When the night is split in two by an apparition, a distant fire, the deer suddenly recalls the deepness of a forgotten youth. He sees the darkness of a forest and smells the resinous scent of pine. He remembers places of sunlight, and other places of cool speckled shadow, and shallow bends in a winding stream where the sounds of the water are hushed, places where he would not hear the murmur of the water's current until his head was bent low to the clear bubbling surface to take a drink.

At some point, and it is impossible to remember when, his life had lifted him out of the forest and led him onto a path that crossed through younger meadows and open prairies. In these places the animals he met were more cautious and reserved than those of the forest, and they watched him with suspicious eyes. In the whistle of wind shushing through the stiff blades of long yellow grass, he heard the first rumors of a danger. In his memory, this awakening to the uneasiness of the world was ever-linked to a startling, sudden awareness of his mother and three older sisters, and of the care with which they selected every step they took, every bite of food they ate.

As he grew older, a fear came upon him. He learned that every animal in the wild survived by living lives that responded to the unnamed threat of danger. His mother and sisters no longer tolerated his inattention to his surroundings. One by one his sisters left his side, and one morning he woke to find his mother had also departed. In that terrible moment a great panic seized him and in a fever he searched for her. But suddenly he became aware of his own breathing, became aware of the sturdiness of his own bones, and the strength of his own muscles. He was alone; but the old nameless fear was joined to a new awareness of freedom.

It was early on a chilly blue afternoon, and he was grazing by the edge of a young maple woods when he chanced upon a scent in the cool autumn air that he had never before experienced. He looked up and saw four strange animals looking away into the distance. Though he had never seen creatures such as these, nor smelled scents such as theirs, a whisper of premonition thrilled the backs of his ears with a shiver, and he knew, without really knowing, that these creatures were the source of those rumors of danger which had once woken him from his childhood. The four animals immediately became aware of him, and when they turned towards him the two smallest of the creatures pierced the morning with yells, dire and shrill. The deer bolted away from them in terror.

After some time, he realized that he had escaped. But he could not shake the memory of terror, nor the helplessness of how the fear had gripped his mind.

He had, throughout his life, been alert for danger, never questioning his ability to locate the nameless threat should he ever encounter it. Now he understood that he had never encountered such a threat before. Or, if he had encountered the threat at some moment in his past, the threat had always proved much less dangerous than anticipated. Within the very moment of survival and relief, a new terror came upon him, and with chilling clarity the deer concluded that the threat he had always feared was different, was other than any threat he had ever experienced. This is the moment when he leaves his past forever. He wakes one last time—as he once awakened from his childhood into the knowledge of danger—he now wakes from his dream of living: the challenge and all the meaning of his existence is fast approaching.

His fear increases. The suspense becomes the dominant force in his life. He ceaselessly worries that he has never before been adequately tested. He is forced to trust to instincts that he believes he has never used—and all the instances of his continual survival now seem less like evidences of self-worth than of a hidden voyeur's omniscient mockery.

And so it is for the deer, when at long last he arrives at the darkest hour of that certain time of night, at the certain midnight highway, at that certain moment of his life when all his existence assumes the imminence of a foretold mortal danger for which he believes his senses cannot prepare him. When the deep blackness of the universe is shattered by a runway of white fire, it is with endless surprise that the deer recognizes the headlights. Tears blur his vision: he can scarcely credit that he has successfully identified the challenge to his purpose, the purpose of all his fears and the purpose of his torturous need to survive—he stands at attention, and makes himself stare consciously and directly into the truth of his fate.

In the terror of this moment of crisis, this deer will discover that all fears are groundless, and worthless, and degrading. Fears are curses and abominations. Put together into one, fear is the ruination of his life and all life everywhere: he will discover that his life has wasted away in self-doubt; and in unconscious, certain anticipation of damnation. Therefore, when all the traces of the night around him have melted away into the white fire, the deer must find a way to surrender his most deeply buried desire to the God of Death and Oblivion.

Copyright ©2004-2006, ©2007 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
Taboo Monkey Blue Blog

Are there subjects authors of serious literary fiction should avoid? What can a writer learn or express by writing about the elements of society we feel are most perverse?

