One provokes movement in form by, inter alia: resonance, allusion, punctuation, repetition, other patterns; by metaphor (because it shifts the gaze and sets off flares to illuminate the surroundings) and dialogue (you can cut corners and get much more done in a shorter time than a description will take); by switching tenses and swapping attitudes or voices; by jumps and by breaks.
Process, though bordered by form, is incarnated in movement. Sometimes movement is form. You may wish to write in a headlong rush, a river in flood hustling along the pebbles on the bottom. Or use a clipped phraseology so that the movement is in the intake of breath between the bare and brief indications. The movement is in the water, not the stepping stones. Silvina Ocampo brings about a forward and backward flow in the way her focus shifts all the time: the flag flapping is neither the wind nor the cloth, but the mind moving.
And there are differences between narrative movement (the unfolding of the story) and structural precipitations created when you shape your material in sentences, paragraphs and chapters. There may be a movement of ideas relating to larger discourses. Here the form matters; presenting the thoughts in an essay may make them more authoritative, more ‘objective’ than when doing them in a story, as the importance of the thoughts will be foregrounded and not confused with the characters’ traits. And movement can be suggested or introduced by what’s left out. A displacement is caused by the tension between full and empty. Completion is sucked in. One would use all of the above techniques differently depending on the form. The novel may indeed necessitate a fuller engagement (a long-term relationship), but it has a shorter immediate memory: if ideas or images are too far apart in the space of the novel you will lose some resonance and connectedness, and thus ‘sense.’
Henri Focillon wrote: “Human consciousness is a perpetual pursuit of a language and a style. To assume consciousness is at once to assume form. Even at levels below the zone of definition and clarity, measures and relationships exist. The chief characteristic of the mind is to be constantly describing itself.”
And to assume form is to take on responsibility.
I end where I started. Writing (in this instance) is moving into the unknown in order to picture it, to bring it — however tentatively and unsuccessfully — within reach of appropriation and identification. It is writing to the heart of nothingness, whether to exorcize or disclaim or become it. Who knows? And does it ultimately matter? Nor does it matter in the land of writing whether in this process (along this road) the void is out there or in here. Walking the road of itself depicts and becomes the fear and the fall and the oblivion and life resurgent: it becomes the human condition, the state of man.
(mirror note 5)
Suppose I tried to tell you that what I’m actually saying is giving expression to this half-wild animal in my arms, the man said. Fox or wolf. And that I have to let it go because it is pawing at my arms, drawing blood. Suppose when I let it go then, it doesn’t run off to freedom but turns around to look me in the eyes.
Transgressions and connections — thus Picaro closes the subject of a months-long reflection on writing in a note to his students. (That he who is so lost between make and make-believe should have been teaching!) You will remember that we set out with the intention to closely read a number of texts by Carver, Sebald and Kundera, he starts — and that we’d then approach these through discussions pursued to wherever they might lead us? Of course, we were on our way to the Middle World of wanderers and parrots. The intention was to identify those considerations that speak to us as writers as we navigate the reefs of writing. That’s why I did not propose formal lectures, or the academic study of a particular literature, but rather an exchange of insights and thoughts around specific texts. Like paper boats. No need to have the keel ripped off.
Writing is in essence a self-taught discipline. By that Picaro says he means, as well, a discipline of teaching the self what writing is all about. What we tried to do together was to dedramatize the act and the process by scrutinizing it more objectively, testing our reading and our interpretations, stepping away from too cosseted a relationship to our efforts. By looking closely at the work of others we may be more sensitive to what they saw and heard, and to their ways of transcription. The wound that allows you to write will, if sufficiently infected, keep people away from you. Do you then write so that the thing you write about may go away? It is true that once something is defined or cut down to size, it may either fade or mutate, or just quietly slip away in the water. He says this was a question.
From these premises, Picaro says, we then moved to the ground where fiction (heightened language) and non-fiction (ordinary communication) meet. How do they inform, shape, deform, imitate or deflate one another? What both share may be the fabrication of lies, either dull or subtle, and the elaborate making of disguises.
The Transgressions in the course title was meant to indicate that we would be crossing genres and categories — for instance, by looking at poetry as non-fiction; or to observe how, in poetry as well, there can be movement and a tension between the so-called ‘real’ (the lived experience, le vécu) and ‘projection’ or ‘imagination.’ Transgression, exactly, because we expect to find few hard and fast distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, obviously with the exception of some scientific texts on the mating habits of bugs — and even there (Picaro claims), we soon find that narrative creates truth. And then we tried to see whether using the same techniques could establish connections between fiction and non-fiction. Among these: the uses and the effects of projection, imagination, tense, points of view, voice, the narrative arc, pattern making, rhythm or breath, “the relativity that is indispensable to novelistic space,” etc.
Beyond that, Picaro admonishes his students, we intended to consider notions of ethics — that is, the role writing can play to be ‘good’ in itself and within larger contexts.
“. . the need arises concretely of building a new intellectual and moral order, i.e. a new type of society, and hence the need to elaborate the most universal concepts, the most refined and decisive ideological weapons.”
