaching the bushes, she once again had to stop and relieve herself; but this time the bag was tied too tight for Petie Pete to get away. So what did he do but call “Bobwhite” several times in imitation of quail. A hunter with his dog out hunting quail found the bag and opened it. Petie Pete jumped out and begged the hunter to put the dog into the bag in his place. When Witch Bea-Witch returned and shouldered the bag, the dog inside did nothing but squirm and whine, and Witch Bea-Witch said:

  “Petie Pete, there’s nothing to help you,

  Bark like a dog is all you can do.”

  She got home and called her daughter:

  “Maggy Mag! Marguerite!

  Come undo the door;

  Then I ask you more:

  Put on the pot to stew Petie Pete.”

  But when she went to empty the bag into the boiling water, the angry dog slipped out, bit her on the shin, dashed into the yard, and gobbled up hens left and right.

  “Mamma, have you lost your mind?

  Is it on dogs you now want to dine?”

  exclaimed Maggy Mag. Witch Bea-Witch snapped:

  “Child, rekindle the flame;

  I’ll be back in a flash.”

  She changed clothes, donned a red wig, and returned to the pear tree. She went on at such length that Petie Pete fell into the trap once more. This time there were no rest stops. She carried the bag straight home where her daughter was waiting on the doorstep for her.

  “Shut him up in the chicken coop,” ordered the Witch, “and early tomorrow morning while I’m out, make him into hash with potatoes.”

  The next morning Maggy Mag took a carving board and knife to the henhouse and opened a little hen door.

  “Petie Pete, just for fun.

  Please lay your head upon this board.”

  He replied:

  “First show me how!”

  Maggy Mag laid her neck on the board, and Petie Pete picked up the carving knife and cut off her head, which he put on to fry in the frying pan.

  Witch Bea-Witch came back and exclaimed:

  “Marguerite, dear daughter,

  What have you thrown in the fryer?”

  “Me” piped Petie Pete, sitting on the hood over the fireplace.

  “How did you get way up there?” asked Witch Bea-Witch.

  “I piled one pot on top of the other and came on up.”

  So Witch Bea-Witch tried to make a ladder of pots to go after him, but when she got halfway to the top the pots came crashing down, and into the fire she fell and burned to ashes.

  31 The North American game was developed from the British Cluedo, invented in 1944 by Anthony E. Pratt as a diversion during air raid drills. In recent years a number of variants have been published, including one where the conservatory and billiard room are replaced by a spa and home theater.

  32 “Ergodic” is a term Aarseth coined himself: “Appropriated from physics [it] derives from the Greek words ergon and hodos, meaning ‘work’ and ‘path.’ In ergodic literature, nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text.”

  33 Elsewhere, Aarseth says that a footnote-rich text is both uni- and multicursal, as the reader can read the text without referring to the footnotes, “interrupt” the reading of the text by dutifully reading the footnotes, or read the text, then read the footnotes. You’ve just faced that challenge. The inclusion of “Petie Pete versus Witch Bea-Witch” as a footnote raises the stakes, as it’s impossible to simply glance down, read the footnote, then return to the main text. Aarseth’s example is Nabokov’s Pale Fire, “which leaves the mode of cursality up to the reader: consisting of a foreword, 999-line poem, a long commentary of notes addressing individual lines (but really telling the commentator’s story), and an index, it can be read either unicursally, straight through, or multicursally, by jumping between the comments and the poem.” It’s interesting that such books disturb some readers, given that our reading is nearly always fragmented (we read a story or chapter today, another tomorrow) or interrupted (the phone rings, we remember the car’s oil needs to be changed). This suggests that the uninterrupted journey through a story or novel offers a particular pleasure, even when that journey involves tension, suspense, puzzle, and mystery. At the same time, an increasing number of books are being produced that insist on multicursal reading. They include books about the Beatles and Lewis and Clark that have pockets holding facsimile documents, ticket stubs, diary pages, etc., as well as books like Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Anne Carson’s Nox, which use a variety of images and typographical ploys to engage the reader with an “artistically complex . . . artifact.”

  THE PLEASURES OF DIFFICULTY

  The spur and burden of the contract are intolerable to me. I can endure the irritation of it no longer. . . . I never had such a fight over a book in my life before . . . this wretched God-damned book.

  — MARK TWAIN, on Life on the Mississippi

  THE LIE WE TELL OURSELVES

  My wife has a fantasy, a desire she often expresses, which I feel certain she would be delighted to have me share with you.

  “Let’s just float in the pool and drink gin and tonics,” she’ll say. “Let’s bake like lizards.”

  We live in Arizona, where we have a pool, and where gin is sold in every grocery store, and where it is no challenge at all to bake like a lizard.

