While the man had been telling us in the common room what is reported above, one among us was seen to stop his ears with his fingers. Most of us surely knew that the man with his fingers to his ears believed himself to be following the example of Henry James, who is mentioned surprisingly often in our part of this building, in not wanting to hear to its end an anecdote that might later provide him with matter for fiction, and I was not surprised when there began in the room one of those inconclusive discussions that some of us seem to enjoy. I heard little of what went forward in the bare, harshly lit room. I was recalling a morning when I was in my twenty-first year and was preparing to move out of my parents’ home. There was much difficulty between me and my mother at the time. Every Sunday morning, I would leave the house as though to walk to our parish church but would call instead at a milk-bar and would sit for an hour at a table inside, sipping a malted milk and reading from the pages of the Sporting Globe the results of horse-races contested on the previous day in every state of the country before returning home as though I had been to church. On one such morning, which I remember as having been cold and overcast, I happened to look at two children in the front yard of one of the many newly built weatherboard houses in the outer suburb where I then lived. The front yard had not yet been turned into any sort of garden. Between the front porch and the front fence were tussocks of grass, clods of earth, and puddles of rainwater. I supposed that the young man and his wife who had recently bought the house had as yet no money to pay for paths or lawn-seed or garden-plants. The two children that I happened to look at were a girl and a boy. The girl may have been six or seven years of age; the boy was a little younger. They were playing the game that many children have surely played: one of the two was a pretend-horse and was steered by the other with a string or a cord. I cannot even recall which child was horse and which was driver. Nor can I recall any detail of the appearance of the boy. I recall only the girl and only the sight of her face when she looked towards me during the first moments after she had become aware that I was passing her house and that I had noticed her and her brother playing among the clods and the tussocks and the puddles. I seemed to learn from her face that she was kindly disposed towards me; that she might have trusted me if ever she had been obliged to do so; that if our circumstances had been vastly different she would have welcomed me into her game. And while the men around me in the common-room went on with their debate as to the worth of anecdotes, I supposed that my eyes must have been turned sideways and downwards while I had passed the front yard where the children were playing, as though I had wanted to fix in mind an image of the first female-person who might have invited me into her pretend-world.
The detail about to be reported has not only stayed in my mind since my first and only reading, nearly forty years ago, of the work of fiction Epitaph of a Small Winner, by Machado de Assis but is the only detail that I can recall from my having read the work. The first-person narrator pauses in his account of his life-story, so to call it, and reports that a butterfly had come into his room through an open window a few minutes before and had alighted on his desk and had seemed to look at him as though he might have been the god of the butterflies.
The detail about to be reported has stayed in my mind since my first and only reading, nearly sixty years ago, of the work of fiction The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy. As part of his effort to describe, as it were, the peculiar characteristics of the fictional town of Casterbridge, the narrator of the novel, so to call it, claims that the town merges so comfortably into the countryside surrounding it that many a butterfly urged to travel from some or another grassy landscape north of the town to some or another more congenial landscape south of the town chooses not to follow some or another long, circuitous course around the margins of the town but rather to flit through the town itself: to pass over roads and between shops and houses as though these are only recent and temporary alterations to the long-standing arrangement of things; as though the countryside is permanent and the town merely temporary.
When I first drew up the plan of this work of fiction, I intended this, the nineteenth of the thirty-four sections, to comprise an argument in favour of reliable narrators as against unreliable or absent narrators. (Unreliable narrators are most often discoverable from internal evidence, so to call it: the texts for which they are seemingly responsible are found to be inconsistent or self-contradictory. Fictional texts lacking narrators include those presented as collections of letters or of documents or of reports by a number of different first-person voices, so to call them. Such texts offer no explanation as to how they could have come into being: as to how the letters or documents or confessions, so to call them, came to be arranged as they are.) The notes that I made at the time are so brief that I cannot now recall the details of my intended argument. Moreover, it occurred to me just now, while I was writing the passage in parentheses above, that no discerning reader should need to be convinced of what is surely self-evident. When I begin to recall the dreary effect on me of even the brief passages that I have sometimes read in certain texts before deciding to read no further, then I feel confident that the discerning reader about to begin a work of fiction expects the personage seemingly responsible for the existence of the text to be seemingly approachable by way of the text or seemingly revealed through the text and to seem to have written the text in order to impart what could never have been imparted by any other means than the writing of a fictional text. In short, I feel confident that the discerning reader would prefer to be in the seeming presence of a personage who could be trusted to have once noted the passing of a butterfly above a street in the south of England or the alighting of a butterfly on his desk in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro than to have in front of him or her a mere text the seeming work of no recognisable personage.
