For reasons that are no part of this work of fiction, I was required, thirty and more years ago, to read several books purporting to instruct readers in the techniques of fiction-writing. The books were divided into chapters with headings such as Plot, Characters, Dialogue, and Theme and Meaning. I long ago forgot most of what I read in the books, but while I was writing the previous paragraph I recalled something of what I read in a certain chapter headed Flashbacks and Time Shifts. I recalled not actual words but rather their import. I recalled the author’s advising the intending writer of fiction to prepare the reader before introducing into the narrative any so-called flashback or time-shift. Thus, the writer might have a character look out from a car or a train at an apple-orchard before introducing as a flashback a scene from the character’s childhood, which scene would have for its setting a garden overhung by an apple-tree. I can hardly believe that anything so foolish was once delivered as advice to intending writers. The author of the advice was himself a writer of fiction, although I forget his name and the titles of his two or three books, and I supposed, even when I first read his advice on flashbacks and time-shifts, that he had in mind, while he wrote, those films in which the pages of a desk-calendar fly back rapidly or in which the face of a staring or a sleeping character is obscured by swirling mists as a signal to the viewer that what follows is a scene from the past.
I am not about to assert, as the narrator asserted in a piece of fiction of mine first published twenty-five years ago, that time is non-existent and that what we denote by the word time is no more than our moving from one to another place in an infinite expanse. Instead, I restrict myself to claiming only that no sort of time exists in a work of fiction such as this, the setting of which is place after place in what I called earlier the invisible world. The reader might care to observe how easily he or she reads the following paragraph, even though the matters there reported have no temporal connection with the matters reported in this and the previous few paragraphs.
Soon after I had read, in a weekly news-magazine from perhaps twenty-five years ago, a reference to a certain castle or, rather, to a certain image-castle, I began, as I ought to have reported earlier, to write this work of fiction. And yet I was still, it seemed, not wholly free from the influence of films that I had watched long before and could hardly recall. I foresaw myself writing, for example, about a man who preferred not to draw the blind or the curtain of his room except on a certain few afternoons of the year. If I had gone ahead with my first, misguided scheme, this, the fifth section of the book, would have comprised a brief account of a man who never failed, during every year of his long life, to mark certain days in late spring or in early summer. Those had been the days during his childhood when he had felt urged to draw the blind in the single window of the loungeroom of his parents’ house in a provincial city in the north of this state and then to raise the window slightly so that the north wind would agitate the worn brown blind and would cause to appear in the dim room flashes of the fierce light from outside. Influenced, surely, by scenes from a film I had never seen nor would ever see – a film set in a castle known to me only from a single sentence in an article in a news-magazine – I foresaw myself writing first about a man who would enact, as though for the benefit of a watcher, some or another ritual from his childhood as a demonstration that his life was all of a piece. Perhaps I even envisaged him in his dim room, on a day of hot north winds, as handling again some of the collection of glass marbles that he had kept by him throughout his life – the same marbles that had represented racehorses in one of his childhood rituals. But this misguided scheme, as I called it, not only seemed more suited to film than to fiction but lacked an appropriate setting. And then I, who have never seen any sort of castle nor any sort of European scenery, saw in mind an image of the only building where my true subject-matter might come into being and, around the building, the only scenery likely to surround such a building; and I foresaw myself writing not about pretend-characters enacting pretend-rituals but about fictional personages writing, on day after day during year after year, in a building of two or, perhaps, three storeys having several wings and numerous windows and being surrounded by mostly level grassy countryside.
The discerning reader, whether or not he or she allows my claim that no sort of time exists in a work of fiction such as this, might well consider me inconsistent or even confused to have used the past tense of most of the verbs in this work. If these paragraphs report events, so to call them, in a timeless location or an eternal present, why am I not obliged to use verbs in the present tense?
If my mood were wilful, I might reply that my way of writing is intended to prevent even an undiscerning reader from trying to apprehend my subject-matter in the way that a viewer, or so I suppose, apprehends the subject-matter of a film. A more respectful reply might include the information that these paragraphs are examples of what I call considered narration and the claim that the reader of such paragraphs is entitled to suppose hardly more than that the narrator of the paragraphs was alive at the time when they were written and felt urged to report certain matters.
The reader’s entitlements are limited indeed, but of course he or she, while reading a considered narrative, postulates or supposes with little regard for any such limits. Many a reader, for example, might seem while reading to hear what might be called the voice behind the narrative or even to see what might be called the personage behind it. The narrator, of course, knows nothing of such matters but I, the narrator of this work of fiction, am hopeful that many a discerning reader has understood by now why a piece of considered narration ought to include verbs in both the present and the past tense; has understood that a considered narrative reports both that certain events may have taken place, or may have seemed to take place, and also what it is to have knowledge of these matters.