A New Type of State, Antonio Gramsci
Fiction/Imagination is an unveiling of what we didn’t know we knew. It is not possible, as far as we know, to think the ‘unthinkable.’ Imagination pre-figures its implementation by shaping the thinkable. We write into the pre-existent pool or underground of images, memories, thoughts, etc. — if only because the words we use connote meaning or morph into metaphors. This ‘pool’ will to a large extent be collective and to some smaller degree personal. “I, Picaro Wordfool, go into the mirror to exist.” It is an ‘unknown’ continent we may wish to explore (or sail across with closed eyes) — but also a continent in progress so that we may never chart its outlines and features once and for all. ‘Uncovering’ the shared Atlantis of the imagination does not imply that it is fixed. (Note: he’s not referring to the Freudian ‘sub-conscious’ although there are obvious similarities.) Because it is pre-existent, ‘out there,’ we may say we are but reporting (bringing back) from what is shared and thus not inventing. We are describing non-fiction. Fiction resides in the ambiguity of lineage.
Story (when it articulates effectively!) modifies perception even about the verifiable existent. It becomes part of the substance of non-fiction. The stones brought back from the moon by the astronauts turned out to be green cheese.
Milan Kundera goes further. He postulates an aesthetic effect to the search for meaning by means of creative fiction. In The Art of the Novel: “Whatever aspects of existence the novel discovers, it discovers as the beautiful.” And: “Beauty, the last triumph possible for the man who can no longer hope. Beauty in art: the suddenly kindled light of the never-before-said.”
Non-fiction/reporting, Picaro argues, depends for its effectiveness, perhaps even accessibility, on means and methods we usually associate with fiction writing: the shaping through choices and presentation, the ‘making-story’ in order to obtain traction. “Oneiric na
rrative; let’s say, rather: imagination, which, freed from the control of reason and from concern for verisimilitude, ventures into landscapes inaccessible to rational thought.” (Kundera)
Maybe this is the only way we can encounter and extend consciousness. Even when transmitting a thought, as in non-fiction, it has to be ‘storied’ with its rise and fall to be accessible. Similarly, we both need to encounter and abide the reader’s attention if we wish to enter her or his mind. And we only exist in the minds and the imaginations of others. At this point he could have suggested to them how he came to live in the clothes of Simon Snow, or how much he would like to penetrate Reader’s mind and her mother-mouth — but this, he thinks, is too personal to unwrap; it could provoke shyness. Truth, in order to exist, must leave a part unsaid. That is why veils and hats are so alluringly important. “The dark inside the mind/ lies hidden” (The Art of Writing, Wen Fu).
A person wearing a hat in a story has certainly an unavowed life to hide or display (or not). And that is why Carver’s stories seemed so ‘real’ to us in class, Picaro concludes this section of his recapitulation.
Imagination gives access to ‘meaning.’ Story telling is a system of knowledge; the very act of narration carries a presumption of truth. It would seem that we are hardwired to see intention in the world, Picaro observes. We are predisposed to the art of learning causal maps: that is, disclosing by intervention. We become by making. We realize ourselves through acts of transformation. “Here we are.”
‘Writing’ is thus both the translation of an opening to non-fiction, and — through fiction — the bringing about of non-fiction. If you were to imagine yourself a woman out walking with a dog (Picaro says), the mere sniffing at the soil by the animal will expose the bones of a story.
“. . the very distinction between real and imaginary events that is basic to modern discussions of both history and fiction presupposes a notion of reality in which ‘the true’ is identified with ‘the real’ only insofar as it can be shown to possess the character of narrativity.” (The Content of the Form, Hayden White)
Look at how Sebald in his Austerlitz promotes the transgression between ‘fiction’ and ‘fact,’ Picaro says, obviously taking cover behind an established author’s coattails; how he melded and moulded the two: merging the voices as one would expect in non-fiction mainly through the effacement of the I (in any event a close invention); in creating distance, as one would expect, by dint of his use of an apparatus of footnotes, pictures, French. See how he employs in his work of fiction the effects and the artefacts of non-fiction: the quasi-scientific lists from botany, astrology, entomology and architecture. Watch how he brings real people into the narrative, like Darwin, and have them lift their veils to shake hands with the population of his mind; how he mixes real sites with imaginary ones, all bathed in the same luminescence of gloom, until we take the made-up for real. Topography, where the illusion of precision is created, seems particularly important to him, Picaro points out. The real is an ever evasive, evanescent entity. That’s why it bothers us. Look at how he equates the labyrinth with forgetting, and that with cruelty. In his instance (Sebald’s, but also Picaro’s) one could hold that ‘imagination’ (as close and as buried as that living death we call ‘memory’) is a matter of focus. We sense throughout the despair of trying to be. “Moreover, I had constantly been preoccupied by that accumulation of knowledge, that which I had pursued for decades, and which served as a substitute or compensatory memory.” Words, words, words over the palimpsest of words meant that “everything was fading before our eyes.” The quotes are from Sebald.