When I first drew up the plan for this work of fiction, I intended that the last paragraph of this section would expound the final, persuasive claims of the argument that I cannot now remember. I shall include here instead something that occurred to me while I was writing about the butterflies mentioned above. A frequently repeated anecdote tells of a Chinese sage who dreamed of being a butterfly and who, on waking, questioned whether he was, in fact, a man who had dreamed of a butterfly-existence or quite the reverse. A discerning reader who had dreamed, or had seemed to dream, such a dream or a seeming-dream would surely ask, on awakening, not merely what the Chinese sage is reported to have asked but whether the butterfly or the seeming-butterfly was actual or fictional and, if it was fictional, whether or not the narrator reporting its existence was seemingly reliable and to be trusted.
He was reported in an earlier section of this work of fiction as having experienced, or having seemed to experience, as a younger man several of what were called at the time nervous breakdowns and as having during one such experience consulted a medical specialist but as having merely endured the other experiences until they had passed or had seemed to pass. He did not merely remain passive during each of those other experiences but took thought constantly as to how he might bring an end to the experience. He often supposed that his best means for recovering, so to speak, would be to meet up with a certain sort of female person or to read a certain sort of work of fiction with a trustworthy narrator. Even while he was consulting the medical specialist, he still supposed that he was more likely to recover by one of the means mentioned just now than as a result of his taking the medicines or following the advice provided by the medical specialist. As time passed, however, without his having met the certain sort of female person or having read the certain sort of work of fiction, he drew on his memories of what he had read in certain books, some of them being works of fiction with narrators not necessarily trustworthy, and began to conduct himself in the company of the medical specialist as though he, the nervously broken one, was a character in a work of fiction with a narrator not necessarily trustworthy. (The medical specialist, from the time of their first meeting, had been conducting himself thus
.)
This and the following few paragraphs will be more easily written and more easily read if I report of the chief character that he pretended to do this or that rather than that he did this or that as though he was a character in a work of fiction with a narrator not necessarily trustworthy. He had satisfied himself, during his first visits to the medical specialist, that the man subscribed to certain popular theories as to what constitutes the mind and what are the causes of mental disorders and the most effective treatments of them. After he, the broken-down one, had begun to pretend, he pretended first that he too subscribed to the theories mentioned just now, then that his having broken down, almost certainly not for the first time, was a result of difficulties that had for long existed and still existed between him and his mother, and finally that he might remove some or all of these difficulties by writing to his mother, who lived in a provincial city far from the capital city where he and the medical specialist lived. He was not surprised when the medical specialist agreed with this pretend-diagnosis and pretend-remedy. He, the pretender, then wrote to his mother the sort of pretend-letter that might have been written by a character in a work of fiction with a narrator not necessarily trustworthy.
The rest of this section, which is the twentieth of the thirty-four sections comprising this work of fiction, might have been written in any of a million ways, according to the epigraph of the work. I confine myself to mentioning only three of the possible million. A narrator such as narrates most of the novels, so to call them, of Thomas Hardy might report the thoughts and feelings and presentiments of the mother while she read the letter from her son and while she wrote a letter in reply; the text of each letter would, of course, be reported, as would the thoughts and feelings and presentiments of the son, the broken-down one, while he read his mother’s reply. A narrator such as narrates most of the novels, so to call them, of Ernest Hemingway might report nothing of the contents of the mother’s mind but much about the gestures and the grimaces and the words muttered by the son as he took his mother’s letter from his letter-box and opened the envelope and read the text of the letter; much would also be reported, of course, of the thoughts and feelings and presentiments of the son while he read the letter afterwards. The narrator of this present work of fiction is one who strives to keep between his actual self and his seeming self and his seeming reader such seeming-distances as will maintain between all three personages a lasting trust. That narrator chooses to report that the son, while reading the letter and pretending to feel what a fictional son might have felt while reading a fictional letter, felt grateful to the mother for having written the sort of pretend-letter that he had expected to receive from her. He recalled while reading her letter that she had read in earlier years many books of the sort called at that time library fiction. After television had become available to her, she had no longer read books, but it seemed to the son that she had not forgotten what she had previously learned from reading books of fiction the narrators of which, he had for long supposed, were untrustworthy.
The mother’s pretend-answer to the son’s pretend-letter was all the excuse that the son needed for ceasing to consult the medical specialist. Yet another of his seeming or actual nervous breakdowns had seemingly or had actually come to an end before he had met up with a certain sort of female person or had read a certain work of fiction with a trustworthy narrator. In fact, the son, so to call him, only a few months after the exchange of pretend-letters with his mother, read for the first time a work of fiction that he later credited with having turned him not only into a person unlikely to break down or to seem to break down but into a person able himself to plan and to write a work of fiction. Several more years were to pass before he met up with her who seemed to be the female person he had sought to meet up with, but by then he had already written part of a work of fiction that was published some years later.