The previous sentence seemed, while I was composing it, a most apt ending for this, the sixth section of this work of fiction. However, I found just now, among the scribbled pages meant to prompt me while I composed the section, certain notes that I could not bring myself to leave unused. One note was intended to remind me of something that I heard from a university lecturer in Islamic philosophy nearly fifty years ago, when I was a mature-age student in a faculty of arts. What may have been the lecturer’s purpose in telling his class what he told them I long ago forgot, if ever I understood it, although it was surely to do with the phenomenon that we call time. He asked us to call to mind a motor-car travelling on a road across a mostly level landscape. A person standing close beside the road and looking directly ahead would be aware for some time that the car has not yet reached him or her, then, for a brief time, that the car is present to his or her sight and then, for some time afterwards, that the car is no longer present, even if still audible. The lecturer then asked us to call to mind a person looking towards the road from an upper window of a building at some distance away. This person is aware of the car as being present to his or her sight during the whole time while it seems to be approaching, present to the sight of, and then travelling away from the person beside the road.
While I was writing the previous paragraph, it occurred to me that the lecturer mentioned might have been trying to explain the notion of eternity and that the observer in the upper room, for whom the present is prolonged, as it were, is meant to call to mind none other than God, who from a vantage-point beyond the last of the stars sees all human history as eternally present. Commentators on works of fiction sometimes have used terms such as god-like to describe the extensive knowledge that certain narrators lay claim to: knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of more than one character in the one fictional work and also a view, so to call it, ranging over many fictional settings and over the fictional present and past. I myself have never laid claim to any such knowledge, but sometimes while writing this and the previous paragraph I felt as though mine might not be the only view of my subject-matter. I felt as an observer might feel when he or she strains to look
across some or another mostly level landscape while behind him or her some or another personage sees from an upper window all that the observer strains to see and more.
It would be absurd to suppose that the experience of some or another personage looking out from an upper window of a building of two or, perhaps, three storeys must be different in quality from that of some or another personage strolling in the grounds below. Nor do I intend to make the familiar claim that the personages reported as living fictional lives in this or any other work of fiction are somehow outside or beyond what we know as time; that such personages exist in some sort of timeless realm often assumed to be superior to our own. (Surely a person is able to sample the experience of eternity without having to read fiction? I found just now a passage that I copied more than thirty years ago from the translated writings of Alfred Jarry: ‘It is fine to live two different moments of time as one: that alone allows one authentically to live a single moment of eternity, indeed all eternity since it has no moments.’) What I was hoping to do when I began this paragraph was to explain, for myself as much as for the reader, why I cannot call to mind any detail of a certain house of two or, perhaps, three storeys (the silent corridors in the far-reaching wings, for example, or the grounds where strollers readily lose their way among hedges or thickets or ferneries, or the immense and mostly level distances to be seen from upper windows) without the conviction that the personages frequenting the place exist not in any sort of temporal progression but in what might be called the narrative dimension, which not only extends infinitely backwards and forwards, as we might say of our own time, as we call it, but has what I perceive to be a breadth or depth, likewise immeasurable.
How should I begin this paragraph? A certain male personage often recalls that he spent much time as a child looking at reproductions of famous paintings and wondering about a matter that he supposed would be for ever beyond his power to resolve. I was wrong to use the word wondering in the previous sentence. Surely no one, in fact, wonders. Surely we postulate, speculate, or supply possible answers rather than remain agape and vacant-minded. What I ought to have written was that the personage spent much time as a child seeing in mind whatever was out of his sight in the backgrounds of famous paintings, or to either side of the places depicted there, or in the sight of those painted personages who looked not towards their painter or their viewer but at persons, places, or things forever invisible to both. Given that the personage mentioned saw as a child no other reproductions of paintings apart from the twelve on the upper halves of the pages of a certain calendar sent each year as a Christmas gift to his parents by a certain devout sister of his father, most of the depicted personages that he saw were divinities or angels or saints or Biblical characters, and most of the narratives that they were caught up in were already known to him. He was therefore obliged at an early age to discover some more promising task than the envisaging of sights intended merely to inspire devotion or to promote piety in the viewer. Instead of following the gaze of kneeling worshippers upwards and past the seated Madonna and Infant or the all-seeing, all-comprehending stare of the God-man into heaven itself, he learned soon enough to see or, rather, to envisage for himself. He would send into the hilly and forested or the level and grassy backgrounds of certain paintings a version of himself hopeful of finding, beyond the last blurs and tints, a folk who were moved more by the vague or the imprecise or the random than by the certainties of religion; a folk for whom a complicated game of chance or a half-heard melody or an inexplicable dream commanded more attention than a prayer or a holy text. Or he might remain deliberately alone in the hope of meeting up with another of his own rare kind: someone, preferably female, who had found her way past the last hint of a horizon on a coloured page that he had never seen nor would ever see.
