Charles Dickens is Funny

The Bleak Humor in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House

According to James R. Kincaid, Dickens said that “humorous invention was the easiest thing in the world for him and that he had constantly to restrain his preposterous sense of the ridiculous.” Kincaid also quotes John Forster as naming humor Dickens’s “leading quality,…his highest faculty” (“Copperfield” 313).  But in a different essay (“Laughter and Oliver Twist”) Kincaid raises the question of how a novel as dark as Oliver Twist can be so funny (63). The same question can certainly be asked in regards to Bleak House: how can “a savage look at England as a wasteland, suffering the moral plague spread by the Court of Chancery….” be so funny (Gold 208)?  And why should it be funny?  In what ways does the humor deepen the work?  In this essay I hope to explore some of the ways that Dickens employs humor to deepen Bleak House and increase its sense of darkness. These ways include: causing us to rethink our assumptions about dominant society and our attitudes toward “outsiders”; causing us to confront the darkness within ourselves; intensifying an ultimately serious or tragic issue; complicating the line between good and evil; and showing the tragedy of an unfeeling environment and the alienation of individuals within it who are trying to use their humor to survive. I want to note that because the critics I’ve cited were usually discussing Dickens novels that I haven’t read, there is a margin for error – I have found what I believe are parallels in the humor of Bleak House to the examples of humor they give in those novels, but it’s possible that I have mistakenly drawn comparisons where comparisons might not be appropriate.  Nevertheless, even if that has happened, I feel that the examples of humor I’ve chosen from Bleak House yield fascinating insights in their own right.

Dickens’s humor has been called subversive by many critics, and for good reason. In “The Sources of Dickens’s Comic Art: From American Notes to Martin Chuzzlewit,” J. Hillis Miller argues that Dickens’s comedy is in part his revenge on the world because of his outsider status as a boy and young man. Miller says, “The comic view is in one way like the perspective of the outcast. Both see the world from the outside, from the point of view of someone who is not part of what he sees, who is ignored or ‘overlooked’ by the world” (467). In his fiction, Dickens turns those who had previously disdained him into “a masquerade of innocuous puppets.  It was a revenge on the world….”.  Miller sees the darkness and terror of Oliver Twist transforming into the essence of the comedy of Dickens’s later novels (468).  Kincaid makes a similar point to Miller, saying that certain passages of particularly strident satire in Oliver Twist deserve special attention, because they reveal a sense of maliciousness that underlies the novel’s humor and that ultimately comprises a kind of “sadistic revenge” (64).  These are dark words for dark humor, but it is not hard to find a similar viciousness in the humor of Bleak House. In fact, we could almost see the omniscient narrator of Bleak House as a kind of lurking avenger for crimes committed by the dominant society against the outsider or underdog.  For example, the narrator’s characterization of Mr. Chadband, the “respected” minister is sarcastically savage: “For Chandband is rather a consuming vessel—the persecutors say a gorging vessel; and can wield such weapons of the flesh as a knife and fork, remarkably well” (234). On the next page Chadband is described as “not unlike a bear who has been taught to walk upright.”  We see this sharp savagery also in the omniscient narrator’s indictment of society for casting out Jo. As he describes Londoners going back to work where they will use their skills of reading and writing, he says that “Jo, and the other lower animals, get on in the unintelligible mess as they can.” Further down the page he compares Jo with a dog: “He and Jo listen to the music, probably with much the same amount of animal satisfaction…”, and further down still,  “But…how far above the human listener is the brute!” (199).  Dickens’s point here, of course, is not to condemn Jo, but to say in vicious terms that Jo has been victimized by a society that has relegated him to a position lower even than that of an animal. 

Nevertheless, Dickens is not purely on a search and destroy mission against the establishment, wielding humor as a weapon. Kincaid suggests that Dickens’s humor also has the important function of causing us to rethink many of our most rigid cultural assumptions, as well as warning us against the darkness in ourselves. Through the skillful use of humor, Dickens helps us to sympathize with the outsider, and thus question the social assumptions of the dominant society. We question our own motives and beliefs about what should and should not be laughed at (“Oliver” 69). One way that Dickens accomplishes this is to cause us to laugh at something, then a few beats later or a few pages later show us that what we laughed at was someone (or something) pitiable that deserved our sympathy.  Our own meanness is exposed so that there is a discomfort to our laughter (“Oliver” 65). Kincaid points out that sometimes a Dickens passage is funny right up until the last word, which then points us toward the tragedy of the situation. Dickens does this in the opening scene of Bleak House with the sentence, “Eighteen of Mr. Tangle’s learned friends, each armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a piano-forte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places of obscurity” (9). This is funny up until the last word, “obscurity,” which recalls to us that these men have no identity despite their best efforts, and thus are tragic. Something similar occurs further down the page when Mr. Tangle jumps in prematurely to correct the Chancellor, which is funny. But the Chancellor ignores him and Mr. Tangle is “crushed.” His error is funny, but the result that he is “crushed” is not. We are left not with contempt for the characters who are the butts of these jokes, but with a complex sense of uneasiness on their behalf.

According to Kincaid, another important approach Dickens uses is direct juxtaposition of a heartless society and its “easy jokes” with a tragic situation or the pain of an outcast, sometimes pushing this situation to the point of grotesqueness. Kincaid says that in these situations, humor is set directly against a more serious situation so that the circumstances are revealed really to be “unfeeling and monstrous heartlessness and the total effect of the scene is to underline…loneliness…” (“Copperfield” 318). Though I could think of no exact correlation in Bleak House to the example used by Kincaid from David Copperfield, nevertheless one particular scene is similar in the ways that it utilizes humor, and I think that it has the same effect. It is the scene in which Mrs. Snagsby arranges for Mr. Chadband to meet with Jo for his “improvement” (318). The “jollity” in this scene is not displayed by Mr. Chadband or Mrs. Snagsby who in fact are both overly austere; rather, the comedy is in Dickens’s tone as he ridicules their ignorant cruelty through caricature. The humor of these two characters is contrasted with two “victims” or outcasts in this scene (or three if one counts Guster):  Mr. Snagsby, who understands neither the poisonous suspicions of his wife, nor the “Nemo” mystery in which he has gotten himself entangled; and Jo, who “don’t know nothink” about much of anything.  Mr. Snagsby’s agony and Jo’s severe discomfort (and hunger) are juxtaposed with Mr. Chadband’s long, lugubrious, and hilarious sermonizing and Mrs. Snagsby’s outrageous and equally hilarious suspicions (that Jo is Mr. Snagsby’s son, and so on).  The effect of the scene is certainly to cause us to “enter much more fully into the world of the terrified and alienated individual” (Kincaid “Oliver” 66).  Dickens again undermines our assumptions and forces us beyond the complacent laughter behind which we have taken refuge. 

Dickens uses humor in other ways to question our assumptions about character; Kincaid argues that Dickens often subtly expands flat, comic situations or characters beyond the point we would expect, and involves them in serious issues, sometimes even culminating in a tragic event. The result is that laughter veers again toward darkness, and our assumptions about a character or situation are once again challenged (“Copperfield” 316). Citing Henri Bergson, Kincaid says that humor comes from a character’s rigid insistence on repeating some line or action without regard to reality. To be funny, the character must be unconscious about his or her behavior, and our sympathies must not be aroused too keenly, because emotional distance from the character is a necessary condition of laughter (“Copperfield” 317). Kincaid argues that Dickens’s comic characters often start out as outrageous caricatures that are easy to laugh at according to Bergsen’s rules, but later some of them “prove to be not unconscious, so their comedy is after all not so easy” (“Oliver” 69). They expand beyond the rigid boundaries of the “comic” and become progressively more real and self-conscious throughout the novel, often even including an “insistent note of seriousness and darkness” (“Copperfield” 324). 

The Jellyby family is a good example of this in Bleak House. At first we might get the impression that every member of the family, more or less, is meant to be seen as flatly comic. After the extraction of Peepy’s head from between the iron railings, it seems that his further incidents are likely to be mere harmless pratfalls. But shortly afterwards he falls down the stairs, and his “head recorded its passage with a bump on every stair—Richard afterwards said he counted seven, besides one for the landing…” (37). This kind of graphic detail accentuates the seriousness of the fall as well as the pain. And when shortly afterwards, Esther takes it upon herself to comfort him, we know that Peepy’s pain is conscious of itself, and is not something so straightforward as a simple laugh. More significantly, Caddy at first seems like a character who will appear on just a few pages as the butt of a joke or two. When we first see her, Esther says, “I suppose nobody ever was in such a state of ink” (38). Caddy is tattered and frayed and awkward, and we laugh. But just a few pages later, we learn that Caddy is a truly miserable girl who bursts into piteous tears and throws herself on Esther’s mercy (44).  Mr. Jellyby, in his status as “nonentity,” seems almost certain to retain a very flat and comical status. But later in the novel we end up with a situation like, “…poor Mr. Jellyby breaking away from the dining-table, and making rushes at the window, with the intention of throwing himself into the area, whenever he made any new attempt to understand his affairs,” i.e. his financial ruin (298). While this is presented in an exaggerated manner that we might interpret as comic, it is clearly tragic. David Gervais puts it well when he says that Dickens’s comedy “is all the time on the verge of becoming something else” (138). There is nothing funny about suicide, and we recognize Mr. Jellyby as a truly pathetic and worn down man. Even the union between the two comic families, the Jellybys and the Turveydrops, through the marriage of Caddy and Prince, results later in a sickly baby born with physical challenges. From all of these circumstances (and many others), one thing Dickens wants us to do is to draw the conclusion that Mrs. Jellyby’s lack of charity at home is not funny, and neither is Mr. Turveydrop’s “deportment” to the selfish exclusion of everyone else; these attitudes result in unfortunate consequences for the innocent. In a sense, the humor is almost always “pointing” at something to come, and is a way of fully getting our attention to show us an injustice or a black absurdity.  Dickens uses laughter “as a controlled artistic device to make more startling and effective the important and tragic implications later” (“Copperfield” Kincaid 324).  