I gave a presentation last night on one of the most disturbing novels I've ever read: The End of Alice, by Amy Michael Homes.

The reader quickly gives the unnamed narrator a name: pedophile. Soon after, we give him another name: psychopath.

Because we see the narrative through his eyes, this narrator resembles Humbert Humbert from Nabakov's Lolita; because of his elitist, classicist use of language, he resembles Hannibal Lecter, made infamous by the film Silence of the Lambs. On this surface level, the novel feels like a writer's case study of the criminal mind.

In Lolita, Humbert Humbert makes us squirm because Nabakov asks us to read (and therefore, identify with) the story through the eyes of the pedophile himself.

In the film Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter isn't a source of terror simply because of the atrocities he's committed, but because of the heightened clarity of his intellect. He isn't just a face-eater. He is also a genius.

In The End of Alice by A. M. Homes, the criminal isn't the only one on trial. The novel begins by creating a complicated framed scenario: the narrator, incarcerated for many years, tells us he is often sought out by many people--aficionados, haters, historians, museums. One woman's correspondence, however, grabs his attention. He tells us that he'll translate a certain series of correspondences he's having with the 19 year-old woman, a sophomore in college, who has developed a taste for young boys.

Several literary tricks complicate the reader's experience. First, because we're hearing everything through the frame of the narrator's perspective, we're forced to see instances of vivid, yet surreal, atrocity inflicted upon the narrator, where he no longer looks like a predator. Second, the entire novel is framed such that time has no meaning, time converges, everything seems to happen at the same time, so the reader is asked to experience terror of- and pity for the narrator during a single moment. Third, because the narrator fits the profile of a psychopath, we are sorely tempted to write off every attempt he makes to talk sense.

That was the most disturbing part. He may very well be crazy. He may very well be sick. But the rest of us who have not been diagnosed with craziness or with sicko-ness must be careful with our judgments. This book makes us question all the boundaries we create between Us and Them, between Right and Wrong, between Predator and Victim, and even between Real and Imaginary.

What is more repulsive: the "pervert's" thoughts, locked up as he or she is inside the walls of prison; or the person who reads the newspaper every day, watches the evening news every day, watches movies and reads books about violence after violence every day and remains unaffected?

Who is more deserving of critique: the person who has been affected by the real horrors of the world, or the person who becomes so numb that to him, the world news seems unreal, distant? Is it more perverse to be affected or unaffected?

Who is wise or innocent enough to know which is worse?

Copyright ©2004-2006, ©2007 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
Taboo Monkey Blue Blog: Writing on Writing

Angelus Novus

"A Klee painting named 'Angelus Novus' shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." --Walter Benjamin, Illuminations

This is a beautiful parable, and a complex metaphor that brings with it more questions than answers. The angel of history focuses on the past. We see history as a series of causes and effects, a logical, linear progression that leads from our origins to where we are now. But the angel sees history as a whole--a multi-dimensional being whose existence is a catastrophe, endlessly destroying itself, leaving the artifacts of horror at the angel's feet.

Every ounce of the angel's soul yearns toward this tragedy, toward his desire to solve the horror, to resurrect what has been killed. "But a storm is blowing from paradise," and this storm "has got caught" in his wings. Paradise is the origin, lives somewhere distant in the past, and from this past moment a terrible gale blows. The angel has trapped the gale within his own wings, but the gale is so powerful that the angel cannot close his wings.

And though the angel has trapped the storm, the storm is still irresistible. The wind blows the angel inexorably into the future--a future to which the angel has his back turned. And all the while, the catastrophe of our history continues to destroy itself, its empty bones piling up toward the sky.

Copyright ©2004-2006, ©2007 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
Taboo Monkey Blue Blog: Writing on Writing

Narratology is the study of narrative, or the study of the relations between different aspects of narrative.

I. What we think of as NARRATIVE actually has three parts:

1. Story, or history;
2. Narrative, or the text itself, the structure and form; and
3. Narrating, or Discourse.

1. The story is literally the content. Story is a chronological account, a history of events.

2. Narrative is the text. Narrative is the word, the focus and overall form, in which the story is revealed. Narrative is plot, the structure that (re)orders and then presents the (hi)story.

