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
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Tolkien, J. R. R. The Lord of the Rings. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965.
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