Sometimes Dickens reaches from the comic into the tragic as a structural element in the arc of a chapter or scene. That is, a scene that starts off on a comic note ends in tragedy, and the tragedy is thereby accentuated. Dickens’s consciousness of his own plan can be seen in his own notes for David Copperfield when he says, “First chapter funny – Then on to Em’ly.” That chapter, as described by Kincaid, starts with a scene of wild comedy, which then leads into a kidnapping (“Copperfield” 315).  As David Gervais says, by the time of Bleak House, it was characteristic of Dickens to vent “anger, sorrow, and disgust” by beginning with the comic and then transforming it into the tragic (137).  Kincaid agrees that when Dickens’s humor precedes melodramatic or tragic scenes, the latter events are made more effective as a result of the contrast (315).  Chapter VIII of Bleak House, “Covering a Multitude of Sins” follows this pattern. In this chapter we meet Mrs. Pardiggle, who is comical at first in the way she asserts her superiority and knocks furniture over. She does seem sadistic and cruel as it is revealed that she takes her children’s money away from them, but here we can still laugh, as Dickens presents the situation to us in a comical manner. But the apparently comical chapter then turns very dark and tragic when Mrs. Pardiggle takes Esther and Ada to the brickmaker’s house. Mrs. Pardiggle’s total lack of empathy and understanding becomes harshly apparent as we encounter the squalid living conditions, Jenny’s black eye, the dying baby, and the brickmaker’s harsh (but realistic) words. The scene culminates in the baby’s death, and Mrs. Pardiggle’s cold hypocrisy is shown to be not funny, but monstrous. It would be hard to imagine a scene of more pathos than the death of a baby and the resulting pain of its mother. And so, “ultimately, humor is deceptive in Dickens; used not only for laughter, but as a foundation out of which serious and tragic incidents grow, and few ordinarily comic characters or situations are allowed to stay within the bounds of the purely entertaining” (“Copperfield” Kincaid 328).

Dickens also uses humor to interesting (and dark) effect when he blurs the lines between good and evil through comic means. Kincaid says that one way he does this is by injecting “playfulness” into a villain’s role, “that makes the horror of his subject both more ghastly and more supportable.” The villain is “neither totally repulsive nor totally funny, but something of both.” Some of these villains display “a fancy which eludes the furthest extension of logic, and it is precisely this flight from the confines of rationality which is usually a trait of funny characters, not villains” (324). This may be why readers from the nineteenth century all the way up to present times have experienced some confusion about how to “take” Harold Skimpole. No doubt Skimpole’s relentless pursuit of his own cracked and irresponsible logic is often very funny, and it would be hard at first not to become confused over whether he is a dastardly villain or a harmless comic character as he launches into his long, complicated speeches with their hilarious flights of fancy.  Nevertheless, Kincaid points out that Dickens tends to abruptly recall us from this kind of fantasy or fancy in the middle of a sentence or a page, reminding us that there is something dark beneath (“Copperfield” 326). For example, Child becomes a key word in Skimpole’s characterization, and as it’s thrown often into the narrative we soon learn to regard it with some degree of suspicion (Fogle 9). Often as we begin to get lost in one of Skimpole’s eccentric flights, his (or Jarndyce’s) refrain of his being a “child” will be repeated, reminding us to distrust him. Certainly once he has betrayed Jo’s location, and the worldly-wise Mr. Bucket reveals him for what he is, we’ve learned better. And if we’re still in any doubt at the end of the novel, his ungrateful pronouncement that Mr. Jarndyce is “selfish” seals our opinion of him. Gervais, calling Skimpole a “weaver of language,” points out that the more complicated the outside of a Dickens character, the more corrupt that character may be on the inside (139). Indeed, Skimpole is a perfect example of a Dickens villain who leaves us uncertain when to laugh and when to be chilled, though ultimately we realize that what lies beneath is thoroughly rotten.

Though Kincaid’s claim that the outrageous humor of a character like Skimpole makes him more “supportable” or believable might seem strange at first, Brian Rosenberg points out that Dickens’s characters “re-create the difficulty and indecision with which we apprehend people more than they do the actual contours of the people themselves” (147). Thus, Skimpole is not at all a mimetic representation like we might find in a George Eliot novel, but he is a fairly true portrait of how we might react in real life to such a malevolent charmer: first liking him and finding him funny, then feeling suspicious, then dismissing our suspicions, yet eventually realizing that we’ve been had. Surely this deception, this comic “unknowability” of what intentions lie behind others’ actions, is a dark and sadly funny glimpse of the human condition.

I’ve dwelt a long time on Skimpole because he is so memorable, and so ambiguous. But the other great comic “villain” of Bleak House, Grandfather Smallweed, should also be mentioned. It’s hard to know where to even begin or end discussing the Smallweeds’ comedy.  Though there is never any doubt of Grandfather Smallweed’s status as a despicable, sadistic, greedy character, we can see some of the tendency toward “flights of fancy” in his extraordinarily colorful insults toward Mrs. Smallweed – brimstone chatterer, brimstone beast, brimstone scorpion, brimstone poll-parrot, chattering clattering broomstick witch, and so forth – along with his habit of throwing a cushion at her.  In this sense, the comedy associated with Grandfather Smallweed is particularly challenging for the reader.  We recognize his actions as cruel, but laugh anyway.  And though he is thoroughly mean, he is contradictorily imparted with a funny vulnerability, his tendency to slip down in his chair so that he has to be “shaken up” by Judy, and we get something pathetic (and funny) like this: “Grandfather Smallweed has been gradually sliding down in his chair since his last adjustment, and is now a bundle of clothes, with a voice in it calling for Judy” (268). There is in fact a touch of pathos to the Smallweeds, and this perhaps points up another aspect of the sadness in Dickens’s humor.  Kincaid quotes Dorothy Van Ghent as saying that a great deal of Dickens’s humor develops from a situation of noncommunication in which “speech is speech to nobody and where human encounter is mere collision.”  Van Ghent says that Dickens’s humor often suggests “a world of isolated integers, terrifyingly alone and unrelated” (“Copperfield” 315).  In fact, much of the Smallweeds’ humor comes from this loneliness and isolation. Grandmother Smallweed, in her second childhood, chimes up irrelevantly with her lines about money, unable to understand or communicate with anyone around her. Grandfather Smallweed’s insults, despite their vehemence, do not reach her in any way that she can rationally comprehend.  Judy clearly cares nothing about her grandfather – her help to him comes not out of any abiding love, but out of long, isolated habit. And the younger Smallweeds, because of their sour and isolated upbringing, were unable to interact and communicate with other children normally.  Though we may be laughing our heads off rather than thinking consciously about the pathos in this situation, the sadness is nevertheless there, lurking just under the surface.  Dickens very directly establishes that tone in the first paragraph in which he introduces the Smallweed family and their dwelling, which is in “a little narrow street, always solitary, shady, and sad, closely bricked in on all sides like a tomb…”  (257). 

Just as Dickens’s despicable characters edge into comedy or pathos, good comic characters can edge into darkness. As Richard Barickman says, “comedy that comprehends so much of Dickens’ thematic material must often…edge pain and brutality and risk its own transformation into a different mode.” Thus we have a comic character like Boythorn who we know to be good because of his gentleness toward animals and toward Esther, but who still sets mantraps and mines for Jarndyce’s men (141). Esther sums up the contradiction nicely when she says of Boythorn, “To hear him say all this with unimaginable energy, one might have thought him the angriest of mankind.  To see him at the very same time, looking at the bird now perched upon his thumb, and softly smoothing its feathers with his forefinger, one might have thought him the gentlest” (109).  We might say something similar of Miss Flite who, though driven slightly mad by Jarndyce and Jarndyce, is clearly meant overall to be a good comic character. Nevertheless, there is something sinister in the way that she keeps her symbolically named birds in cages to be released on the “day of judgment,” and the way that she acts as a harbinger of evil tidings in the narrative. Kincaid quotes Humphry House as saying that Dickens’s “gregarious and hearty happiness” represents “a revulsion from the abysses of evil, a strenuous and ardent wish to achieve happiness, rather than the realization of it” (“Copperfield” 316). This seems a good description of some of Dickens’s good comic characters, who are undoubtedly hearty and gregarious, but who nevertheless allow us to see “the abysses of evil” just below the surface.

Dickens’s settings and descriptions in Bleak House also have this characteristic of darkness lurking underneath. In fact, much of this darkness is not even so much below the surface as on the surface. Dickens could not have put the word “bleak” in the very title of his novel by accident. Barickman says that the famous opening of the novel depicts people engaged in “an unremitting struggle” with the environment as they tend to slip into the state of being objects themselves (133). What is maybe more surprising is that, yet again, this darkness is infused with humor. Priscilla Gibson points out “the unrestrained play of personal, obtrusive humor” over the opening passages of the novel despite its depressed mood, and the humor is in no small part related to Dickens’s strange animism of the environment (284). Gibson says that one of the purposes of this humorous animism is to prepare readers for his metaphor of Chancery (as fog) enveloping England (285). But further, it evokes an atmosphere which is actually alive, and which breeds evil, as Dickens speaks of  “…the fog, the rain’s language at Chesney Wold, the starved houses in dispute, the self-propagating mud, speaking portraits of the Dedlocks, the ‘dimly-blinking’ lamps of Lincoln’s Inn, the hypnotically drawing lord chancellor’s mace, the pointing Roman on Mr. Tulkinghorn’s ceiling, the stonily staring houses and sulky street lamps on Dedlock Street” (289). The upshot is that the strangely vital environment works in a way that is often funny (or at least odd) and menacing at the same time. Barickman points out that “it is the blurring of that rationalist’s distinction between inner and outer, mind and body, them and me, that provokes much of the terror in the novel’s world, as the object world leaps into life… (132).  Not unlike many of Dickens’s characters, his settings are humorous and nightmarish at the same time, often transforming before our eyes in much the same way that we watch Mrs. Pardiggle transform from a harmless comic caricature into an unfeeling monster.

Barickman further points out that what is different about Dickens’s comedy from the new comedy of Austen, Eliot and James “is the absence of any hope that the energies celebrated can flow into a regenerated community”; the setting and action tends to return again and again to the more squalid conditions of London and away from the more idyllic (and less poisonous) settings (142). It is an unpredictable and strangely menacing world that Dickens’s characters must live in and contend with; they are in a struggle for survival “against all the nameless social forces that have made [their] spirit[s] and environment so wretched,” and they have to use their humor in that struggle (Barickman 136).  Kincaid touches on this when he suggests that the Dodger in Oliver Twist reveals that he consciously uses his humor as a way to survive (“Oliver” 69). And Barickman argues that Dickens’s comic (and even noncomic) characters form isolated, bizarre enclaves that are unique to each character, and which help them to humorously assert self-identity against rigid nineteenth century social boundaries and moral codes (134). What is humorous about this is the way that these eccentrics “thwart and burlesque mechanistic social forms with ostentatious routines that have the unmistakable mark of individuality” (135).  Sometimes characters seem aware of their own eccentric humor and the way that they must use it to defend or assert themselves; sometimes they are “unconscious” and are only funny to us in their struggle. In any case, examples abound in Bleak House.  In fact, nearly every character in the novel could be mentioned as fitting the description. Barickman cites Phil Squod sidling along the wall creating “Phil’s mark,” and even Vholes with his idiosyncratic tendencies (135). Also fitting the pattern are the Badgers, with their arrangement of mutually admiring Mrs. Badger’s previous husbands; John Jarndyce in Bleak House with his “Growlery”; the Turveydrops at the dancing school; Krook and others at the Rag and Bottle shop; the Jellybys in their topsy-turvy household; the Smallweeds, in their tomb-like home; and even Harold Skimpole, when we finally get a glimpse of his tatty abode.  Barickman’s argument is a somewhat optimistic one: “The late novels expose shrewdly, relentlessly, even cynically the disaster that modern urban culture can be, but they still relish the dodges that keep a surprising number of people…alive, responsive, and unreasonably happy” (138). But despite the glee, we nevertheless perhaps glimpse an ultimate futility in their efforts, because we know they’re going against such dark odds. At the opposite extreme from all of these comic individualists are “the Coodles and Doodles of Bleak House…who have all gained a protective anonymity by allowing the self to be submerged in the most mechanistic of social functions”; no matter how funny the Coodles and Doodles are, they have still lapsed into being nothing but Coodles and Doodles (Barickman 131).

