Village Explaining

Talking this way, I risk earning that most famous literary pejorative: "village explainer". The epithet applies more easily to Americans than it does to writers from other countries, which seems mysterious to me. Why isn't Gombrowicz a village explianer? How do Milosz and Kundera and Brodsky escape the title, when their non-fiction writing is no more acute than Pound's was and in most cases much less? Is it something national, something inherently cranky in the American non-fictive voice? And if so, should I really try to avoid it?

But a question like this really is nothing more than a placeholder for a larger one, isn't it? Why am I doing this? Why am I waking up at four o'clock in the morning and engraving my "thoughts" (more like moods or weather patterns) onto the unruled palm-sized electronic notecard that blogger hands me? What do I get out of this? Fame? But surely you realize that I might be writing all this down on the back of a beer coaster for all the people who will ever read it? My own patient passage through the Vale of Soul-Making? As if Keats would have written a line without the promise of someone, somewhere waiting for him on the other side...

Bloggers are the New Crusoes. You remember the story? If you do, you don't, since the real book happens in the gorgeous, green-green valley between Crusoe's arrival and when Friday shows up. Not that I don't like Friday: I do, especially after reading the French anthropologist/aspiring-vampire Michel Tournier's translation of him. But his arrival transforms Crusoe's redolent solitude into a society, which means conflicts, motives, and, eventually at least, plot. The Russian literary critic Viktor Shklovsky titled his book on plot in Tolstoy "The Energy of Delusion", which as I understand it is meant to equate the conviction required for story-making with the kind of whipped-up and blinkered myopia we might find in someone wearing a sandwich board. Shklovsky's own book is frustratingly plotless: a whirlpool of lines that seem to be less arranged against their margin than clinging to it, like iron filings on a magnet or arrows from St. Sebastian's side. This is frustrating at first - but the further you read in the book, the more you come to see that Shklovsky is in fact attempting his own kind of literary mimesis: mimicking the peripatetic and searching adventure of Tolstoy's drafts (hundreds of them on AK - entire rewritings even!) in his own investigation. The result is an unending digression on literary creation, a fractal fable:

"I'll repeat what's important for me: Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy said that he didn't know how to draw a circle; he had to close the line and then correct it.
He knew how to think by juxtaposing words, by awakening them, in a way.
When he wrote his major novels, he would begin with something plotted, i.e., something that was happening or had already happened, and sought the relationship between the incidental and the inevitable.
He studied the thoughts of a child and how cunning emerged at its first stages.
The so-called draft version is not an adaptation of a text to the norms, not sorting through gems, like jewelers do when making necklaces or crowns.
Drafts weigh the essence of events. The scenarios, which the hero of the work goes through, they should be called 'hypothetical circumstances.'
This is the analysis of how man was created, i.e., his sensation of the world, and how through the movements of scenarios, experimented and tested hundreds of times in fiction, the truth becomes clearer.
This work is like that of a captain who navigates by the stars and moon, using his chronometer to verify and make sure of their hypothetical place in the sky. The captain is testing the ship's course." (p. 134)

Shklovsky's dedication to the search ("The purpose of my search is art", he says) was so great that he scrapped the more recognizable generic forms ("The only genre that interests me is film itself" - Tarkovsky) for something ragged and messy-looking. His book is, at times, almost viscerally embarrassing. But failure or no, it is also something infinitely valuable: it is sincere. An outmoded and abused virtue these days, I know....but how striking! How amazing, to watch him flail and attempt and then finally hit on something that you know he simply could not have said in a 20-page letter to the academy. Why couldn't he have said it? Simple: because he couldn't have seen it. As he describes it being for Tolstoy, writing for Shklovsky is a sea-voyage - a discipline (or ecstacy) of perception, wherein the calcified generic modes must be stripped, Blake-style, from the organs of perception, so that the truth of the world (truth, which likes to hide) can be glimpsed and revealed.

Does this actually happen? I'm wondering. Whatever good news I have to bring, I'm bringing; but I'm wormy and skeptical, especially when it comes to the rhetoric of vision. Blogs, luckily, let you do this. You can backtrack and undermine, revising your own assertions as you go. What won't you get by doing this? Well, among other things, you will never write Anna Karenina. Make peace with that right now: stare yourself down in the mirror, sure in the knowledge that your beard will never dangle, nor your t-shirt stretch into the peasant blouse that you so sorely desire. Your eyes will go unhaunted by that revelation of ordinary life that is Levin and Kitty, or the romantic pyre of their dark, ridiculous shadows, Anna and Vronsky. Not for you.

I guess what I'm trying to figure out here (what a village-explainery sentence!) is: what am I writing? At the same time, I think I'm trying to forget that: forget "novel", forget "blogging", forget "Tolstoy". No wonder I feel the need to explain myself so much.