  From this you might understandably presume that my wife is an aspiring alcoholic, or an idle and frivolous person. But in fact the -holic my wife is closest to becoming is a worka-; and as I am writing this, at eleven o’clock at night, she is standing in her study, playing her viola. She’ll do this for an hour, maybe longer; she does it virtually every night. My wife is not a professional musician. While she’s played violin or viola since she was eight years old, and she has played in any number of quartets and chamber groups and orchestras, the vast majority of her playing is not for other people to hear. For a while, when we lived in Asheville, North Carolina, she was a regular on the wedding circuit, making pocket money playing, as she cheerfully put it, “the same damned tunes. Pachelbel’s Canon, Handel’s Water Music, and the Mendelssohn. Most of the time people wouldn’t know if it was us playing or a radio.” She stopped playing weddings not because we became independently wealthy, not because she didn’t enjoy the other musicians, not, she assures me, because she’s become cynical about marriage, and not because “playing” had become work—but because the work had become tedious.

  In contrast, the other night she drove to a church where, with about sixty other musicians she had never met, she sight-read Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. They played it beginning to end, without a break, without an audience. She came home exhausted. “That was glorious,” she said. “It’s so complicated.”

  “Complicated,” I said, trying to look sympathetic in a knowing way, when in fact I am a heathen. I can sing along with “Morning, Noon and Night” and “Chug-a-lug,” but
I can tell you nothing about Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. I can’t even tell you with complete confidence that Mahler had previously written four other symphonies. I asked my wife, “But you had a good time?”

  “Glorious,” she said again. Then, shaking her head: “It was terrifying.”

  I would have given her a hard time about the apparent contradiction except for the fact that I am currently learning how to ride a bike. I exaggerate only a little; I never rode much as a child, I have virtually no sense of balance, and my feet are attached to my legs nearly perpendicular to the desired angle for feet, so situating myself on a potentially fast-moving foot-powered object requiring some combination of balance and dexterity never seemed like a good idea. A month or so ago, though, my doctor suggested I take up swimming or biking.

  Not many people would buy a book of sudoku that looked like this:

  My wife would not look kindly on my splashing and making a lot of commotion in the pool; it dilutes the gin. So for the past week I’ve been riding out to a desert park in 104 degree heat, then turning around and riding back. Most of the last mile is uphill, part of it fairly steep, and I have not yet been able to make it to the top without pausing. There are many other places I could bike, flat places; but I ride out to the park every day now, then turn around and try to climb that hill.

  “Did you have fun?” my wife says from her blue pool float, glass in hand. “You look like you’re going to have a heart attack.”

  “Nah, it’s great,” I tell her before going under. “Damn it.”

  I don’t think my wife and I are unusual in this: most of us lie to ourselves. We say we want the good life, we say we want to live on Easy Street, but we suspect it’s true that heaven is a place where nothing ever happens, and it sounds pretty dull. So while we might lounge in the sun for a while, or have a drink, before long we dry off and make trouble for ourselves.

  Not everyone is like this, but most writers (and other artists) are. Most of us are, at least for periods, unsatisfied with our current degree of fluency. Sometimes—maybe often—we find writing frustrating, even aggravating. Absolutely no one is telling us to do it. The financial rewards are, for nearly all of us, modest. And yet we continue, trying to do a difficult thing well.

  To argue for the pleasures of difficulty is not to promote the products of laziness, self-absorption, or hostility—that is, work that is intentionally vague, obscure, or encoded to prevent accessibility, work that doesn’t intend to communicate with readers but which instead exists as a fortress without doors. This is the sort of writing some of us produced as teenagers in a misguided display of (we thought) superiority that was, in fact, a fear of being understood, and so revealed to be not unlike other people. (Tom Wolfe argued against that kind of elitism years ago in The Painted Word.) I am not arguing here for fiction or poetry that only certain trained readers can hope to understand and admire. While we may say that we read to be entertained or enlightened, often we find that the books we return to, the books we find most valuable, are the books that disturb or elude us, defy us in some way, even as they appeal to us.

  And the casual sudoku solver may be put off by the challenge presented by this:

  But somewhere in between are a great many variations of the puzzle, with varying degrees of difficulty, which occupy a remarkable number of people.

  I first read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita as an undergraduate English major. Over the years I’ve reread it many times; I’ve read and reread The Annotated Lolita; and I’ve taught the novel to undergraduates and graduates. I’ve referred to the novel enough that one student, only partly kidding, said she wondered if I could teach an entire course without mentioning it. “You must love that book,” more than one person has said to me. But “love” is a word I would never use to describe my feelings toward it. “You really understand that book,” one or two people have said to me, but I strongly doubt my understanding of the novel—which is to say, I have an understanding of the novel, but that understanding has certainly changed over time, and is very much open to interrogation; I feel challenged every time I return to it. Poet C. Dale Young described a similar—though superficially opposite—experience reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The first time he read it, he said, the book seemed perfectly clear. Why did people make such a fuss? Moved to reread it, he found Conrad’s tale increasingly elusive, more complicated. Richer. However it happens, the appeal of the books we return to is often, at least in part, a fascination with what we can’t quite reach.