Perhaps it can be said that “no comedy is free of some threat” (Barickman 143).  There is certainly no doubt that these two elements go together in Dickens, and that his comedy and pathos often work together for the same purpose (Gervais 136). Working together, they cause the reader to participate more fully “in the vital action of the novel, which is at once more complete and much more intense” (Kincaid “Oliver” 69).  More importantly, they cause the reader to rethink assumptions, and confront darkness inside and outside the self.  Perhaps one of the most efficient representatives in Bleak House of the tragedy in Dickens’s comedy is the very little counsel with the terrific bass voice from the opening scene of the novel: “Leaving [his] address (delivered like a sepulchral message) ringing in the rafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and the fog knows him no more. Everybody looks for him. Nobody can see him” (10).  And as this little counsel drops into obscurity in the comedy of human failure to communicate, we see just how poignant Dickens’s humor can be.    

 

 

Works Cited

Barickman, Richard.  “The Comedy of Survival in Dickens’ Novels.”  NOVEL: A Forum

on Fiction 11.2 (Winter 1978): 128-143. 

Dickens, Charles.  Bleak House.  Ed. George Ford and Sylvere Monod.  New York:

Norton, 1977. 

Fogle, Stephen F.  “Skimpole Once More.”  Nineteenth-Century Fiction 7.1 (Jun., 1952):

1-18.

Gervais, David.  “Dickens’s Comic Speech: Inventing the Self.”  The Yearbook of

English Studies, Vol. 25, Non-Standard Englishes and the New Media Special Number (1995): 128-140. 

Gibson, Priscilla.  “Dickens’s Uses of Animism.”  Nineteenth-Century Fiction 7.4 (Mar.

1953): 283-291.

Gold, Joseph.  “Charles Dickens and Today’s Reader.”  The English Journal 58.2 (Feb.

1969): 205-211. 

Kincaid, James R. “Dickens’s Subversive Humor: David Copperfield.”  Nineteenth-

Century Fiction 22.4 (Mar. 1968): 313-329. 

--.  “Laughter and ‘Oliver Twist.’”  PMLA 83.1 (Mar. 1968): 63-70. 

Miller, J. Hillis.  “The Sources of Dickens’s Comic Art: From American Notes to Martin

Chuzzlewit.”  Nineteenth-Century Fiction: The Charles Dickens Centennial 24.4 (Mar. 1970): 467-476.

Rosenberg, Brian.  “Character and Contradiction in Dickens.” Nineteenth-Century

Literature 47.2 (Sep., 1992): 145-163.

Herman Melville’s Careful Disorderlieness

A Paper of Careful Disorderliness

My ambition with this essay is to examine broad and relatively superficial elements of structure and plot in Moby-Dick to help me solve a select few of the most pressing problems of my own novel. As with my last paper, I have been entirely arbitrary, choosing elements that I feel will be especially helpful to my own creative process. I don’t purport to solve every problem of my novel here, but to discover some guiding principles, to ask some of the right questions which can be answered later. 

To start out, I should define the nature of the problem. I have a project for which I have several notebooks full of material – character sketches, incidents, dialogue, and rough scenes. I’ve been collecting this material off and on for years, and my plan is to form it into a series of novels, perhaps a trilogy. The novel I’m focusing on here would be the first one, and in its most basic aspects, it’s a fantasy story about a man (Doran) and woman (Meredith) locked up in a tower together and tormented by guards and a warden. Its working title is Bastard’s Tower, partly in reference to the setting and main character, and partly in reference to the fact that the project has been such a bastard. The trouble is that it is spontaneous story with no structure and no plot. In 20 Master Plots, Ronald B. Tobias calls pure story “a chronicle of events,” and differentiates plot as not just what happens next, but Why? (12). Looked at in this way, my story is indeed nothing but a very loose “chronicle of events,” with no “why.”

It’s true that a story doesn’t necessarily need a “why” anymore to be successful.  It has become more common and acceptable for story to spontaneously erupt in a surreal way, as with the metafiction of Jonathan Lethem or the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Nevertheless, regardless of the degree of rational plot that exists in a story, it cannot be denied that material always requires at least some degree of structure. Also, though some of the trappings of magical realism might not be out of the question for my own story, I certainly have no desire to write surreal metafiction. My own preference is to provide a story with at least some degree of conventionally plotted causality. Though on the surface it may not seem to make much sense for me to look to Moby-Dick to help me with these problems, it has a strange rhyming logic for me; Moby-Dick seems in many ways an “irrational” book with some degree of rationality and structure imposed on it. Since my own material is essentially irrational – pure creation with no form – it doesn’t seem too far off base to look to Melville for a little help on a successful marriage of chaos with form.

J.A. Ward quotes chapter LXXXII of Moby-Dick, “There are some enterprises in which a careful disorderliness is the true method.” Ward points out that Melville is “a great organic artist who is careful to provide his work of art with the architecture for orderly growth” (162). This is echoed by James Barbour in “The Composition of Moby-Dick.” According to Barbour, Melville’s creative process may have involved three different periods of composition of drafts, which essentially resulted in three different narratives that he assembled together. The first was a fairly straightforward whaling adventure that included many of the scenes involving the humorous and adventurous aspects of whaling, and which can still be found in the completed novel.  The second period mainly included the composition of the cetological chapters, whose distinguishing characteristic (for my own purposes) is that they lack any kind of plot whatsoever in its traditional sense. The third period of Melville’s composition of Moby-Dick was influenced by Hawthorne and Shakespeare and was characterized by the addition of Ahab’s quest to the narrative. The most rational response to this procedure is probably, “Don’t try this at home, kids”; it comes with no guarantee of resulting in Moby-Dick every time.  Even Melville apparently considered the novel a “hash” and thought the disparate parts had failed to blend (Barbour 352).  Later readers have, of course, come to regard it as anything but a hash, and Melville’s process was apparently agreeable to him in terms of creative satisfaction as evidenced by his request for ”fifty fast writing youths” to copy down all of his ideas (350).

I think Melville’s eccentric process is useful as a corrective for the rigid formulas for writing that tend to crop up in writing books as well as universities. Formulas can indeed be quite useful, but only when they remain fluid and adaptable. I found this out the hard way during my senior year of undergraduate, when a professor directed me in a one-on-one writing project that was to be the start of my work on the material that I’m addressing here. Very little writing took place, as the professor insisted that I revise a two-page synopsis over and over for all four months of the semester. For him, this was the one and only way to write a novel – before beginning one had to have a synopsis whittled to absolute perfection and rationality. Though I don’t begrudge him his own method, by the fifth or sixth rejection of my synopsis I had lost all interest in and enthusiasm for my material. He also insisted that I eradicate all the contradictions in my material, which had been the aspects of it that interested me and that I thought worth exploring.  For example, one of my main characters, Meredith, had two children by two different men.  The professor said that this was not properly motivated, and made me eliminate one of the children (an event that sounds rather sinister when stated like that). However, I’ve often found that a lot of the most rewarding and interesting turns of my own stories come out of exploring such contradictions and finding a synthesis – stumbling across a dynamic answer that leads me in a new and unexpected direction. If one believes Coleridge that “the imagination reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities . . . “ then my professor was doing me no great favor by eliminating any possibility that I should grapple with such qualities!  To be sure, by the end of his prescribed process I had plot and structure, but it was useless to me since it had nothing to do with anything I had originally wanted to write. Also, when I did start writing the first chapters of the novel with the synopsis as my source, they came out very flat and uninteresting.

I’m not trying to use Melville to advocate some ridiculous notion that a writer can sit down without any planning and that a novel will somehow magically and organically erupt onto the page. But I am advocating that perhaps for Melville, and for many, there’s a happy medium somewhere in between “magical eruption” and a dull, rigid synopsis honed for months on end. It would seem that some instructive principles in accomplishing a “careful disorderliness” can perhaps be extracted from Melville’s process. For example, it’s interesting to me that what is now considered by most to be the main driving force of the novel in terms of both plot and theme – that is, the Ahab portion of the book – was apparently, in large part, added last.  If this is the case, it would mean that Melville actually incorporated much of what is considered the plot (the “why”) of the book as a later step since this is the part of the book that many tend to recognize as the “plot.” Eldridge calls it “the primary unifying force in the novel” (147). And various popular books on the craft of writing tend to dub this aspect of the book a “pursuit plot,” or “revenge plot” (Tobias 81). One possible lesson to be learned from this is that it is in fact possible to play both fast and loose. That is, it may be possible to start a novel with nothing much beyond a rather loose structure, a sketched in story, and a determined intention. Another way to put it is that it may be possible to start out with a weaker plot and discover and add the stronger plot (and other structural elements) later. In my own case, this “inside out” method sounds useful. If I were to follow it, the best course of action would probably be to form some kind of loose structure on which to start hanging the story, and then let other elements of story and plot develop as I go, which would also allow me to grapple with the contradictions that interest me.

One clue to finding this structure perhaps lies with the next element I’m eager to borrow from Moby-Dick, which involves a plot device called the crucible. This is a term of James N. Frey’s that Elizabeth George discusses in her book Write Away. She defines it as “a situation in which your characters are bonded together for one reason or another and thus unable to escape being in conflict with one another … a crucible works as a crucible if the characters either cannot get out or have stronger reasons for staying in than they do for escaping“ (62). George mentions both literal, material crucibles (e.g., a prison) and situational crucibles (e.g., two characters both coveting the same object, but only being able to obtain it by working together). 

George does not say much beyond that about crucibles, but for my own purposes it’s useful to extend the concept.  Along with material and situational crucibles, I’ll add a third category, which I’ll call “metaphysical.”  This is a more intangible, spiritually or mentally binding crucible, which I think often appears in fantasy or romance. Sometimes it will be embodied or tied up with a material object or objective so that it has a more solid presence (which also does a fine job of tying the plot together).  For example, in The Lord of the Rings the Ring is a kind of Meta- or Uber-crucible, uniting everything unto itself. It’s a portable material prison, keeping others within its grasp through a kind of addiction wherever it goes; it’s a situational crucible, bringing together the Fellowship of the Ring since it can only be destroyed with all working together; and it’s a metaphysical crucible forcing all characters into contact with power and evil. I might add that I admire plots with less unified, more mimetic crucibles just as much.  In Jane Austen’s novels, it would seem that all of the following are crucibles: English provincial life; the fact of being female in a 19th century world; manners; marriage; and love itself.

