The Art of Fiction, page 22
At that instant some person tried the latch of the door. I hastened to prevent an intrusion, and then immediately returned to my dying antagonist. But what human language can adequately portray that astonishment, that horror which possessed me at the spectacle then presented to view? The brief moment in which I averted my eyes had been sufficient to produce, apparently, a material change in the arrangements at the upper or farther end of the room. A large mirror, – so at first it seemed to me in my confusion – now stood where none had been perceptible before; and, as I stepped up to it in extremity of terror, mine own image, but with features all pale and dabbled in blood, advanced to meet me with a feeble and tottering gait.
Thus it appeared, I say, but was not. It was my antagonist – it was Wilson, who then stood before me in the agonies of his dissolution. His mask and cloak lay, where he had thrown them, upon the floor. Not a thread in all his raiment – not a line in all the marked and singular lineaments of his face which was not, even in the most absolute identity, mine own!
EDGAR ALLAN POE “William Wilson” (1839)
THE FRENCH (originally Bulgarian) structuralist critic Tzvetan Todorov has proposed that tales of the supernatural divide into three categories: the marvellous, in which no rational explanation of the supernatural phenomena is possible; the uncanny, in which it is; and the fantastic, in which the narrative hesitates undecidably between a natural and a supernatural explanation.
An example of the fantastic in this sense is Henry James’s famous ghost story The Turn of the Screw. A young woman is appointed governess to two young orphaned children in an isolated country house, and sees figures who apparently resemble a former governess and the villainous manservant who seduced her, both now dead. She is convinced that these evil spirits have a hold over the young children in her care, from which she seeks to free them. In the climax she struggles with the male ghost for the possession of Miles’s soul, and the boy dies: “his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.” The story (which is narrated by the governess) can be, and has been, read in two different ways, corresponding to Todorov’s “marvellous” and “uncanny”: either the ghosts are “real”, and the governess is involved in a heroic struggle against supernatural evil, or they are projections of her own neuroses and sexual hang-ups, with which she frightens the little boy in her charge literally to death. Critics have vainly tried to prove the correctness of one or other of these readings. The point of the story is that everything in it is capable of a double interpretation, thus rendering it impervious to the reader’s scepticism.
Todorov’s typology is a useful provocation to thought on the subject, though his nomenclature (le merveilleux, l’étrange, le fantastique) is confusing when translated into English, in which “the fantastic” is usually in unambiguous opposition to “the real”, and “the uncanny” seems a more appropriate term with which to characterize a story like The Turn of the Screw. One can also quibble about its application. Todorov himself is obliged to concede that there are borderline works which must be categorized as “fantastic-uncanny” or “fantastic-marvellous”. Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson” is such a work. Though Todorov reads it as an allegory or parable of an uneasy conscience, therefore “uncanny” in his own terms, it contains that element of ambiguity which he sees as essential to the fantastic.
“William Wilson” is a Doppelgänger story. The eponymous narrator, who admits his own depravity at the outset, describes his first boarding-school as a quaint old building in which “it was difficult, at any given time, to say with certainty upon which of its two stories one happened to be” (the pun is surely intended). There he had a rival who bore the same name, was admitted to the school on the same day, had the same birthday, and bore a close physical resemblance to the narrator, which he exploited by satirically mimicking the latter’s behaviour. The only respect in which this double differs from the narrator is in being unable to speak above a whisper.
Wilson graduates to Eton, and then Oxford, plunging deeper and deeper into dissipation. Whenever he commits some particularly heinous act, a man invariably turns up dressed in identical clothes, concealing his face, but hissing “William Wilson” in an unmistakable whisper. Exposed by his double for cheating at cards, Wilson flees abroad, but everywhere he is pursued by the Doppelgänger. “Again and again, in secret communion with my own spirit, I would demand the questions ‘Who is he? – whence came he? – and what are his objects?’” In Venice, Wilson is just about to keep an adulterous assignation when he feels “a light hand placed upon my shoulder, and that ever-remembered, low, damnable whisper within my ear.” Beside himself with rage, Wilson attacks his tormentor with his sword.
Obviously one can explain the double as Wilson’s hallucinatory externalization of his own conscience or better self, and there are several clues to this effect in the text. For example, Wilson says that his schoolboy double had a “moral sense … far keener than my own,” and nobody but himself seems to be struck by the physical resemblance between them. But the story would not have its haunting and suggestive power if it did not invest the uncanny phenomenon with a credible concreteness. The climax of the novel is particularly artful in its ambiguous reference to the mirror. From a rational standpoint, we might hypothesize that, in a delirium of guilt and self-hatred, Wilson has mistaken his own mirror-image for his double, attacked it and mutilated himself in the process; but from Wilson’s point of view it seems that the reverse has happened – what he at first takes to be a reflection of himself turns out to be the bleeding, dying figure of his double.