When he read for the first time the work of fiction mentioned in the sentence before the previous sentence, he was still an ignorant and gullible reader. The work was of a kind that he would have declined to read twenty years later, after he had become a discerning reader. Twenty years later he would have decided, after having read the first pages of the work, that the implied author of the work had abdicated his responsibility and had hidden himself, so to speak, behind a narrator who was self-evidently incapable of having brought the text into being. The first words of the work, which words the son mentioned above is still able to recall after not having read them for fifty years – the first words of the English translation of the original text are ‘Granted that I am an inmate of a lunatic asylum...’ Nowadays, he would decline to go on reading a work of fiction beginning thus, but fifty years ago he read the whole of the work mentioned and even believed himself to have learned from the work, and for the first time, that every event reported in a work of fiction is a pretend-event whether the event is reported to have taken place in the mind of a fictional personage such as Oskar Matzerath or in fictional places such as those in and around the fictional Danzig where he has his fictional existence, according to the text of The Tin Drum, by Günter Grass.
The word plot is seldom heard in the sporadic discussions that take place in this upper corridor of this remote wing of this building that remains largely unfamiliar to most of us. Many of us claim to find the word not only irrelevant but scarcely comprehensible. And yet, none of us commented derisively on the evening recently when someone reported that Charles Dickens was supposed to have laboured for days over detailed charts illustrating the sequences of fictional events in some or another work, as yet unwritten, together with the names of the characters, so to call them, who were to take part in the events and the sites where the events were to take place. In the brief silence that followed, I surmised that many of us felt a certain admiration for Charles Dickens, even though none of us would care to do what he is supposed to have done. We who avoid using the words plot and character have too much respect for those we call fictional personages to do more than take note of their moods and caprices, but we could hardly not admire a writer of fiction or, I should say, an implied author of fiction, who could so assert himself as to prescribe in advance what should seem to be said and done by those he might have called his characters and where and when it should thus seem. Was the implied author of the novels, so to call them, by Charles Dickens able, as none of us has ever been able, to direct the fictional behaviour of fictional personages? Or, do the so-called characters in Dickens’s so-called novels have a different sort of existence from that of our personages, as we call them? Did Dickens’s beings, perhaps, even lack for existence until certain words had been written with ink on paper?
On the rare occasions when we discuss authors such as Charles Dickens, we seem to agree that we lack for something that writers of fiction seemed formerly to possess. And yet, if we have lost something, so to speak, we have also gained something. We may be unable to exercise over our fictional personages the sort of control that Dickens and others exercised over their characters, but we are able to turn that same lack of control to our advantage and to learn from our own subject-matter, so to call it, in somewhat the same way that our readers are presumed to learn from our writing.
Subject-matter and writing...if any of us, long ago, believed that these two are identical or that one cannot be claimed to exist without the other, then he would have owned to his error soon after he had begun those simple-seeming exercises in introspection devised at our first meetings by those of us hoping to learn, for example, why most fictional personages seem to behave unpredictably and not even as foreseen by those called, for convenience, their authors. Perhaps because I had never observed myself to do anything that might be called thinking, I was at once absorbed by the exercises and learned much from them. That which taught me most required each of us, while writing a suitable passage in his current work, to scrutinise the behaviour, so to call it, of some or another personage, so to call him or her, at some or another moment, so to call it, about t
o be recorded in writing. The matters at issue were as follows: could the writer predict with certainty how the personage was about to behave? and, if not, could the personage be said to stand, in relation to the writer, in any way differently from some or another man or woman in the building where the writer sat writing or in the mostly level grassy countryside visible from his upper window in the building?
As I reported above, I have never seemed able to do whatever it is that other persons seem to do whenever they think or claim to be thinking. I am capable only of seeing and feeling, although I can see and feel, of course, in both the visible and the invisible worlds. Being thus disabled, I was obliged to try to answer the two questions mentioned above only by the most painstaking observation and certainly not by any rational means, whatever that phrase might denote. The sort of observation needed came easily to me. I had always considered myself the least observant of persons in the visible world, but the invisible parts of me proved able to see with acuity in the invisible world, or so I might put the matter. In summary, I learned that I have no apparent control over what sort of fictional personage might appear to me while I try to compose some or another piece of fiction. Nor am I able to decide what such a personage might do or might want to do in the invisible space surrounding him or her. All I can do is to select. This is no easy task, but I am mostly able, while struggling to keep in mind what I can only call an instinctive desire on my part to arrange the densest possible concentration of meaning on the fewest possible pages – I am mostly able to confine myself to reporting what I, whether as implied author or narrator, see fit to report.
My research, so to call it, taught me also something that Charles Dickens and his like may not have been aware of while they planned the behaviour of those they probably called their characters. I learned how little is ever reported in fiction of all that a fictional personage is able to do or say. After having compared notes with a few like-minded residents hereabouts, I decided that I had been justified on the many occasions from as long ago as my childhood when I had wanted to read or to write – if not on paper then in my mind – the hitherto unread and unwritten reports of all that took place during the many days, weeks, or even years when certain fictional personages maintained their fictional existence although no writer had reported any detail of it.
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