Undoubtedly, Moby-Dick is made up of a brilliantly conceived series of crucibles. The Pequod is a material crucible, acting like prison walls; the hunt for the whale is a situational crucible; and Ahab’s almost superhuman personality combined with the metaphysical pull of the whale comprise a metaphysical crucible. Melville uses his crucibles to their most extreme end; once he has everyone imprisoned within the ship, within the hunt, and within Ahab’s mania, he destroys the entire (microcosmic) world. Many others have remarked on this phenomenon, though in different terms. Says Ward, “…the quest motif would be dominant and the object of the quest, the white whale, would serve as the object of both physical and metaphysical capture. Never before in Melville’s fiction had there been such a complete union between physical object and spiritual truth …”(167).

Ship, whale, Ahab’s quest: to me, they work as the engine driving the plot of Moby-Dick. All three are crucibles, all three force every character on the ship into conflict on various inner and outer levels. As already noted, some of these elements in Melville’s fiction may have been added late in the revision process, but in terms of their effect on the final draft, it matters very little whether they were added early or late; they’re simple (as most brilliant ideas are), and act as a bedrock force, helping to make the more digressive elements possible. With such a strong foundation to his plot, Melville had tremendous freedom to allow things to remain complicated, “loose,” and more experimental in various other parts of the novel – cetological chapters, characters that appear and disappear, philosophical rambling, and so on.  Nevertheless, the degree that one wanders off from the bedrock is, of course, a personal choice for a writer.  Melville chooses to play loose, whereas Austen piles on crucibles, but also keeps everything else about her plots very tight and focused. 

Crucibles have several other winning qualities in terms of their usefulness to the writing process. One is that they work as a kind of dynamic, multi-dimensional system that ties together a number of different fictional elements all at the same time. Setting, plot, conflict, tension, and character all tend to converge on the crucible, and sometimes other elements do as well.  A well-designed crucible can be a kind of fictional plate tectonics in constant motion, keeping the story world dynamic and alive. Depending on how one’s mind works, this can be a much more useful concept than linear plot. Essentially, crucibles are a great way to set up the “game.” Because crucibles will automatically produce conflict, once they are established as structure, one can write whatever comes naturally from them and then go back and revise more analytically later.  It’s a way to have one’s cake and eat it, too.  For Bastard’s Tower, if I were to set up a crucible, or a series of them, structure will result even if plot doesn’t, and chances are, it will help plot emerge as well.  My goal then becomes to develop the three different kinds of crucibles - material, situational, and metaphysical.  These crucibles can have a more unified aspect (as in The Lord of the Rings) a less unified aspect (as with Jane Austen), or fall somewhere in the middle (like Moby-Dick), but they must be present as far as I’m concerned. 

Though I already have my own material crucible (a tower), I’m jealous of Melville because in many ways a ship is the perfect crucible; it forces people into conflict within itself and yet is mobile so that it has the added advantage of coming into contact and conflict with other lands, ships, people, and so on. (Science fiction has used this concept advantageously in the form of the space ship, e.g., Star Trek.) Nevertheless, my situation does allow some similar ramifications as Melville’s situation, such as exile and isolation, though in one very important sense my goal for this exile and isolation is much different from Melville’s; as John Parke says, “…the absence of women and their influence from the crew and, generally speaking, from the story, may be taken as symbolic …the specific feminine principle of relatedness, of nurturing, of instinctive affection, is implicitly and expressly denied” (325).  Melville exiles and isolates masculinity, throws it against itself, within his crucible.  My goal, rather, is to exile male and female together, especially my characters of Meredith, Doran, and the Warden.  Gender is always important to me as thematic material, and I always feel compelled to explore both masculinity and femininity. What comes of the conflict I set up is something I’ll have to discover in the writing process.

            I still lack situational and metaphysical crucibles. That is, what I am missing utterly is a White Whale, an outward goal or object that serves as a crucible. If I were to follow the model of Moby-Dick, I would also need a parallel Ahab character, and in fact I do have a character that would be roughly parallel to Ahab – the warden of my tower. This is related to another interesting point: “within the domain of his own universe, the ship, [Ahab] acts as an all-powerful tyrant” (Heller 55). A material crucible often enables a tyrant. For example, Big Nurse is the all-powerful tyrant in the crucible of the mental hospital in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Not only is Ahab a tyrant, but he is a tyrant with charisma; he possesses a mysterious, almost magical force of personality that the crew cannot escape. Indeed, charisma is another of my favorite, rather strange types of crucibles. People can become “trapped” in the charisma of celebrities or leaders, which can throw them into rather sinister kinds of conflict sometimes. In my tower, the warden would be the all-powerful, and perhaps charismatic tyrant, a character who is, for the moment, woefully underdeveloped. This reveals to me that one of my priorities is to break this character wide open. He can’t be Ahab, but he might turn out to be an important element of my story.  If I were to develop this character, he might perhaps lead me to situational and metaphysical crucibles, just as every thought and action of Ahab’s leads toward the whale.

I will move on now from crucibles, and trace out several smaller principles I can extract from Moby-Dick to help my project. The first of these is that the ship and the white whale are not just any general ship or white whale; the ship is specifically the Pequod and the white whale is specifically Moby Dick. The whale and the ship work as archetypes, and Melville developed more specific identities around these archetypes, weaving together his own myth (Ward 173).  Whatever the merits or demerits of the working title for my project - Bastard’s Tower - it reflects the vague and abstract level of my thinking at the moment; if I were to fail to advance beyond this level, it would be as though Melville failed to develop his material any further than being able to call his novel White Whale.  Just as Melville got hold of natural history volumes and other factual accounts to develop the cetological chapters and other part of his novel, what I need to do is study my archetypes and brainstorm on and borrow from historical accounts.  In this way, I can develop a much greater degree of specificity. My tower can gain a name and history, and a specific function; and though Doran is my eponymous bastard, he can be given a much more detailed history. 

Related to the need for greater specificity is what I will call a need for greater “groundedness.” As Ward says, “Melville creates a world cosmic in scope and spiritual at its center, but his starting point is earthly and material.” Because of this concrete foundation in fact, “Melville can afford to violate the canon of realism with impunity” (171).  And returning again to Coleridge: “The imagination reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities …; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; …the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion, with more than usual order; …and while it blends and harmonizes the natural with the artificial, still subordinates art to nature; the manner to the matter” (170).  Unfortunately, in my case, by temperament I’m always trying to skip the concrete, the image, the old and familiar objects, the more than usual state of order, the nature, and the matter. And I simply cannot do that and write effectively.  If recognition of my affliction is the first step of recovery, then I’m well on my way. I see now that I must ground my story, develop more powerful descriptive powers in my craft, and do the necessary world building, whether it’s this world or some other.

Speaking of other worlds, J.R.R. Tolkien’s sentiments in “On Fairy Stories” are strikingly similar to Coleridge – so much so that a rather striking link between romanticism and “high fantasy” is evident, at least to my eyes. Tolkien insists on a consistent and concretely developed “Secondary World” so that the more metaphysical aims of Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, and Consolation are possible (60, 66). The highly structured plot of fantasy certainly fits the bill of “more than usual order,” while Tolkien’s notion of Eucatastrophe, “Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief,” is certainly “a more than usual state of emotion” (81). At any rate, attention to the grounded and concrete is part of Tolkien’s success, too.  He creates a world so detailed that he can then take the reader to some very metaphysical, spiritual places.  This is relevant to my purposes since what I’m striving to achieve probably borrows elements from both 19th century Romanticism and 20th century fantasy (among other sources).  And though the metaphysical elements of my own story are far from being well-developed, I now understand more fully the importance that a strong base be built to support them.

The next principle involves the problem of “nothing happening.”  According to Ward, Melville had a need to add some variety to his story, because “he had to face the obvious fact that on a long whaling voyage very little happens.”  If Melville were to concentrate too much on Ahab, the narrative would get too intense. But “to concentrate on the trivia, on the day-to-day activity of the seamen or on the capture of every whale, would be both repetitious and monotonous” (168).  All of this echoes my own problem that during a long imprisonment very little happens, and that the day-to-day activity of prisoners is both repetitious and monotonous.  Trying to address this issue, the professor on my senior project insisted that my story must have some kind of standard plot to drive it forward - specifically an escape plot. But while I wouldn’t mind an escape plot figuring into the narrative in a peripheral way (e.g. as a subplot), it’s not the driving force that I want. To focus on an escape plot would emphasize themes and issues that are not at the heart of things for me. According to Ward, one way Melville chose to solve the problem of monotony was “by punctuating the Ahab scenes and the whaling incidents” with the cetological chapters. In these chapters, “The whale is the common denominator, both object of exposition and object of quest” (168).  I’m not suggesting I should write a series of expository chapters related thematically to my material; readers are rather unforgiving about this tactic, and after all, I’m looking to Moby-Dick for techniques and principles, not trying to copy the book. But I can borrow the idea rather generally, and think about adding a third “stream” of some kind into the narrative, perhaps an elaborate sub-plot – perhaps an escape plot, for that matter!  It also seems to me that the gams serve a similar purpose in the narrative. In “‘Careful Disorder’: The Structure of Moby-Dick,” Eldridge argues that they have an important function in the structure as they are spaced evenly throughout and counterbalance more “organic” elements (155).  Certainly every time they appear, they enliven and spice things up.  This may be an idea that I can borrow more or less directly; a group of people comes to the tower to visit Doran and Meredith from time to time, and I should probably develop this as an important structural element.  Just like Melville’s “gams,” I could build in a “progression” to these meetings and use them to give some regularity as well as variety to the narrative.

My last, very short, guiding principle gleaned from Moby-Dick involves the notion of the Pequod as a microcosm, as “society, as world-in-itself” (Young 449). If I were to make the population of my tower a microcosm, it would allow me to develop a cast of characters with a wide variety of attitudes and temperaments, just as the characters on the Pequod show “a variety of attitudes toward the white whale, a variety of attitudes toward reality and man’s place in the universe …” (Ward 170).

I will now attempt to sum up what I have learned from Melville to apply to my own project.  First, a writing method of “careful disorderliness” can be a very useful corrective for rigid writing formulas.  It is quite possible to start out with a weak plot and strengthen it as one goes in order to keep an element of surprise in the creative process. Second, a way to arrive at a dynamic kind of structure, whether early or late in the creative process, involves the use of material, situational, and metaphysical crucibles, which are a handy tool to produce conflict in an “organic” way.  The development of my own parallel “Ahab character,” the warden of my tower, may help lead me to satisfactory crucibles. Third, it is important to develop archetypes on both a general and specific level in order to arrive at a fully developed “myth.”  Fourth, it is also important to establish a grounded world of convincing detail, because this makes the fantastic or metaphysical details of a story resonate more believably.  Fifth, the monotony of “nothing happening” can be enlivened with a subplot or other separate line of chapters, as well as with a series of meetings (similar to gams) with characters from the outside.  Sixth, and last, my tower can be designed as a microcosm whose inhabitants exhibit a wide variety of attitudes and attributes.

The ideas I’ve covered here have been helpful to my project, and will continue to be helpful in exactly the ways I’ve stated. Nevertheless, it seems that the most immediate result of my efforts is that I “accidentally” jumpstarted a later book in my series while ruminating on Melville’s style of myth-building (i.e. points three and four above). One of Melville’s wonderfully freeing lessons seems to be that nearly anything can be transformed into a myth. Though I was not looking for that particular lesson, or for a start to that particular later novel, or for a whole new direction of thinking with no time to write a different paper, I won’t complain. After all, I’ve just spent thirteen pages pleading (if not praying) to Melville to help me justify freedom and spontaneity within form.

Works Cited

Barbour, James.  “The Composition of Moby-Dick.”  American Literature 47.3 (Nov.

1975): 343-360. 

Eldridge, Herbert G.  “‘Careful Disorder’: The Structure of Moby-Dick.”  American

Literature 39.2 (May, 1967): 145-162. 

George, Elizabeth.  Write Away.  New York: Harper Collins, 2004. 

Heller, Louis G.  “Two Pequot Names in American Literature.” American Speech 36.1

(1961): 54-57. 

Parke, John.  “Seven Moby-Dicks.”  The New England Quarterly 28.3 (Sep. 1955): 319-

338.

Tobias, Ronald B.  20 Master Plots and how to build them.  Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest,

1993.

Tolkien, J.R.R.  The Tolkien Reader.  New York: Del Rey, 1986.

Ward, J. A.  “The Function of the Cetological Chapters in Moby-Dick.”  American

Literature 28.2 (May, 1956): 164-183. 

Young, James Dean.  “The Nine Gams of the Pequod.”  American Literature 25.4 (Jan.

1954): 449-463. 

If I Only Had a Heart

“Realism is nonsense when you think about it.  I mean, there is no such thing.  Nobody writes realism, if realism is defined as ‘fiction that is objective and real and not distorted, but is just, you know, normal.’…The nature of all fiction is distortion, exaggeration, and compression.  So what we call realism is just distorting, exaggerating, and compressing with the intention of alluding to, or handwaving at – taking advantage of our fondness for – what I’ve heard called ‘consensus reality’ – the sort of lazy, agreed upon ‘way things are.’

“Which, of course, is not at all how they actually are…

“What I find exciting is the idea that no work of fiction will ever, ever come close to ‘documenting’ life.  So then, the purpose of it must be otherwise.  It’s supposed to do something to us to make it easier (or more fun, or less painful) for us to live.  Then all questions of form and so on become subjugated to this higher thing.  We’re not slaves any more to ideas of ‘the real’ or, for that matter, to ideas of ‘the experimental’ – we’re just trying to make something happen to the reader in his or her deepest places.  And that thing that happens will always be due to some juxtaposition of the life the reader is living and the words on the page…the heart will either rise, or it won’t. 

— George Saunders

I’ll start by summarizing my understanding of the George Saunders quote about departing from realism.  He feels that genre isn’t an “issue,” that any work of fiction is more important in terms of how effectively it moves a reader rather than in its surface manifestations, and that no artistic work can be defined as realistic because it’s impossible to document life.  Following from this, the purpose of fiction is not (can’t be?) to capture life, but to move readers in their deepest places, to touch their hearts.  Probably Saunders’s most provocative claim is that touching the heart and making life easier, more fun, or less painful for the reader is a “higher thing.”  He feels that questions of form in fiction should be subjugated to this aim of ease/fun/less pain.  Maybe an interesting question raised by this (and judging only by the quote I’m not sure where Saunders falls on this) is whether forms that veer further from mirroring “consensus reality” in general make for larger numbers of happy consumers.  If the economics of our own culture is any evidence – the multi-billion dollar industry of superhero movies, the Lord of the Rings phenomenon, etc. – and if dollars are votes for happiness, then it might seem so.  On the other hand, there are of course large numbers of people who don’t make “unrealistic” leaps in their minds, whose happiness is inspired by art that sticks more closely to “consensus reality,” and many of them are good friends of mine.  I take it that Saunders probably just means that art can take many forms along a scale of “like” to “very unlike” consensus reality, but that his focus is on defending those forms that veer toward “very unlike,” since these are viewed as more seditious and constantly seem to need a defender.  Presumably whether or not the heart is moved is ultimately determined by a reader’s individual temperament, choices, experience, etc. 

In the first section below, I’ll expound on the subject of heart, on what makes me happy (since that’s the only heart I can attest to with any authority), and on what music has to do with that.  I’ll spend the largest amount of space discussing why I’ve chosen certain forms in my attempt to make others happy through my writing. Then I’ll conclude by responding briefly to charges from earlier in my life that I’m a fantasizing self-indulgent idiot. 

The Heart Rising

“Heart” would be defined differently for everyone in the world, as would the experience of “the heart rising.”  I suppose another meaning of “heart rising” might be “epiphany,” but that still doesn’t help much since both are subjective.  For the purposes of this essay I’ll define what the “heart rising” means to me:  it’s when there’s a particular place in a story – or often it can be the work as a whole – that changes my life through my emotions.  It can be any emotion: humor, delight, wonder, awe, joy, grief.  In these kinds of moments, I tend to stop, look up from the page, and make that moment my own – that is, add my own feelings to it, my own meanings from deep within myself.  It has nothing to do with relating what’s on the page to some experience in reality, such as “Gee, that reminds me of Uncle David’s funeral” – though perhaps for another person that’s what it would mean.  The response within me does not involve wordy thoughts or specific memories, but is something primal, involving only emotions and intuitions. And even though I’ve looked up from the page, it’s a process of looking inward.  Nor have I been diverted from the story, despite the fact of looking up – I’m still engaged with the story itself, and its images are what I’m seeing, but the story has caused a wordless response that is (going along with Saunders) higher.  I guess I count it as a kind of mystical experience.  Exhibit A: page 23 of my story “Exalted” since that’s what I was trying to describe there.  In that case, I did try to put the revelation into words: “…we couldn’t have perfection and love most of the time, but we could experience it just in that moment, and then imagine the moment as forever.”  But that’s only what I got from one particular movement in the Mozart string quintets. The “heart rising” is always completely different in every instance, in both its feel and its articulation.

 I like that Saunders uses the word “higher” in regards to the pursuit of happiness in the arts. I believe in the ability of the arts to redeem, to uplift, to give hope, to break through to new possibilities. I agree when Saunders states that a work should make people’s lives “easier (or more fun or less painful),” though all of those effects strike me as being rather passive.  I would take it a step further and insist that ideally a work should inspire real change, both inward and outward.  Without The Lord of the Rings, I’d still be sitting in Indiana.  Because it made my heart rise, I decided to force myself to rise to the challenges in my life.  Maybe this is not quite the same thing, but when my opera was performed years back, my brother Hugh was one of the leads, and a girl named Tiffany was in the chorus. They fell in love, my brother ended a bitterly poisonous thirteen year marriage, and he and Tiffany have been very happily married for ten years now. (Incidentally, Hugh’s ex-wife also thrived once their marriage ended.)  If the show hadn’t happened, then Hugh and Tiffany probably never would have met.  But more to the point, I’ve heard both of them credit the environment itself (the music and words they were surrounded with) as being a factor in the emotional shifts that took place.  So yes, I believe in the transformative power of art in an active, not just a passive sense.  Of course, the problem is that everything I just said sounds corny, and so in public one has to make claims, as Saunders does, only for “easier (or more fun or less painful)” effects, and leave it at that.  I suppose the effects must be understated for superstitious reasons as well – it’s not as though any writer can guarantee changing a person. 

But even if “easier (or more fun, or less painful)” simply connotes that a person was made happier for a little while one day, it’s not as though that’s anything to scoff at.  What could possibly be more magical than making someone smile?  It’s a powerful trust.  And certainly, I’ve been transformed at times that I can’t point to any tangible result.  I can say without a doubt that James Joyce’s “The Dead” was such an experience for me, and that I came out of the story a different person than the one who went in, though I couldn’t put my finger on an outward change – unless it counts to use “The Dead” to justify writing stories that are too long for the sake of the ending, clutching it like a kind of magic talisman.

Heart, Mind, and Music

Now that I’ve defined what it means for my heart to rise (can’t vouch for anyone else’s), I have to admit that my heart really must rise for me to experience any lasting impact from a work of fiction. Going along with Saunders, for me it has little to do with genre. For me I think that it often comes down to an issue of heart/emotions versus mind/cleverness.  Not that “heart” and “mind” are mutually exclusive; certainly those two can and should exist together, just as the heart can rise in response to any genre. I guess my trouble is well illustrated by the two books Wilton Barnhardt assigned for the historical novel workshop this semester: Any Human Heart by William Boyd, and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.  I enjoyed Any Human Heart a great deal, and as its title suggests, its organizing principle seems to be “heart.”  Though I can’t point to any particular emotional moment or epiphany I had during the course of the book, the overall structure – the novel as a whole – engaged my heart as well as my mind.  I admit I had some believability issues – even if it’s realistic that the narrator would have known Woolf, Hemingway, Picasso, and many other famous people, it seems a bit “forced” for the sake of a novel – and yet, that didn’t interfere with my engagement with the book.  It just seems to back up what Saunders says about there being no such thing as realism.  Any Human Heart is a historical novel that strikes me as being perfectly unrealistic. In any case, it’s a book which is not in “my” genre, but which I enjoyed because my heart rose. (The reasons why my heart rose may have much to do with its form, which I’ll elaborate on more in the next section.) 

Meanwhile, Cloud Atlas is more in “my” genre, but doesn’t engage me.  Certainly David Mitchell is a razzle-dazzle genius as the book jacket extols.  Certainly the novel is stunningly structured.  Certainly he cycles flawlessly through ridiculous numbers of forms and genres – historical account, mystery novel, futuristic society and post-apocalyptic narratives, and so on – with all the words in precisely the right configuration.  The entire work is very slickly produced – so slick that I fall right off the surface.  Cloud Atlas strikes me as being a work that puts form and cleverness above emotional imperatives, and yet it’s ostensibly about heart, spirit, and the connections between people.  Maybe one could say that Cloud Atlas is about the heart via the entrance point of the mind.  But I’ve always been bad at puzzles, and Cloud Atlas is one of those books that makes me feel stupid and inadequate, as though I’m just not good enough for the great genius that wrote it.  I guess I prefer my geniuses more generous – the warmth and incisive simplicity of Willa Cather, for example. 

Obviously my feelings about Cloud Atlas won’t cause David Mitchell to lose any sleep, and I’m a big enough girl to understand that the fiction I dislike is simply for someone else.  When a work truly repulses me, I fear the failing is mine – not that it doesn’t have heart, but that I’ve missed it through my inability to grasp part of the range of human expression.  Though I’m able to appreciate the achievement of a work like Cloud Atlas, I disappoint myself that I can’t like it. It strikes me that what I said above about David Mitchell is similar to what some of Mozart’s critics have said about him over the centuries – that his music is clever, pretty noise lacking heart (O’Connell 347).  Some months ago, curious to understand all of the conflicting love and hatred for Mozart, I set out on a mission to see if I could come to not only appreciate, but to like him.  I surpassed my goal and fell in love with him.  Though it was a challenge at first, I think he and I came to an understanding about his heart.  It’s a much different kind of heart than Beethoven or Schumann, but it’s definitely a heart, and it definitely emotes – it’s just that all of the surface cleverness and prettiness go right along with the heart.  It’s who he is.  Why then can’t I come to a similar understanding with David Mitchell?  Probably I’m pricklier about fiction because it’s my own area.  Then again, music by its very nature – the direct receipt of sound – is better geared toward emotional immediacy regardless of whether it’s more “heartfelt” or more slickly pretty.  Since writing depends on all those pesky little abstract symbols sitting on the page, it’s more of a challenge to touch the emotions with it – and especially so in a work that is perhaps driven a bit more by “mind” than by “heart.” 

I can say from personal experience that it’s much easier to touch the emotions through music.  It was a thrilling experience back in 2001 to watch my opera with an audience and see them cry in response to my words and Martin McClellan’s music.  Fiction, of course, can be deeply moving; we just don’t usually get to see firsthand if someone laughs or cries.  And yet I know that my own prose stories that I wrote in the years after my opera were emotionally “dead.” After having succeeded in making people’s hearts rise with my lyrics, I was greatly disturbed by that.  I’ve been stubborn the past two years about rewriting those stories because I was determined to eke out at least a drop of emotion from each of them (and indeed, most of them still yield only a drop, but it’s better than nothing). 

Music is what I come from.  I’ve been surrounded by it my entire life, and I knew that music would be my way back to my understanding of my own heart. When I decided that I must either be able to write something that made me feel, or else quit, it was natural that I chose music as the catalyst to try to transform my writing – using it as a central organizing concept (Modus Perfectus) or as a metaphor (the two violins at the end of Muller’s Mile), invoking it like the muses (the reference to Beethoven’s 7th Symphony at the start of Muller’s Mile), attempting to capture its effects in words (the end of “Exalted”), or using it as inspiration in passages where I’m sure it’s not clearly obvious (the passage about Now-or-Never near the end of Muller’s Mile is my description of the 1st movement of Mozart’s 39th Symphony).  To get a reader’s heart to rise, I think you need a modicum of talent, and you have to devote yourself to a lifelong improvement of craft.  But even above that, I think you have to be true to your own integrity and your own truths to have a hope in hell of moving anyone else.  That’s why I turned to music for help.

Forming a Heart

After integrity and getting back in touch with my heart, the next imperative for me is form.  Here I agree with Saunders that the choice of form has less to do with genre and more to do with what works have caused one’s own heart to rise.  Nevertheless, if you have a certain kind of mind – the speculative kind that is obsessed with possibilities and alternatives – genre rears its ugly head quite early on, whether you like it or not.  If you have this kind of mind, you often learn sometime during childhood that you’re suited for science fiction or fantasy.  My mind has always known that it generates “fantasy” of some sort, although what interests it and what it generates are not exactly the same thing.  What interests it is emotional and inter-relational truth (and so it likes Jane Austen and Willa Cather), and emotional and inter-relational speculation and alternatives and possibilities (and so it likes J.R.R. Tolkien and Gabriel Garcia Marquez).  What it seems to generate is stuck somewhere in the middle, but nevertheless, because it’s in the middle, most easily takes the form of fantasy.  Incidentally, what was important to me about The Lord of the Rings when I read it at twenty-two – the reason it changed everything for me – was that Tolkien shows purities, distillations of emotions and relationships that don’t precisely exist in this world, but which can nevertheless exist within my mind with stunning force and vividness.  Since the essence of what he portrays was what I had always perceived in my own mind, but was too much of a coward to ever assert, Lord of the Rings struck me as an act of enormous courage and integrity, an assertion of Tolkien’s own deeply felt spiritual and philosophical truths.  I know that I’m not the only person Tolkien has affected that way. 

I’ve always felt that if we can imagine something, then it probably exists somewhere, even if it isn’t this particular spot in the universe at this moment in time.  Earth in the year 2009 seems like an absurdly limited view of the universe.  And though thinking in terms of “the possibilities of the universe” may not seem immediately practical in the scheme of pleasing readers, on the contrary I think it strikes on a very intimate (and pleasing) level. I think that acknowledging that anything we can imagine exists somewhere or could exist somewhere is important to a central notion of hope, of invention, of empathy, of many other things.  I fear, though, that my view on things has often been met with scorn, and because I’ve been too much of a coward in the face of that, I’ve stayed silent most of my life.  But in the next necessary step of being true to my own integrity and having a hope of moving anyone with my fiction, I must say what I actually feel and “see.” 

All of this is why I have felt a bit guilty about seeming to “suddenly” announce that I write fantasy, as though I woke up one day a few years ago and decided it out of the blue.  Rather, “waking dreams,” and endless variations of stories are something I’ve indulged in since I was a tiny child. I always knew that it was the main thing that drove me.  But people found me to be an odd and unacceptable child, and so, being the inept, cowardly creature that I am, I went about most of the rest my life trying to please everyone while keeping my most deeply felt impulses to myself.  It didn’t occur to me until I was in my early twenties that I would have to give myself permission to try to do something with it (and I’ll add that the fact that I got “permission” at NC State made all the difference for me).  During my whole twenties it wasn’t that I was coyly holding back, or even that I was cowering in fear of my undergrad creative writing instructors’ dislike of fantasy.  It was that I was privately trying that whole decade, and failing.  I have ten years’ worth (and hundreds of pages) of notes and aborted attempts at novels.  The chasm between what was “allowed” and what I really had to say was so wide by then that it was very difficult to figure out a way to bridge it – to figure out a form that would work. 

So far, then, I can state that whatever I might have to say takes the form of “emotional or inter-relational speculation,” and must be couched as fantasy of some kind.  Also related to form, and really more important than genre (it’s just that genre is like an uninvited party guest that arrives before anyone else) are questions of structure, point of view, voice, and tone.  Starting with structure:  for my own heart to be engaged, I need a clearly defined structure that holds its form and does not “break,” and that extends over a substantial amount of space and time.  By “extends over a substantial amount of space and time,” I mean a novel, or perhaps a novella, simply because my preference is to be immersed in a world and to explore it deeply.  To illustrate “a clearly defined structure that holds its form and does not ‘break’” I’ll juxtapose Boyd’s Any Human Heart and Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas again.  Any Human Heart is in the old-fashioned form of a journal, a form maintained through the course of the whole novel.  Via this journal, I traveled with the narrator, Logan Mountstuart, from young adulthood to his death at age eighty-five.  He stuck with me, and I with him.  Though his voice matured from young man to old man, it was the same voice.  The form sustained itself over a long stretch so that I felt comfortable enough to move my things in and stay.  In Cloud Atlas, the forms, genres, and voices switch frequently, as already noted, and I never felt that I achieved a connection with any of them.  Each time I managed to get my things unpacked I was shunted to a new hotel (and I don’t care how ritzy each hotel was). 

My love for “mythologies” is probably related to this notion of structures that hold their form over space and time.  What is mythology but a structure that you can depend on, a system with which you have a comfortable and happy familiarity?  This is especially true in terms of how the word seems to be bandied about currently in popular culture, as in the “mythology” of the TV show Lost, the “mythology” of Harry Potter, the “mythology” of superheroes.  In these cases, the term “mythology” seems to mean roughly “the collection of rules, archetypes, lore, etc. that define a particular self-contained world.”  This notion of mythology is probably the underlying common element (in my own perception) of the various works I admire, even though the works are defined by vastly different kinds of mythologies.  Tolkien’s mythology is wildly disparate from the mythology of Dickens’s strange comic universe – but they are nevertheless both dependable, consistent mythologies. Connecting my short stories through Modus Perfectus was my attempt to begin forming a mythology since one generally needs a lot of room to “spread out” to form a mythology.  Muller’s Mile is my slightly more ambitious stab at it. 

To sum up so far: I’m a fantasist who wants to use relatively large, dependable mythological structures to explore emotional and inter-relational matters.  What of point of view, voice and tone?  This may be the area where my undergraduate experience did me the fewest favors.  These three go together so intimately that you really need the freedom to work on them simultaneously.  They sink or swim together.  And yet omniscient point of view – which I’ve known for years would be the key to unlocking my own voice – was flatly forbidden by all of my instructors.  Most of the works I admire are told in some form of omniscient point of view: The Lord of the Rings, The Once and Future King by T.H. White, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Marquez, Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees, Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake, and most of the work of my beloved Charles Dickens, to name only a few.  I think omniscient is so often an ideal choice for speculative work (and especially for my own speculative “emotional” aims) because it allows the author to leap space and time from one consciousness to another, to ignore physical limitations, and to efficiently explore the connections among all the characters.  Because of this complex network of consciousnesses, omniscient lends dimension to a work for me.  I guess one of the things I dislike about some modern fiction is that the form itself (choices in voice, POV, tone) tends toward what strikes me as a collapsed-in consciousness, an existence defined by little more than the body’s impulses and a collection of predetermined psychological reactions.  Omniscient gives the flexibility of blasting through boundaries, to give a sense of communion and of “other” rather than “me me me,” while simultaneously allowing one to establish a consistent tone, structure, etc. and maintain it throughout the narrative.  It provides maximum flexibility and stability, if you will.  

In addition, I think there’s a lot to be said for the dimension added by the presence of the author’s voice/persona within the narrative, and I think it provides one more point of connection for a reader.  I have never found an author’s voice “intrusive.” (Who came up with that biased, judgmental term for it, anyway, and why did it stick?)  I think the strong, confident presence of an author’s voice is brave, a way of taking a stand on what he or she actually thinks.  I think of Bleak House and Dickens’s scathing eulogy after the moving death scene of the homeless boy, Jo: “Dead, your Majesty.  Dead, my lords and gentlemen.  Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order.  Dead, men and women, born with Heavenly compassion in your hearts.  And dying thus around us every day” (572).  An author’s presence in the narrative is of course almost never quite that dramatic, and it’s true that nowadays we can’t get away with something like that very easily (how I love it, though).  But just as effective is the gentle once-upon-a-time voice of Hope Mirrlees in Lud-in-the-Mist, or frankly, of Jane Austen, as she sets up one of her scenarios of a woman with a collection of complicated financial and social woes who must find a good man, as in Persuasion: “A few years before, Anne Elliot had been a very pretty girl, but her bloom had vanished early; and as even in its height, her father had found little to admire in her, (so totally different were her delicate features and mild dark eyes from his own); there could be nothing in them now that she was faded and thin, to excite his esteem” (3).   This single sentence provides the whole set-up of the relationship between father and daughter. Though it’s more subtle than a mini-sermon from Dickens, we understand from this that Sir Walter is so self-centered he can’t see worth in anything outside of himself, and that Anne won’t be getting any help from him.  And we know exactly what Austen thinks of him. 

The issues of tone and voice have only begun to come together for me very recently, despite struggling with them for years.  (Again, voice and tone may have been held back by the fact that for years I did not manage to do anything with point of view that interested me.)  It seems that the missing key was humor, and I’m grateful that I got the encouragement I did at NC State, because I don’t know that I ever would have figured that out on my own.  Though I’ve always deeply admired comedy and humor and grew up watching Monty Python episodes over and over, I never thought it was possible for me to be funny. And yet, I knew that my own material – my “emotional speculation” and the forms that it took – was in some basic sense, rather silly.  For years I couldn’t figure out how to make something so silly work on the page.  To some degree, I may have been mired down back then in my admiration of Tolkien; though there are glimpses of humor and lightness in Lord of the Rings, it’s mainly dominated by big, heavy, mythic emotions.  I may have thought that because the stories I envisioned were full of silliness, they had no worth.  Frankly, everything in Muller’s Mile is silly: Hostage Madness, scrum scree, the idea that when Effluvia thinks of Muller it holds the weight off of him, islands in a Brimful Puddle – all silly. But my hope is that I’ve at least found a way now to make it work on the page.   

Beyond individuals at NC State who encouraged me, the other person who opened my eyes to humor was Dickens. The man can do everything – sophisticated satire, slapstick, absurdity, burlesque, etc. – all in the course of the same narrative. Bleak House contains the dark satire of Chancery right alongside the grotesquely funny Grandfather Smallweed and the slapstick comedy of the Jellyby family.  From Dickens I learned: just roll with it.  As long as you tell a narrative with confidence and conviction, it can have “weight” and you can still veer off into any kind of humor (or other digression) imaginable. If your voice and structure are strong enough, your story doesn’t break.  It’s actually not enough to say that Dickens opened my eyes to humor; he changed my entire definition of storytelling, and opened up a whole new humor-related emotional vocabulary to me that I had never imagined – a vocabulary that I could actually use on a practical level so that I could move forward.  Talk about my heart rising. Thanks, Dickens. 

Though it took me a long time to wake up to what I could do with humor and a lighter tone, it’s not the first time I’ve ever admired something along those lines.  Back in high school, Chapter VI from Book Two of The Once and Future King was in my literature textbook, and I dearly loved the combination of myth, humor, and hope.  I’d quote or summarize some of the humor from the chapter, but it doesn’t really seem to do it justice.  Only reading the whole chapter does it justice, because the silly humor is so much a part of the overall voice, pace and tone.  At any rate, after various antics, Arthur outlines his plan to harness Might for Right, a very new idea at the time.  Then there’s this final sentence about Merlyn’s response to Arthur: “The magician stood up as straight as a pillar, stretched out his arms in both directions, looked at the ceiling, and said the first few words of the Nunc Dimittis” (255).  By this, Merlyn means that he has seen the “savior,” and his work on earth is done.  At sixteen I had no idea what the Nunc Dimittis was, but there was a handy footnote to explain it to me, and then the passage, and the whole chapter, provided me with a definite “heart rising” moment.  This promise of hope couched in humor and myth, and with so much respect for the reader’s heart and imagination at the end, seemed purely delightful.  The chapter is burned into my psyche, and it’s long been on my mind that it might be my best model for emulation, because it’s a kind of writing that I not only admire but am also capable of achieving to some degree through my own particular inclinations and abilities. I’ve looked back over the chapter many times over the past few years, and though I didn’t actively copy it as I worked on Muller’s Mile, as I look at the chapter again now, I see that the tone and voice of Muller’s Mile are often strikingly similar to it.  Even the style and pace of my “omniscient summary” is very similar to the passage of summary at the start of the chapter. 

The end of the chapter (the Nunc Dimittis moment) is representative of what has long been one of my favorite types of moments or endings – it makes your heart rise by leaving you to imagine some kind of fresh awe or hope.  In high school I also loved Lawrence of Arabia – the historical figure and the film (my tastes of course made me wildly popular with others my age).  The start of the film sets up a web of seemingly unsolvable problems for the various Arab tribes in the midst of World War I.  Then there’s a scene in which Lawrence essentially walks around the desert and thinks in a very intense manner.  The scene has no dialogue, though the score is effective and gradually builds until Lawrence utters, “Aqaba – by land,” by which he means that he and a small band of Arabs will cross a dangerous desert (which no one had thought of as a solution, because the desert is supposedly “uncrossable”) and take the port of Aqaba.  It’s his inventive solution to the deadlock the Arabs are in.  This strikes me as being very like the Nunc Dommitus scene.  Somebody utters the promise of a hope, a kind of determination to make good things happen, and it’s often (but not always) embodied in a single mythic hero.  It stops at the height of the moment to allow the reader to imagine the rest.  I’ve encountered this kind of moment or ending often in myth or fantasy (Stephen King’s The Eyes of the Dragon ends this way, as does the final issue of the original ElfQuest comics my father brought to me when I was a child).   Whether I succeeded or not, this kind of ending was what I was consciously going for at the end of Muller’s Mile – to suggest that Muller is going to make a powerful change (with a little help from Effluvia), and then let the reader imagine hopeful things, wonderful things. 

So, to sum up the kind of form that makes my heart rise, and which I’ve been trying to write in lately to make others’ hearts rise:  I’m geared toward emotional or inter-relational speculation conveyed through fantasy or myth in a structure that establishes itself and remains fixed and dependable.  Point of view should usually be some form of omniscient, and voice and tone should be optimistic and hopeful, full of conviction, and willing to veer toward humor at any time (darkness okay, too).  All of this is, of course, easier said than done.  When I started Muller’s Mile, I played around with a snarkier voice and with structural ideas that would have been “flashier,” but I rejected these things as not serving the heart of the story.  I started over, making Part Two my entrance point, since that’s where I best understood its heart. Then I formed the rest around it.  And yet, the finished product still seems non-ideal to me.  The perspectives shift to some degree throughout the narrative, but each of my three parts mainly sticks to a close third with a different dominant perspective. I would suppose that after seeing things through Brum for so long, it might be uncomfortable for a reader to shift mainly to Effluvia, and then to Muller.  But that was the best I could come up with.  For Principally Murdock, I also devised something I don’t feel completely happy with (though people in workshop seemed to like it all right) – a kind of omniscient first person where the characters speak as “I,” but also know and freely tell the emotions and thoughts of other characters.  (Not that this idea is exactly innovative – it seems to me the last book I read that did that was Moby-Dick.) 

Another challenge for me is that I lack the anthropological world-building skills of fantasy and science fiction.  This is another reason that I supposed for a long time that I couldn’t write the kind of stories I wanted to write.  I seemed to lack inventiveness, like many of the Dungeons-and-Dragons-playing boys around me. What I’ve discovered in the past few years is that, according to others, I do possess a type of inventiveness that, though it is not anthropological, is nevertheless adequate.  It generates more of an emotional landscape than a physically believable landscape, but it’s workable with just enough grounding. However, I’m bothered by the fact that bizarre, highly improbable elements tend to invade the landscape. While theoretically I agree that there are few limits to sticking with “documented reality” – as we see, for example, with Borges’ “Library of Babel,” which happens to be the universe, as well as “a sphere whose consummate center is any hexagon, and whose circumference is inaccessible” (80) – my preference is for stories that have enough warm and familiar elements that I feel comfortable enough to hang my hat there. One of my greatest worries is that my writing is hermetic instead of generous and inviting because of being oddly random. To make matters worse (?), I often knowingly undercut myself with a kind of bizarre humor when I sense a story trying to get too big for its britches. That’s why, for example, I have a Brimful Puddle instead of an ocean.  It’s a form of creative self-deprecation, and I have no idea whether this helps or harms the stories, though people seem to respond positively to the humor of these self-deprecating instances.  In any case, Silly Oddness (or Odd Silliness?) seems to be what I am capable of conceiving, and to have a chance of making anyone’s heart rise, I think I have to choose forms based not just on preferences, but also on my natural abilities and inclinations. I do think that I’m at least capable of forming a steady structure consistent with the idea of mythology – it’s just an odd and silly structure.  Maybe it’s not so bad if someone has the patience to get used to it.  I can also make up for it to some degree with strength and consistence in the structure of the writing itself.

These are just a few of many issues I have with my writing. I suppose I just have to keep trying for heart-pleasing forms while continuing to make concessions to circumstances or to my own still-inadequate craft. I was pleased that nearly everyone in workshop this semester found Principally Murdock (which is the closest thing to Muller’s Mile that I’ve ever workshopped) friendly enough to enter. A number of people mentioned that it worked for them on a primal, subconscious level, and some also mentioned that though the humor veers into absurdity, it doesn’t compromise the reality of the world.  These kinds of comments lead me to believe I’m on the right track.

In Defense of Self-Indulgence

I’d like to reflect on (which really means complain about) a view I’ve encountered from time to time that veering from consensus reality constitutes gross self-indulgence.  My first public (and very disastrous) attempt to come up with something like Muller’s Mile was when I did my undergrad senior project.  I made the mistake of describing the nature of my project (including at least some of the ideas described in this essay) to my professor, which seemed to convince him that I was a hopeless self-indulgent idiot. He prescribed what he apparently thought was good medicine for me – writing a plot synopsis over and over for nearly four months. I got the impression that his goal was to “rein me in” and teach me discipline. Every time I went in to talk to him he always told me several times, “You’re not thinking about the reader.”  The implication seemed to be that because my material was internally-generated and fantasy-oriented that I was too selfish to think of others – that essentially, my project was undisciplined and self-indulgent. 