Fiction's Failure

I. Making Mistakes

The opposite of failure is success - but what's the opposite of a mistake? A success? And what is a success? The word belongs to that peculiar class of abstract English nouns we call "states", which you can travel into and out of without hassle or identification. But then you try to buy gas and the prices are different.

Mistakes, on the other hand, are local as furniture. They have no lexical antonym and are therefore free to roam through English unharassed. Their peculiar combination of flimsiness and power makes them interesting, unlike success - for success is the Velveeta cheese of human conditions: the same no matter where you slice it. All successful men are alike, to paraphrase Tolstoy. On the other hand, when a man tells us that he's made some mistakes, we want to know EXACTLY what they were.

"Everybody makes mistakes."

"Make one mistake and you're dead."

(Success may be something you achieve, but mistakes are made)

The most common uses of "mistake" imply recognition, which in turn point to two separate (-seeming) worldviews. Either 1) error is folded into life, which means success is a matter of overcoming one's errors, or 2) Success is achieved only through the strategic and near Herculian ability to avoid making mistakes.

"You had it all planned out - but you made one mistake" (sardonic, heavy-eyebrowed gangster-voice). In this sentence, as in the two quoted above, the sense of "downfall" is both heightened and strangely mitigated by the inherent domesticity of the "mistake" itself (which unpacks as something like "one little mistake"). The speaker is luxuriating, as choruses do, in the justice of the gods. The sentence creaks comfortably beneath him - for in the rumpus room of his thoughts, everything, even the juice stains on the carpet, contributes to a sense of ingenious inhabitation.

(and then isn't there also a sort of wonderful artistry about mistakes? Don't we appreciate them aesthetically - even when they're our own?)


II. Failure and Floating

To move into failure from this cozy realm is like being shot into deep space - for if mistakes are the most distinctive of nouns, then failure, I would argue, is the most nebulous. It's a "frozen verb": a linguistic/conceptual black hole ("frozen star" in Russian), whose location is fixed but whose axis pulses with mind-bending movement. Failure vibrates, like a fly on flypaper. It moves without moving. Next to the other "states" we occupy, it always seems to have been put into our box by mistake from some other puzzle.

Success is an endpoint, hence our dissatisfaction with its worldly version - for in achieving it, we inevitably discover that we have not achieved it. Being a failure on the other hand is like being stuck on one of the Snakes and Ladders snakes: you're not supposed to be there, but there's a luxuriant satisfaction in floating past the world's ankles with such impunity. You're moving. It's over, but it's not over - it is failure, which is similar to the pre-natal dream in that during it we feel both perfectly responsible and perfectly absolved. We are Jonah, delivered from the small whale of anxiety into the larger, more-predictable whale of God's will. This is the fall-as-rise of comedy - of Hrabal and Svevo and Flaubert and Tolstoy, among many others - which transfigures our inability to do what we want into precisely what God wanted all along.


III. The Mimic Plot

In fiction - from the hackneyed who-done-it to the lofty roman fleuve- the most persuasive mimesis of this transfiguration from mistake to failure to success is plot itself. What - you didn't see it coming? Well relax, and watch your anxiety transform alchemically into a faith that the confusing events of your life (which seemed so distinct at the time) really will, as James said, "hang together". Mistakes will turn out to be not just themselves, but part of some larger failure, which you couldn't see at the time you made them. Likewise this failure, so final-seeming when it fell, will turn out to be inside out.

This is why novels, as a genre, are so particularly powerful: not just because they contain mimeses (characters, settings, dialogue), but because they ARE mimeses. They're "graphs made up of graphs" as Guy Davenport puts it: collections of accurate particulars tilted against one another like dominos, so that the reader's attention might move through it Rube-Goldberg-style, losing - and yet somehow at the same time gaining - energy.

(So, when I hear people talk about difficult (read: "experimental") art pejoratively, I find myself strangely divided. On the one hand, I also hate art that lacks interest and attention. On the other hand, I feel that what these "traditionalists" are freqeuntly missing is the existence of this second-level mimesis. They want trees that look like trees: but the book itself looks like a tree)

A fictional plot, then, really is a sort of distilled failure: a strange-making, to use Shklovsky's phrase, which we live (..."in order to" wants to follow this somehow - but doesn't the Old Testament (that great book of plots) suggest the insignificance of a final clause? Order is in us, as we are in it. With a setup like that, there is no point in looking for a "point")

If the novel has a secret, particularly, it is how natural this plottedness is to it, and how, if we look back at the great novels of the past, we almost always find exactly what Sterne, Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Bolano say we're going to find. In saecula saeculorum, or as the KJB translates it, World without end. For how could we "succeed", in life or art? Likewise, how could a faithful mimesis fail to untie its own knots, no matter how convincingly it presented them? What would we think of its conscience?


IV. (close parenthesis)

(Finally, writing fiction, then, must be a matter both of being willing, and - MUCH more importantly - able to fail.

This is far more difficult than people realize)