  Many writers seem to be mathphobes. I’ve known writers who complain at length (and with good reason) about the shocking decline of literacy both in and outside of classrooms, but who laugh at the impossibility of calculating numerical grade averages or the tip on a restaurant bill. Many people who feel an aversion to math think of it as a foreign language, or a system of rules to be memorized and applied to abstractions. But while one of the appealing qualities of math is the consistency or purity of the knowledge it offers—2 + 2 = 4 all day long, no matter the weather or the majority party in Congress—most dedicated mathematicians are passionate about the unknown, the problems unsolved. A delightful illustration is Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Enigma, about the many people who dedicated some large part of their lives to proving that something isn’t mathematically possible.

  Pythagoras is credited with the theorem that the longest side of any right triangle—the hypotenuse—always has the same relationship to the other two sides of that triangle. Specifically, if the two shorter sides are a and b and the hypotenuse is c, a2 + b2 = c2. Mathematicians, being mathematicians, wondered if there are any positive integers for which it’s true that a3 + b3 = c3 (or, for that matter, a4 + b4 = c4, and so on). Nobody could come up with numbers that satisfied the equation, but neither could anyone prove that there wasn’t such a combination of numbers. Enter Pierre de Fermat, a French lawyer and amateur mathematician who, in 1637, jotted in the margins of his copy of Diothantus’s Arithmetica that he had come up with a proof but didn’t have space to write it out. Fermat did write out plenty of other proofs, so the combination of a very specific problem, or puzzle, and a mystery (what did Fermat see that no one else could see?) sent countless others off on a journey.

  The pleasure of math, at least on one level, is not doing routine computations, or “plugging in numbers,” but solving problems—and not the kind that are answered in the back of the book.

  Everything I have written up to now is trifling compared to that which I would like to write. . . . I am displeased and bored with everything now being written, while everything in my head interests, moves, and excites me.

  — Anton Chekhov

  THE MILLER’S PUZZLE

  The Miller took the company aside and showed them nine sacks of flour that were standing as depicted in the sketch:

  “Now, hearken all and some,” said he, “while that I do set ye the riddle of the nine sacks of flour. And mark ye, my lords and masters, that there be single sacks on the outside, pairs next unto them, and three together in the middle thereof. By Saint Benedict, it doth so happen that if we do but multiply the pair, 28, by the single one, 7, the answer is 196, which is of a truth the number shown by the sacks in the middle. Yet it be not true that the other pair, 34, when so multiplied by its neighbour, 5, will also make 196. Wherefore do I beg you, gentle sirs, so to place anew the nine sacks with as little trouble as possible that each pair when thus multiplied by its single neighbor shall make the number in the middle.” As the Miller has stipulated in effect that as few bags as possible shall be moved, there is only one answer to this puzzle, which everybody should be able to solve.

  — Henry Ernest Dudeney

  THE STRATEGIC RELEASE OF INFORMATION

  Within a sentence, diction can be used to clarify or to strategically obscure. The first sentence of Antonya Nelson’s short story “Strike Anywhere” is, “This was the next time after what was supposed to be the last time.”

  There’s nothing about that l
anguage or its arrangement that is hard to comprehend; the difficulty comes from the fact that we have signifiers, but no specific content. What is “this”? we think. The next time for what? The last time for what? All we know for sure is that “this” is an occasion, and it’s significant because it wasn’t supposed to happen. The sentence appears to be telling us something, and we understand the logic of its grammatical construction, but we need to know more—a deliberate mystery pushes us forward.33

  The next sentence puts us at ease by offering clear and explicit information—two characters and a bit of action: “The father parked at the curb before the White Front, and the boy found himself making a prayer.”

  So we’ve got a boy and his father, and the boy seems to be worried. Despite the matter-of-factness and absolute clarity of the sentence, tension is maintained, as is the mystery—we still don’t know what’s going on, or why it’s important. The boy’s worry mirrors our own unease about not knowing what the narrator is referring to.

  The paragraph continues, “It was Sunday, after all, and this was what his mother did when faced with his father’s stubborn refusal to do what he said he’d do. Or not do what he said he’d not do.”

  We understand that “this” refers to prayer, but all that doing and not doing conveys more sound than sense—and echoes, it’s worth noting, the first sentence. The first sentence created a desire to know certain information: What is this significant event? And why isn’t it supposed to happen? We still don’t have answers, but the context for the questions is becoming increasingly clear—so while we’re eager to have those initial questions addressed, we’re content to wait a little longer, because we’re getting what seems to be important information. By the third paragraph, when we learn that the White Front is a bar, we’ve got a clue regarding the source of the trouble; yet by that time the focus of the narrative is no longer the simple fact of what’s going on, but the difficult situation the boy is in, and his father’s obliviousness, or self-interest, and the mother’s influence, or lack of it. (This opening would unfold much differently if Nelson had chosen to call the establishment the White Front Tavern; even the specific information she releases is calibrated to sustain curiosity.) The opening passage ends with these two sentences: