From Where You Dream

by Robert Olen Butler

  "They were still two days short of Arizona. Eleanor sipped an early aperitif, perspiring jagged rings on the armholes of her pongee suit." A silk suit, pongee silk. And what we now see is this arid place, and a woman out of place, displaced, but in the reflexes of a life that is about to change. Sipping "an aperitif." I dare say the word had never been spoken in Arizona in 1914. Laurel "skimming a Commerce Chronicle"—again, it's as if they were sitting in their parlor, whereas in fact they're being carried far away from the life of their past. And Eleanor is conscious of that. We're in her point of view, so we under-stand that she's aware of the jagged rings of sweat. Laurel's first comment is "When in Rome"—a facile patrician use of a cliche, just because he's taking off his coat. He's still dressed in his pinstriped vest and four-in-hand!

  We hear the train running, and the very movement of the thing carrying her away suggests—what?—the rending of silk. Silk already represents the life that she's lived, and it's being rent apart, and then she's all the way back to Maryland. It's House Beautiful! she reads, talking of homebuilding in England and, meanwhile, the desert is all around them. We find that she has an unbuilt house—and this is where the epiphany of yearning is strongest. Because her grief is not just for aperitifs and silk dresses. In fact her potential is separate from her privilege—and where is that potential found? In the intense memory of something very concrete, very sensual, very specific: her father's wood planes. And then comes that wonderful verb, her hand patting along the shelf, touching these planes and knowing the rich, various names of them. As we see that potential for something of the hands, of building something new, we see that potential in her. She grieves not for her parlor and her silk dresses, but for the planes—and that's where the yearning comes through clearest. If you combine that moment with the devastating desert image in the beginning, her yearning suggests, ironically, her potential for the rougher parts of life and the challenge to come.

  There's nothing analytic here about yearning; it is manifest in every detail. I yearn not only for a literal home but also for a place in the world—a lack reflected in the empty landscape.

  The yearning finds its way, in a certain kind of irony, into her memories. The sounds of the train metaphorically echo the rending of her old life. The dynamic is working on all those levels at once, all reflecting the same yearning.

  Here's the opening of a short story, "Brownsville," from a book called Blues and Trouble by Tom Piazza. Again, the yearning comes out of beautiful moment-to-moment sensual details, all fit organically together.

  I've been trying to get to Brownsville, Texas, for weeks. Right now it's a hundred degrees in New Orleans and the gays are running down Chartres Street with no shirts on, trying to stay young. I'm not running anymore. When I get to Brownsville I'm going to sit down in the middle of the street, and that will be the end of the line.

  Ten in the morning and they're playing a Schubert piano trio on the tape and the breeze is blowing in from the street and I'm sobbing into a napkin. "L. G.," she used to say, "you think I'm a mess? You're a mess, too, L. G." That was a consolation to her.

  The walls in this cafe have been stained by patches of seeping water that will never dry, and the plaster has fallen away in swatches that look like countries nobody's ever heard of. Pictures of Napoleon are all over the place: Napoleon blowing it at Waterloo, Napoleon holding his dick on St. Helena, Napoleon sitting in some subtropical cafe thinking about the past, getting drunk, plotting revenge.

  I picture Brownsville as a place under a merciless sun, where one-eyed dogs stand in the middle of dusty, empty streets staring at you and hot breeze blows inside your shirt and there's nowhere to go. It's always noon, and there are no explanations required. I'm going to Brownsville exactly because I've got no reason to go there. Anybody asks me why Brownsville—there's no fucking answer. That's why I'm going there.

  Last night I slept with a woman who had hair down to her ankles and a shotgun in her bathtub and all the mirrors in her room rattled when she laughed. She was good to me; I'll never say a bad word about her. There's always a history, though; her daughter was sleeping on a blanket in the dining room. It would have been perfect except for that.

  The past keeps rising up here; the water table is too high. All around the Quarter groups of tourists float like clumps of sewage.

  "I've been trying to get to Brownsville, Texas, for weeks. Right now it's a hundred degrees in New Orleans." This goal of getting to Brownsville provides a dynamic from the beginning. He says the gays are trying to stay young, but "I'm not running anymore." Hmmm—he's not running but he's trying to get to Brownsville; is there some sort of contradiction there? He feels he's getting old, nothing has seemed to work for him. He has a failed past, like Napoleon, whose history certainly contained a huge and final failure. His immediate failure is this breakup with someone—who used to say that he's a mess.

  Well, he's a mess. And notice the walls of the cafe: . .. silhouettes of "countries nobody's ever heard of." His life is as meaningless as that; nobody's heard of him, and he's going someplace anonymous, where you don't have to explain anything, because he has no explanations. His own past is likened to Napoleon—"blowing it at Waterloo . .. holding his dick on St. Helena . . . sitting in some subtropical cafe," which is where our narrator is sitting at the moment, getting drunk. Napoleon was plotting his revenge. In this, he's different from our narrator, who isn't "running anymore." But we know that Napoleon's revenge never came, don't we? He's critical of Napoleon for this. He thinks he wants to go to a place where it's always noon, no explanations are required, you just sit in a hot breeze under the sun. That's what he thinks he wants, but—a lot of modern fiction works with dramatic irony—we know more than the narrator does.

  Then, we move to a woman he slept with last night, and what wonderful details he has of her: hair down to her ankles, shotgun in her bathtub, the mirrors in her room rattling when she laughs. "She was always good to me." What is it that makes the whole imperfect? Her child sleeping in the other room— which is what? Her past. The tension lies between here I am and the past is fucked, just like the water table that keeps rising in this town that has too much past.

  What is his yearning? The dramatic irony here is that he seems to be yearning to disconnect from his failed past. But he's sobbing into his napkin; he slept with this woman just last night, and everything was fine except for this goddamned past. If he could just be in the present. In fact, he yearns to connect. The yearning for disconnection is really an emotional inverse; this is why he's chosen Brownsville, where it is always "noon." He's not so close to wanting oblivion as he would have himself believe.

  Here's another opening passage, this one from "The Bog Man," a short story from Wilderness Tips by Margaret Atwood.

  Julie broke up with Connor in the middle of a swamp.

  Julie silently revises: not exactly in the middle, not knee-deep in rotting leaves and dubious brown water. More or less on the edge; sort of within striking distance. Well, in an inn, to be precise. Well, not even an inn. A room in a pub. What was available.

  And not in a swamp anyway. In a bog. Swamp is when the water goes in one end and out the other, bog is when it goes in and stays in. How many times did Connor have to explain the difference? Quite a few. But Julie prefers the sound of the word swamp. It is mistier, more haunted. Bog is a slang word for toilet, and when you hear bog you know the toilet will be a battered and smelly one, and that there will be no toilet paper.

  So Julie always says: I broke up with Connor in the middle of a swamp.

  There are other things she revises as well. She revises Connor. She revises herself. Connor's wife stays approximately the same, but she was an invention of Julie's in the first place, since Julie never met her. Sometimes she used to wonder whether the wife really existed at all, or was just a fiction of Connor's, useful for keeping Julie at arm's length. But, no, the wife existed all right. She was solid, and she became more solid as time went on.

  Connor
mentioned the wife, and the three children, and the dog, fairly soon after he and Julie met. Well, not met. Slept together. It was almost the same thing.

  Julie supposes, now, that he didn't want to scare her off by bringing up the subject too soon. She herself was only twenty, and too naive to even think of looking for clues, such as the white circle on the ring finger. By the time he did get round to making a sheepish avowal or confession, Julie was in no position to be scared off. She was already lying in a motel room, wound loosely in a sheet. She was too tired to be scared off and also too amazed, and also too grateful. Connor was not her first lover but he was her first grown-up one, he was the first who did not treat sex as some kind of panty raid. He took her body seriously, which impressed her to no end.

  Understand that in everything I'm reading you, there's an organic coherence among the details, built around a character with a dynamic yearning. Julie's yearning begins to manifest itself how?—by revising everything. Everything is qualified. She makes a statement, revises it, backs out of it, deromanticizes it. But then returns to it. At once, we see this inner conflict going on. She wants to uplift, to rewrite romantically; then she wants to debunk, to go back and see things with brutal clarity. And this process keeps repeating. More or less. Sort of. To be precise.

  Well, not even. What was available. Well, not met. Slept together. Ultimately, there's a moment when we learn what has kept her with that married man: he took her body seriously.

  The point of revision is to find meaning. You revise to clarify the meaning of something. You understand, I'm doing this terrible artificial thing, to be forgotten instantly, giving you a little analytical summary to show what's going on here in the moment. The moment is the point: her attachment to Connor comes from the moment she knew that he took her body seriously. The yearning is to find meaning and appropriate relevance in her life.

  The last example is from James Joyce's story, "The Sisters," from Dubliners.

  There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind, for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me, "I am not long for this world," and I had thought the words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and

  yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

  At home he learns of the old man's death:

  "Well, so your old friend is gone, you'll be sorry to hear."

  "Who?" said I.

  "Father Flynn."

  "Is he dead?"

  "Mr. Cotter here has just told us. He was passing by the house."

  I knew that I was under observation, so I continued eating as if the news had not interested me. My uncle explained to old Cotter.

  "The youngster and he were great friends. The old chap taught him a great deal, mind you; and they say he had a great wish for him."

  "God have mercy on his soul," said my aunt piously.

  Old Cotter looked at me for a while. I felt that his little beady black eyes were examining me, but I would not satisfy him by looking up from the plate. He returned to his pipe and finally spat rudely into the grate.

  "I wouldn't like children of mine," he said, "to have too much to say to a man like that."

  "How do you mean, Mr. Cotter?" asked my aunt.

  "What I mean is," said old Cotter, "it's bad for children. My idea is: let a young lad run about and play

  with young lads of his own age and not be . . . am I right,

  Jack?"

  It seems to me evident from the very first sentences what this young man's yearning is. A man is dying, and our narrator has carefully watched the process "night after night." The passion, the yearning, is in that phrase instantly. It's vacation time, and this time the old man has suffered "the third stroke," and our narrator is still walking past that window, studying the lighted square of the window "night after night." Of course, the deep connection the dying man has with our narrator is immediately clear as well. "He had often said to me, 'I am not long for this world,' and I had thought the words idle." The suggestion of an ongoing relationship—that the dying man had been his adviser and confidant, and even that the narrator had taken his words with a grain of salt—all represents a kind of intimacy between them. The impact of this man's process of dying is clear, too, in the words our narrator repeats to himself. The deep connection, as it turns out, between the narrator and this priest, and the institution and worldview with its mysteries that the priest represents, is reflected in our narrator's focus on the words that he says softly to himself, not only in the "paralysis" that the man of God now suffers, but in the definition of gnomon, which is "an interpreter, a pointer," and simony, which is the buying and selling of religious pardons. These words take on a kind of personality, as he says that the words sounded to him like "some maleficent and sinful being."

  When the narrator gets home, he keeps his own counsel and is very quiet, but he is critical of the adults that surround him, his aunt and uncle and old Cotter. The adults contend that you can learn too much; that you really need not pay attention to the dark and serious things of the world; that, as Cotter says, education is bad for children because their minds are so impressionable. All of this adds up organically, and deepens our understanding of the boy whose hunger for learning, and knowledge of the darkness and the seriousness of the world, whose very impressionability leads us to identify with him.

  I caution you once again to understand that this is a secondary and artificial way of responding to literature, and that this philosophical articulation of these characters' yearning runs counter to the ways in which we are meant to and do respond to them in a story. But here our narrator yearns for the truth. He's going night after night past the window, reading the implications of what sort of candles are lit and working through the mysteries of religion in terms of where this man may be headed when he dies. The narrator yearns to face the dark things honestly. He's doing so in a world commanded by adults who would keep him ignorant, who would prevent him from knowing, much less speaking, the truth. And this yearning is inherent in every detail of image, of voice, moment by moment in the narrator's experience.

  Fiction technique and film technique have a great deal in common. We're not talking here tonight about how to translate a book to the screen or how a film could be transformed into a novel, but about deep and essential common ground.

  The great D. W. Griffith (I say great in the sense of moviemaker; he was a loathsome human being)—who did those massive silent screen epics in the teens of the last century, Intolerance and The Birth of a Nation—was rightly credited with inventing modern film technique. Griffith himself credited one man with teaching him everything he knew about film, and that was Charles Dickens. Of course, Dickens died several decades before film was invented, but what Griffith learned from him about this new art form of the twentieth century goes to the heart of the experience of reading literature.

  Pause for a moment and consider what goes on within you when you read a wonderful work of fiction. The experience

  is, in fact, a kind of cinema of the inner consciousness. When you read a work of literature, the characters and the setting and the actions are evoked as images, as a kind of dream in your consciousness, are they not? The primary senses—sight and sound—prevail, just as in the cinema, but in addition to seeing and hearing, you experience taste and smell, you can feel things on your skin as the narrative moves through your consciousness. This is omnisensual cinema. Consequently, it makes sense that the techniques
of literature are those we understand to be filmic.

  All of the techniques that filmmakers employ, and which you understand intuitively as filmgoers, have direct analogies in fiction. And because fiction writers are the writer-directors of the cinema of inner consciousness, you will need to develop the techniques of film as well. I want to deal with some of those techniques tonight, because I think they can help you overcome some of the problems I've been describing in the past few weeks: the impulse for abstraction and analysis, for summary and generalization, problems of rhythm and transition— how to get from one scene to another or one image to another or one sentence to another—how to put all the parts together, where to place your own personal focus when you're in your own creative trance.

  I inveigh against abstraction in these works called novels and stories. Consider how Jack Nicholson as a crotchety old bachelor in a movie looks at Helen Hunt. We see his face on the screen; he lifts an eyebrow; his lip curls. If the screen suddenly went blank and the word "wryly" came up, or "sarcasm," or "contempt," how would you react? You can imagine: with great discomfort. For readers who know how to read, abstraction, generalization, analysis, and interpretation have the same deleterious effect.

  Let's turn to a few basic film concepts, most of which will be familiar to you, and then let's look at some literature together and see how it is that writers have always been filmmakers.

  The shot is the basic building block of film. From your point of view as spectator, the shot is a unit of uninterrupted flow of imagery. From the moment that image begins to whenever that image is interrupted, by whatever—that is the shot. That is the basis of every film.