3. Narrating is the condition that makes the narrative necessary, that makes the narrative possible. Narrating is the conscious and subconscious of the work. Narrating is NOT story; it is the act of telling; narrating is the environment in which narrative takes place.

MFA fiction writing programs have a bit of dogma that goes like this: literary writing is character-driven story writing. But that bit of tripe, frankly, is wrong.

The MFA dogmatic companion to the mantra above reads as follows: plot-driven writing is mechanical writing. Two pieces of tripe. MFA programs should know better. But they don't.

Traditional (new-critical) writing theory allows for very little distinction between story and plot; and the paltry distinction that exists is usually a matter of sneer. Additionally, writing programs live and breathe realism. The best writer, they say, works like a mirror: he produces the illusion of reality.

Every different branch of theory today, however, suggests that reality (the way we experience reality) is relative, has a context. Physics, psychology, cultural and social theory today all argue that what we experience is only an image of our relation to reality. That's a complicated concept, and not worth the time we'd need to unpack it for the purpose of this discussion.  Still, here's an example: painters discovered this concept a long time ago. Think about impressionist painting with its long seductive brush strokes and its short textured swipes. The artist acknowledges her relation to reality, not objective reality, in these strokes.

This is why the notion of character-driven "story" is dated. Every device a writer uses to create a book is a device. In realist or naturalist texts, the illusion of reality is a device. In modernist texts, the visibility of style is a device. And device is structure, or plot, or narrative. It's the way we tell the story.  It's true that stories, the chronologies, are driven by characters and their desires; but the act of telling (narrating) and the text itself is what drives the entire process of communication.  When we tell a story, what's important is not the story itself; it's the relation between the teller and story that offers meaning.

II. Metanarrative is how we talk about the way we tell the story. Metafiction, to give a very broad definition, is a narrative that talks about itself.

Realist fiction, always trying to maintain the illusion of reality, believes that metanarrative has no place in fiction. Modernist fiction in general feels the same way realist fiction does, with one significant difference: modernist fiction believes that hiding the structure is a detrimental lie--worse, a lie told by a poor writer. Structure always calls attention to itself, whether the writer tries to hide it or not. If this effect, this calling attention to itself can do so in a way that directly refers to itself, that talks about itself, then it is metanarrative.

Metanarrative: the relation between story and narrative can be thought of like this:

A1 (story)
B1 (narrative)
C1 (the story subject)

A, B and C when put together on paper, bound up and printed are a book. Narrative (B) is the text, the word produced by a narrator who tells us the story (history - A). The whole point of the story is the subject (C).

Have you ever read a book where the narrator was part of the story? There are a couple out there, but perhaps not as many as you think.

Here's my favorite test case: Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield is in the story, isn't he? Not exactly. The story is a series of events, the "madman stuff," that happened "about a year ago" to, yes, Holden. These events are Holden's history, of course. But the Holden who tells this (hi)story is a different Holden. He's an older, arguably wiser Holden who is currently spending some time in a mental hospital.

So: the story is told by a narrator who has finished living the story he is narrating. Holden has learned the lesson of that story (though unreliably so), and therefore he can tell it. He can narrate his old story.

So: Holden becomes the metasubject (C2) of a new story (A2), telling (B1) his old story (A1). Holden isn't really talking about himself.

So: the book in itself is not a metanarrative. In fiction or in "real life" it's not that easy to talk coherently about the story that you're living. If you're a teacher, can you teach a lesson you haven't learned? Sure, but your students won't learn anything, either.  You won't have a distinguishable relationship to the lesson; you won't have anything to communicate.  And the same goes for narrators trying to narrate their own stories: the reader won't learn anything, either.  We can't communicate reality, only an image of our relation to reality.

Related Writing Posts: 

1. Care to Revise Your Story? Introduction
2. Novel Workshop: Testing Your Idea

Other Related Posts:

1. Your Limited Perspective: A Woman Problem
2. The Angel of Progress
3. Waking and Dreaming, Thought and Sound
4. Fascination with Heavy Objects
5. Ecclesiastes, Simulacrum, Baudrillard, Disneyland 

Copyright ©2004-2006, ©2007 Joshua Suchman. All rights reserved.
Taboo Monkey Blue Blog: Writing on Writing