As soon as he had been able to make sense of books, he had learned that he was far more free to stray in his reading than in his observing of painted scenes. He had struggled to insert himself, as it were, into many a setting that hung before his eyes, but while he read he was hardly aware of having crossed any fixed boundary. And yet his being at home among denoted settings and personages was only the beginning of his pleasure. When he paused from following the text, or even when one or another book was far from his reach, even then he had access not only to narrated scenes and events but also to a far more extensive fictional space, so to call it.
He found it impossible to accept that the last page of a book of fiction was any sort of boundary or limit. For him, the personages who had first appeared while he was reading some or another fictional text were no less alive after the text itself had come to an end than while he had pored over it. This is surely a common experience, but he wanted more than to brood over only those scenes and events that the narrators of works of fiction had allowed him to read about. What he did as a child was hardly more than to daydream about the unrecorded future lives of personages reported to be still alive when last written about, although he sometimes tried to write a few pages of his own to report what he hoped might happen to them or had already happened to them in some or another time-scheme beyond his comprehension. In the years when he would have been called an adolescent, certain personages who owed their existence to his having read certain details into certain works of fiction seemed not only closer to him than any of his family or his friends but closer even than the divine or sanctified personages that he believed to be watching his every deed and thought. Not only did the fictional personages, so to call them, seem closer than the religious, so to call them, but whereas the religious seemed ready always to judge him or to censure him, the fictional world seemed to want no more from him than that he should side with them rather than with the religious, even though his doing so would earn him not eternal salvation but the right to live with them, the fictional ones, for perhaps no more than a few days of their peculiar, immeasurable version of time.
Until as late as his twentieth year, he dared not consider the eternity promoted by his pastors and his teachers as less than factual or the mysterious time-scale of the fiction he read as anything more than a beguiling illusion. One of his heroes during his first twenty years was an uncle of his, an unmarried brother of his father and a brother also of the devout unmarried woman who was the sender each year of the calendars mentioned earlier. This man, who was hardly less devout than the sender of the calendars, several times during the first twenty years of the chief character of these fictional pages deplored in his hearing the number of young men who lost their faith and gave up the practice of their religion as a result of their dealings with some or another, or with more than one, young woman. During an exchange of letters in a year soon after the chief character had lost his faith and had given up the practice of his religion and had preferred not to meet with his devout uncle and aunt, the uncle had put it to the nephew that the true cause of his lapsing, as he, the uncle, called it, had been some or another, or more than one, young woman. The chief character had denied his uncle’s claim, but he, the chief character, had acknowledged to himself that the claim was accurate, although not in the sense that his uncle would have intended. He, the chief character, far from lusting after and then taking up with or cohabiting with some or another, or more than one, young woman, (the sentences hereabouts report fictional events purporting to have taken place during the fictional 1950s) had decided – no, had accepted what had seemed from the moment of his acceptance to have been inevitable since the time when he had first read the first page of fiction that had made sense to him (the chief character would have been some or another fictional female) and from the time when he had written the first sentence of fiction that he could later recall (the subject was some or another fictional young female). He had accepted, at some or another moment while he was reading some or another poem by A.E. Housman or some or another work of fiction by Thomas Hardy, that his most urgent need was not to perfect himself so that his soul would later be admitted to a heaven without end but to bring into being some or ano
ther fictional version of himself that would be able to move unchallenged, if only during a few fictional hours or days, among the unfulfilled lads of Shropshire; nor to burn with the devotion to some or another deity or virgin-mother of sanctified personage, but to convey by some or another means to some or another female personage in some or another work of fiction by Thomas Hardy that a fictional version of himself was in sympathy with her.
The previous four paragraphs may be thought of as having been written behind some or another upper window in a house of two or, perhaps, three storeys and in some or another room opening off a corridor frequented by, among others, those wayward few who look for their subject-matter not in visible places on the far side of the mostly level grassy countryside surrounding this building but in the mental space surrounding fictional texts, which space is to be thought of as reaching endlessly backwards, so to speak, from the first paragraph of each text, endlessly forward, so to speak, from the final paragraph, and endlessly sideways, so to speak, from every intervening paragraph. The wayward few, as I call them, take for their subject-matter scenes and events never reported in any fictional text but likely to have taken place in the vast zone of possibility surrounding not just every page but the merest sentence on that page. And the mental space that I mentioned just now extends so far in every direction from every fictional text that the wayward ones, as I call them, are able to write as though the content of many a seemingly separate fictional text adjoins, or is entangled with, the content of many another such.
A Million Windows Page 2