The difference between fact and fiction is the focus brought to bear on the matter of the text; perhaps also the latitude of space we allow the reader. But ‘focus’ implies intention, thus imagination. Part of the latitude allowed the reader may also be confined by limitation — another possible attribute of ‘focus’ — and sheer mindlessness brought about by a blind obedience to repetition.
What is it we are imagining? Picaro asks. The ‘real’? Can it be argued that imagination recognizes the real and does so by imitating it? In order to imitate you have to recognize the other as an agent; more precisely, you have to recognize that the other incarnates a goal. What’s the difference between pretending (to understand) and imitating recognition? It is believed that non-human primates do not have the capacity for monitoring shared attention, and thus they cannot teach one another. How do they learn then? By mere aping? What is it that they imitate if not the gestures and actions that would ensure survival, like putting on hats and veils? But then, Picaro says, he has read that the mating dance among chimpanzees and baboons may be far more intricate than among humans — that with chimps, for example, the loud sounds made during sex will reflect careful and sophisticated social calculation. It is believed (but how can we ever know?) that the female tries to blur paternity by mating with as many individuals as possible when her sexual swellings show that she’s ready to conceive, because the males are prone to kill any infant they believe not to be theirs. By shouting (being “acoustically exuberant”) while getting fucked the female attracts and excites and recruits other partners, hoping to thus gain many influential protectors for her future offspring. But when a higher-ranking female is present she will be as quiet as a mouse, even while she’s being had, so as not to incite the obstructiveness of her elders. One has to feed. “Copulation calls are not a feature of public life in Western societies, but the situation could be different in hunter-gatherer groups, which enjoy little privacy.” (Nicholas Wade, The New York Times)
By imitating the form of writing we try to apprehend contents, Picaro postulates.
So as to survive we mime the stories of ourselves. We are apes imagining ourselves to be human and hairless the better to invent selves. Hence the importance of veils and hats.
The dust of this body of mine is the Veil face of the soul, Behind the Veil they treat me as men treat parrots,
Hafiz
But (Picaro warns) we should not mistake this imitation/ apprehension of the ‘real’ as the incarnation of ‘truth.’ It may well be but a projection of one possibility among others. Kundera tells us that Kafka’s writing “represents one fundamental possibility of man and his world, a possibility that is not historically determined and that accompanies man more or less eternally.”
Ethics come into play in the implications of what we imagine. On a very basic level, evidently, Picaro holds, we may argue that we recognize the ethical approach in writing by what it is not, what it does not transport or relish in: racism, gratuitous cruelty, deliberate misrepresentation, ‘inventing’ facts, old women giving blowjobs to young medical students in Paris. . But can it not be reasoned that this is censorship underestimating the reader’s capacity for making her own judgments and drawing her own inferences? Transportation is, after all, not the same as promotion. Or is it? Codes of behaviour may be as important in real societies as they are in imaginary ones. Drawers are useful.
Responsibility — to both material and reader — lies in the choices we make, according to Picaro: ordering (sequencing), which implies a hierarchy of attention if not importance, and is played out in structuring and elimination and highlighting. Can all information conceivably have equal value and importance? Will the consciousness be able to access information unless it is given the ‘texture’ of inequality in presentation and treatment, of degrees of resonance and implication? And can we therefore say, he speculates, that there may be opposition between doing away with ignorance (by putting everything out there, however horrible or despicable, going to the limits of the conceivable, and beyond) and compassion (trying to help bring about a modicum of liveable conditions by, for instance, limiting cruelty and greed)?
Or is this not a concern of writing? Picaro would like to imagine himself a hedonist. Are we not here to entertain and divert? Perhaps to edify, but moderately? (“Small fish ought to be fried lightly.” [Laotse]) And is oblivion not as important to human congress
as anything else? Writing may be about re-membering but it is also about for-getting. Why should we know that which we can do nothing about? In the world that we inhabit there’s “the progressive concentration of power, tending to deify itself; the bureaucratization of social activity that turns all institutions into boundless labyrinths; and the resulting depersonalization of the individual.” (Kundera)
Picaro, if you paid attention, dear Reader, wrote about this extensively in previous chapters. He now repeats: “We need to remember that we’re bastards and forget that we’re obedient citizens.”
“The ideal of truth inherent in its entirely unpretentious objectivity, at least over long passages, proves itself the only legitimate reason for continuing to produce liter-ature in the face of total destruction. Conversely, the construction of aesthetic or pseudo-aesthetic effects from the ruins of an annihilated world is a process depriving literature of its right to exist.”
On the Natural History of Destruction, W. G. Sebald
But we write a life, Picaro argues. Living (mostly unconsciously) and writing (often wittingly) are processes of finding and according a fullness to life and attempts to sidestep death for as long as possible. “Once more he found himself in the presence/ of mystery. Rain. Laughter. History. Art. The hegemony of death. He stood there, listening.” (Listening, Raymond Carver)
Intimate Stranger Page 9