Classic tales of the uncanny invariably use “I” narrators, and imitate documentary forms of discourse like confessions, letters and depositions to make the events more credible. (Compare Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.) And these narrators tend to write in a conventionally “literary” style which in another context one might find tiresomely cliché-ridden: for example, “wild excitement”, “power of a multitude”, “sheer strength”, “brute ferocity” in the first paragraph of this extract. The whole Gothic-horror tradition to which Poe belongs, and to which he gave a powerful impetus, is replete with good-bad writing of this kind. The predictability of the rhetoric, its very lack of originality, guarantees the reliability of the narrator and makes his uncanny experience more believable.
48 Narrative Structure
THE HAND
I SMACKED MY little boy. My anger was powerful. Like justice. Then I discovered no feeling in the hand. I said, “Listen, I want to explain the complexities to you.” I spoke with seriousness and care, particularly of fathers. He asked, when I finished, if I wanted him to forgive me. I said yes. He said no. Like trumps.
ALL RIGHT
“I don’t mind variations,” she said, “but this feels wrong.” I said, “It feels all right to me.” She said, “To you, wrong is right.” I said, “I didn’t say right, I said all right.” “Big difference,” she said. I said, “Yes, I’m critical. My mind never stops. To me almost everything is always wrong. My standard is pleasure. To me, this is all right.” She said, “To me it stinks.” I said, “What do you like?” She said, “Like I don’t like. I’m not interested in being superior to my sensations. I won’t live long enough for all right.”
MA
I said, “Ma, do you know what happened?” She said, “Oh, my God.”
LEONARD MICHAELS I Would Have Saved Them
If I Could (1975)
THE STRUCTURE of a narrative is like the framework of girders that holds up a modern high-rise building: you can’t see it, but it determines the edifice’s shape and character. The effects of a novel’s structure, however, are experienced not in space but over time – often quite a long time. Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, for instance, which Coleridge thought had one of the three greatest plots in literature (the other two were both plays, Oedipus Rex and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist), runs to nearly 900 pages in the Penguin edition. As previously noted (Section 36) it has 198 Chapters, divided into eighteen Books, the first six of which are set in the country, the next six on the road, and the final six in London. Exactly in the middle of the novel most of the major characters pass through the same inn, but without meeting in combinations which would bring the story to a premature conclusion. The novel is packed with surprises, enigmas and suspense, and ends with a classic Reversal and Discovery.
It is impossible to illustrate the operation of such a complex plot with a short quotation, but the work of the American writer Leonard Michaels, who writes some of the shortest stories I know, allows us to examine the process in microcosm. I have cheated a little in as much as the pieces reproduced here were not designed to stand entirely alone, but belong to a cluster of short narratives, collectively entitled “Eating Out”, some of which are interrelated by being concerned with the same character or characters. “Ma”, for instance, is one of a series of dialogue-stories about the narrator and his mother. The whole sequence amounts to more than the sum of its parts. Nevertheless, each part is a self-contained narrative, with its own title. Even out of context the meaning of “Ma” is clear enough: the Jewish mother always expects the worst. Perhaps this text hovers on the boundary between the story and the joke. But there is no generic ambiguity about “The Hand”, which conforms to the classic notion of narrative unity. It has a beginning, a middle and an end as defined by Aristotle: a beginning is what requires nothing to precede it, an end is what requires nothing to follow it, and a middle needs something both before and after it.
The beginning of “The Hand” consists of its first three sentences, describing the narrator’s punishment of his son. We do not need to know what behaviour has provoked this act. The first sentence, “I smacked my little boy” establishes a familiar domestic context. The emphasis is all on the narrator’s emotions. “My anger was powerful. Like justice.” The verbless sentence is a kind of afterthought, justifying the relief of tension, the exercise of power.
The middle of the story describes the waning of the narrator’s confidence in his own righteousness, and his attempt to justify his behaviour to his son. First there is a kind of psychosomatic symptom: “Then I discovered no feeling in the hand.” The hand is both a synecdoche and a metaphor for the “unfeeling” parent. “I said, ‘Listen, I want to explain the complexities to you.’” Structurally, the whole story turns on the axis of this line, the only direct speech in it. Formally it favours the narrator, because direct speech always conveys a stronger sense of the speaker’s presence than reported speech. But the use of the adult word, “complexities”, to a little boy gives the game away. In spite of his professed anxiety to communicate with his son (“I spoke with seriousness and care, particularly of fathers”) the narrator is wrestling with his own conscience.
The ending contains a neat double reversal. First, the little boy proves to have a penetrating insight into his father’s state of mind: “He asked me, when I finished, if I wanted him to forgive me.” Secondly the normal power relations between father and son are reversed: “I said yes. He said no.” The symmetry of these sentences echoes the symmetry of the plot. The narrator’s “Like trumps” ruefully acknowledges defeat.