And yet, it’s often occurred to me that this “self-indulgence” accusation only works if the resulting writing lacks any redeeming qualities. I don’t know what I’d do without Tolkien’s little bit of “self-indulgence.” A towering example of gorging, unapologetic self-indulgence is Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, but it’s also a very entertaining and original piece of writing. Even if self-indulgence goes too far, it seems justifiable sometimes in the bigger scheme of things; there are whole chapters of dialogue between Wegg and Venus in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend which seem to go on interminably, even in the context of Dickens’s long comic dialogue exchanges, or in the context of gargantuan Victorian novels. But I’ll visit Dickens’s self-indulging mind any time, happy to endure passages like those to get to one of his great shining bits of lunacy or to a scene like the so-good-it-should-be-illegal death and resurrection of Rogue Riderhood.  I’m not justifying myself by pretending I’m standing on these giants’ shoulders.  But I am defending self-indulgence in general – where would we be without it? 

I was very shaken by my professor’s “not thinking about the reader” accusation, because the truth is, the reader is all I care about.  The entire goal of my inner meanderings since I was making up crude stories in my crib has been to bring about connection, to deliver some kind of joy and pleasure.  If I fail that, I fail everything. Admittedly, my first goal is to get something onto the page that pleases myself, because I’m my first reader. But if it fails to please anyone else, then I would label it self-indulgence.

As far as my own case is concerned, I agree with the workshop members who’ve said that the opening gazillion or so pages of “Exalted” are too much, but I guess I justify the pages on the basis that they were necessary for me to get to the ending (here I pull out my magic talisman, James Joyce’s “The Dead”).  But some people have also said that the ending itself is too long and drawn out, and I agree; and some have said that the endings of most of my stories, as well as of Muller’s Mile, are too long and drawn out – and I say, guilty as charged.  But I also say that when my undergraduate professor finally gave me permission to quit revising my synopsis and to write, the resulting two chapters, though they were certainly controlled and reined-in, were also just thoroughly bad.  I suppose that I’d rather be self-indulgent and at least have some good stuff mixed in with it than to be reined in and have nothing but dross. 

But whether my self-indulgence in “Exalted” is useful artistically, I think it was necessary as part of my own process. Though Augusta’s voice is not my voice and I’m the furthest thing from a music hater, much of the beginning part of the story is autobiographical. I think Augusta was a kind of sacrificial lamb for me, and that I used her to “kill” myself and everything I hated about the decisions I made in earlier years about my life and my writing. When the story launches into the greater “metaphysics” of the end, that’s my greater reality and truth, as is Muller’s Mile. That’s what I’ve been trying to get back to – this more primal, archetypal kind of invention that comes very naturally to me. On a larger scale, my thesis mirrors the same process; the end piece, Muller’s Mile, is a grown-up, fully integrated version of my earliest intentions – although I use the term “grown-up” loosely. 

Conclusion

I admit it: I believe that reality is distorted, not art.  Reality is constructed – distorted – in such a way that it’s often impossible to truly know and connect with one another.  To feel a connection with Mozart or Herman Melville across the centuries  (or William Boyd or Gene Wolfe in the present) is truer to me than the reality of going out in public and having an impersonal transaction at the supermarket, all of us wearing fake smiles and saying fake words.  I suppose all of this is what gets me in trouble. It’s strange, but it seems that one of the ways to be just a little radical and seditious is to try to be thoughtfully optimistic and childlike, and to acknowledge sentiment as something beautiful. The MFA program at NC State has allowed me to put almost all of my focus on finding a “form” in which to couch that sort of thing. Since there is no way to predict whose heart will rise and whose won’t, I think what constitutes making someone else’s heart rise is simply being true to one’s own heart, and using all the tools of craft to the best of one’s ability. For many of us (all of us?), it’s our own hearts or others’ hearts we’re trying to capture in writing – not “reality,” whatever that is. I still don’t feel I’ve gotten entirely to the heart of the matter – but with Muller’s Mile I got close enough that I’m not ashamed of that work.  I can keep trying to make a better fantasy of the emotions and of different kinds of loves.

Works Cited

Austen, Jane.  Persuasion.  New York: Dover, 1997.

Borges, Jorge Luis.  Ficciones.  New York: Grove Press, 1962.

Boyd, William.  Any Human Heart.  New York: Random House, 2002.

Dickens, Charles.  Bleak House.  New York: Norton, 1977.

---.  Our Mutual Friend.  New York: Random House, 2002. 

Joyce, James.  Dubliners.  New York: Dover, 1991. 

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Mirrlees, Hope.  Lud-in-the-Mist.  Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2005.

Mitchell, David.  Cloud Atlas.  New York: Random House, 2004. 

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Peake, Mervyn.  The Gormenghast Novels.  Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1995. 

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The Line (2004)

I have a problem with the line.  I refuse to draw it.  I’m not denying that fantasy and reality have separate existences, nor am I denying that it’s a good idea to have a solid grasp on the difference between the two.  I’m only expressing personal distaste for the line.  This distaste for defining fantasy and reality in strict terms will undoubtedly have profound effects on my real life.  Some of these effects might be – and probably already have been – quite negative.  But my feelings about the line have nothing to do with my real life.  It’s my concern for maintaining a healthy relationship with the arts that makes me suspicious toward the line.

I realize it defies logic to put art before life.  But the problem for me is that art does in fact draw from life.  If I formed definite boundaries in all my thoughts, including those in my real life, it would affect my writing in ways that I don’t want.  If I were to define my life in an exact way, it would make my art exact in a way that I don’t want, in a way that I don’t choose.  And after all, I’m not the only one who has a problem with the line.  There are always a great number of artistic sorts who are unwilling to draw it.  It’s a naturally occurring phenomenon.  Maybe it has something to do with maintaining a balanced ratio in the artistic pool.  Some draw the line way up here, others way down there, and some refuse to draw it anywhere at all.  Somewhere out of all of this comes an eloquent – if not always coherent - expression of the art forms in their various facets.

In Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert expresses his opinion that the line has got to be drawn somewhere.  There is fantasy; and there is reality.  The line needs to be drawn more firmly between the two.  If it is not drawn, the ramifications are dramatic.  Disaster will ensue.  A beautiful woman will have affairs, ruin her family, and take her own life.  In this view, Romanticism is out of control.  It consumes everyone and everything that it touches. Romantics have to be saved, says Flaubert.  They are a liability and burden to their families, a menace to society. 

And yet, Madame Bovary is fiction. Every story necessarily makes the line blurry to a greater or lesser degree. And like all things that are reacting against something, Madame Bovary over-reacts.  Flaubert was trying to make a point, so he chose a dramatic way to do it.  Emma Bovary is supposedly drawn from real life, and from these sorts of out-of-control feelings.  But is she really?  She’s as silly a fictional creation as any Romantic heroine.  Perhaps things were more dramatic and miserable than I realize in France in the 19th century, but Madame Bovary’s struggle with the line seems like a rather extreme case.  Not one in a million goes mad and commits suicide while grappling with the line, just as not one in a million people who play role-playing games go psychotic and chop up their friends with a battle ax, as some conservative groups would like people to believe.  Refusing to draw the line doesn’t necessarily create a cruel, superficial, reckless person.  Emma Bovary is just one portrayal of what could happen.  But her example – a fictional example, no less - is blown up so large, it’s made to seem like some kind of ultimate portrayal.

I think a more accurate description of the struggle with the line would be Thoreau’s “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  And the line, of course, isn’t so much of an actual line.  It’s probably more like a Dead Letter Office, as in Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” where many attempts are made to reach, without ever achieving the aim.  Quiet desperation is the result.

In one of my own stories, a character named Dobbs is trying to reach through music to find what lies beyond. As I wrote the story, I considered that I was just trying to describe what it feels like to listen to a Romantic composer, specifically Robert Schumann.  But one day while listening to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, I realized that Dobbs’s fevered attempts to reach into the voids of Schumann’s music are actually my own efforts.   Bach’s music – and Baroque music in general – has no such voids.  Instead, it’s driven by a dynamic tension – a kind of tension that I deeply admire.  This tension – this line – in Baroque music comes from man, feet firmly planted on the ground, reaching for the eternal.  There is a line there – man in the clay, God in the heavens - and it makes a beautiful tension.  Romantic music (and Romanticism in general), on the other hand, has something unhinged about it, something dangerous.  Romanticism didn’t merely dabble with the line a bit, but attempted to erase it altogether. The line is not drawn in Romanticism.  There is still the reaching for the eternal, but feet are no longer planted on the ground.  Instead, it’s like soaring at great heights. It’s dizzying. And the tension there is not a taut, dynamic tension as in the Baroque.  The tension comes from wondering how far you can reach into the void, wondering if you can go all the way, and what will happen to you if you do.  It’s not quite certain whether it’s very good or very bad. 

All of this poses an interesting dilemma for me on a personal level.  I deeply admire dynamic tension, but I refuse to draw the line.  Is there any way to have dynamic tension while at the same time refusing to draw the line?  Can I be pragmatic in one realm while reaching into a void in another? 

I think the answer might lie in irony, if irony is defined as more than one consciousness existing in the same space at the same time.  That’s a paradox, but most answers that have ever made any sense to me were paradoxes.  If two consciousnesses can exist at once – as happens in irony – then one consciousness could remain grounded, and one could reach eternally at the same time, in both art and life.  The dynamic tension is between these points. Rather than the ignorant consciousness/informed consciousness of irony, the tension is between a grounded consciousness/infinite consciousness, with no absolutely defined lines.  I think this kind of dynamic tension must underlie a lot of modern literature, including the fantasy genre, when the fantasy genre is actually good.  It’s a lot of what makes The Lord of the Rings work.   

I’ve always refused to draw the line.  I have always insisted that if I can imagine something, it can somehow exist.  It has nothing to do with logic.  I just insist.  My mother insists, with equal conviction, that there is only one possibility of existence – for example, that loneliness is the only possible state of being.  I argue with her not because I have any evidence to the contrary, but on the grounds that I refuse to accept any lines.  If something is impossible in the human condition, and yet I, in the confines of the human condition, can imagine it, then why shouldn’t I at least try to portray it?  If this dynamic tension between the imagined and the real exists in the most inward part of the human condition – within one’s mind — then it seems an outward portrayal of this tension is only logical and natural.   My earliest memories as a very young child are lying in my crib, playing with my feet, making up very simple stories, and imagining feelings and things that I couldn’t experience in reality.  To fail to convey the possibilities of those experiences onto the page would, to me, defy logic.  If the tension exists in the very inward-most condition, then the tension must exist on an outward level, too.  Different kinds of consciousness must exist at the same time, eliminating the need for an exact line, and forming a dynamic tension that drives creation. 

There’s nothing unnatural or silly about this tension and the desire for the imagined – that is the human condition.  Reality by itself is not the human condition, which is what makes Madame Bovary a silly representation.  Accepting fantasy may be too simplistic, but completely rejecting it is also too simplistic. Absolute fantasy may not exist, but neither does absolute reality – at least not in my experience.  Reality when married to the infinite is the human condition, and the resultant tension pervades everything. And though I have a firm grasp on the difference between reality and fantasy, I refuse to draw a line.