Plot has been defined by a modern disciple of Aristotle (R. S. Crane) as “a completed process of change”. A good deal of modern fiction has, however, avoided the kind of closure implied in the word “completed” and has focused on states of being in which change is minimal. “All Right” is a case in point. It has a much more elusive narrative structure than “The Hand” – less obvious, less easy to follow, the divisions between beginning, middle, and end less certain. It uses techniques I discussed earlier under the headings of “Staying on the Surface” and “Implication”, consisting almost entirely of dialogue, and withholding information about the characters’ private thoughts and motives. We infer that the couple are engaged in some unconventional sexual act, but it is impossible and unnecessary to know what exactly it is. The beginning perhaps consists of the woman’s statement of her uneasiness; the middle of the narrator’s self-justification and the woman’s reiteration of her displeasure (“To me it stinks”); and the ending of her refusal to play the game of sexual dilettantism. But the story lacks the reassuring movement of “The Hand” towards the narrator’s moment of truth. It is not clear why he is telling us this story, for he reports the woman’s harsh strictures on him without comment. Whereas “The Hand” is instantly comprehensible, we have to re-read “All Right” several times to make sense of it, sounding the dialogue in our heads. (“She said, ‘Like I don’t like … I won’t live long enough for all right.’”) The text seems to be about deadlock rather than discovery, and its unity owes more to its internal verbal echoes, especially of the word “right” highlighted in the title, than to its narrative structure. In that respect it offers itself as a kind of prose poem – either that, or a tantalizing fragment of some longer story.
49 Aporia
WHERE NOW? WHO now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on. Can it be that one day, off it goes on, that one day I simply stayed in, in where, instead of going out, in the old way, out to spend day and night as far away as possible, it wasn’t far. Perhaps that is how it began. You think you are simply resting, the better to act when the time comes, or for no reason, and you soon find yourself powerless ever to do anything again. No matter how it happened. It, say it, not knowing what. Perhaps I simply assented at last to an old thing. But I did nothing. I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me. These few general remarks to begin with. What am I to do, what shall I do, what should I do, in my situation, how proceed? By aporia pure and simple? Or by affirmations and negations invalidated as uttered, or sooner or later? Generally speaking. There must be other shifts. Otherwise it would be quite hopeless. But it is quite hopeless. I should mention before going any further, any further on, that I say aporia without knowing what it means.
SAMUEL BECKETT The Unnamable (1959)
APORIA is a Greek word meaning “difficulty, being at a loss”, literally, “a pathless path”, a track that gives out. In classical rhetoric it denotes real or pretended doubt about an issue, uncertainty as to how to proceed in a discourse. Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” soliloquy is perhaps the best-known example in our literature. In fiction, especially in texts that are framed by a storytelling situation, aporia is a favourite device of narrators to arouse curiosity in their audience, or to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the story they are telling. It is often combined with another figure of rhetoric, “aposiopesis”, the incomplete sentence or unfinished utterance, usually indicated on the page by a trail of dots … In Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, for instance, Marlow frequently breaks off his narrative in this way:
“It seems to me that I am trying to tell you a dream – making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation, that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt, that notion of being captured by the incredible which is of the very essence of dreams …”
He was silent for a while.
“… No it is impossible; it is impossible to convey the life-sensation of any given epoch of one’s existence – that which makes its truth, its meaning – its subtle and penetrating essence. It is impossible. We live, as we dream – alone…”
In metafictional narratives like “Lost in the Funhouse” or The French Lieutenant’s Woman aporia becomes a structural principal, as the authorial narrator wrestles with the insoluble problems of adequately representing life in art, or confesses his own hesitation about how to dispose of his fictional characters. In Chapter 55 of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, for instance, when Charles, having discovered that Sarah has disappeared from the hotel in Exeter, is travelling back to London to begin his search for her, the authorial narrator intrudes into the narrative as a rudely staring stranger in Charles’s railway compartment:
Now the question I am asking, as I stare at Charles, is … what the devil am I going to do with you? I have already thought of ending Charles’s career here and now; of leaving him for eternity on his way to London. But the conventions of Victorian fiction allow, allowed no place for the open, the inconclusive ending; and I preached earlier of the freedom characters must be given. My problem is simple – what Charles wants is clear? It is indeed. But what the protagonist wants is not so clear; and I am not at all sure where she is at the moment.
In the fiction of Samuel Beckett, especially his later work, aporia is endemic. The Unnamable (originally published in French, as L’In-nommable, in 1952) is a stream-of-consciousness novel, but not like Joyce’s Ulysses, where the sights, sounds, smells and human bustle of Dublin are evoked for us, in vivid specificity, through the sense-impressions, thoughts and memories of the chief characters. All we have is a narrative voice talking to itself, or transcribing its own thoughts as they occur, longing for extinction and silence, but condemned to go on narrating, though it has no story worth telling, and is certain of nothing, not even of its own position in space and time.
The anonymous narrator is sitting in some vague, murky space, whose limits he can neither see nor touch, while dimly perceived figures, some of whom seem to be characters from Beckett’s previous novels, move round him – or could it be that he is moving round them? He knows his eyes are open “because of the tears that fall from them unceasingly.” Where is he? It could be hell. It could be senility. It could be the mind of a writer who has to go on writing though he has nothing to say, because there is nothing worth saying any longer about the human condition. Or are all these states essentially one and the same? The Unnamable seems to fit Roland Barthes’ description of “zero degree writing”, in which “literature is vanquished, the problematics of mankind is uncovered and presented without elaboration, the writer becomes irretrievably honest.”
