How to read my stories

I am going to try to do something difficult, and that I know, in advance, I will fail to achieve completely. I feel that I must do it, though, because, if I don't, no one else will do it for me. In brief, I want to try to explain how to read -- or at least how to start to read -- my stories, and what I mean by them.

I call this post "How to read my stories" rather than "How I read my stories" because I want to make clear that my stories are intended to be read; I do not write them simply for myself. At the same time, "How to read my stories" sounds unavoidably prescriptive, but better prescriptive than nothing at all. Since I'm the only person who seems able to make head or tail of what I write, or feels any affection for it, I'd just like -- for the record -- to try to explain what I think I achieve, why I want to achieve it, and what the whole experience means to me.

What follows is not going to be precise; it is also going to flit from topic to topic. At the heart of my work there is an *extreme naivette*, and I, for one, have never found adequate critical language with which to engage with it at a programmatic level. As you might surmise, this is also very much my own authorial intention: my work is not intended to be *deduced*, to be transformed. It is intended to be touched. If I ever felt it could be "solved" by a simple translation of symbols, then it would forfeit its vivacity entirely.

I am going to begin with one story: Tallensbury. Tallensbury opens like this:

I was brought up in a small town called Tallensbury, a town distinguished by a street at one end of which stands a chestnut tree, and at the other end of which is a house with a rickety shed and a broken sundial. With this much to define it, I might be talking about any town, and perhaps the particular Tallensbury I remember no longer exists. But there are a thousand towns like Tallensbury, each of which can only be individualised by those who live within it, and only explained to others who have lived there too.

I spent a lot of time working with this paragraph. To this day, it remains my favourite opening to any story I have written. What specifically appeals to me is something hard to define, but it has to do, at root, with a sense of poise, and this requires a very particular kind of narrative voice. "I was brought up in a small town", for example, is very different from saying "I was born in a small town," (too factual; too much future history is presumed) or "I was raised in a small town" (the vaguely regional "raised" lacks the neutrality of "brought up"). Its closest equivalent would be "I used to live in a small town" (though that's too disjunctive, making it clear even now that one no longer *does* live there). If I dwell at length upon such minutiae, it is to make a serious point: I can't pretend that everything I write is crafted as carefully as it should be, but every sentence I write does involve me in decisions like these, and the majority of my subsequent revisions deal not with the facts of the story, but with moments of narrative imbalance, places where word order should be inverted, or where the rhythm of adjacent phrases seems not to fit, or some particular word isn't quite the right one, and so on.

The paragraph contains three sentences, and all three please me, particularly the last one, because they succeed in maintaining, to my mind, an exactly equal, level tone; they communicate neither too much nor too little, neither involve the reader too deeply, nor distance him too greatly. Tallensbury is inexorable, yet also indescribable; it can "only be individualised by those who live within it, and only explained to others who have lived there too." Yet, even as the narrative on the one hand refuses to say anything explicit, on the other one comprehends the universality of Tallensbury by a kind of gesture of faith. It speaks to those who already know, and this, in fact, mirrors other aspects of the larger story, in which a self-contained, self-constituting place is shown to exist, in the middle of nowhere in particular.

The second paragraph begins:

In the morning Tallensbury calls us to rub our eyes, to finish our drinks from the night before, to argue, to make up, to hang out the washing, at which time you see clearly the long, straight road over the low hills.

Adjectives, to me, are often just a more compact form of metaphor. When I say "long" and "straight" and "low" here, I deliberately choose simple, mundane words, precisely because I am trying to create a picture of something that is simple, mundane and, for both these reasons, essentially private. Metaphorically, though, the words are actually saying something decisive: "long" conveys something of the extent of the insularity pervading this place. If the road is long, then it's onerous. And it's "straight" -- what does this signify? It's straight because it's constrained, either because it constrains itself, or because circumstances constrain it; either way, it has no real choice about being straight, and being straight is scarcely something it can feel proud of. Finally, it is a road "over the low hills." What about them? There is nothing for such a road to reach - nothing to pit itself against, nothing by means of which it can celebrate any achievement in being the way it is. As a destiny, it remains a long, straight road -- a long, straight road both entering and exiting -- the same long, straight road that knows nothing of difference, and remains blissfully incapable of self-understanding. The road is both Tallensbury and the continuation of Tallensbury, the route through which Tallensbury enters itself, and the inevitable, unreflecting path by means of which it passes out of itself once again. Those within it, awaiting a destiny, can scarcely be blamed for missing it.

It isn't as if one can read all this into the story just yet, though. The sense of these words only becomes clear as they are repeated in the story's closing sentence, in which they finally reveal themselves a more than adequate commentary on all the events that run in between.

So far as the simplistic choice of adjectives goes, I also often choose metaphors which are deliberately inadequate in order, as it were, to *share with the reader* the act of reaching toward, to make real and sincere by placing meaning in jeopardy, by giving us no choice but to find meaning by faith, emotional truth, empathy with language. For example, in the story Good morning, I write:

Sometimes the voices are peppermint in their freshness, and you feel their brief warmth in condensation on a glass, as they crackle past the school gates; sometimes, again, they are drawn out from the early morning, like the clean rustling of silk against a sky – drawn out like cars passing softly in the snow. And sometimes they are no more than recollections from the night before that have slid a few inches from the roof, and now, as if to test themselves, heap up in their height and overhang the gutters.

Though one can perhaps imagine a silky pennant straining against the breeze, and the long-drawn hiss of winter cars passing along a slushy lane, each of these images is imprecise in the *wrong* way; it doesn't quite relate to its subject, so that the connection only holds if the reader makes the leap of association it demands -- the leap which brings him to this (in the preceding paragraph), that "everything is at the mercy of all things":

In the very teeth of winter, when your life drifts and billows about you, it is not unusual to hear voices from a foreign quarter as you make your way slowly in your suit toward the office through the ice – as you make your way slowly from the room in which you live across the frozen paving of the town – as you make your way slowly in your slowness, since everything is at the mercy of all things, and you must wrap your reasons fast about you.

Even metaphor, even meaning, slides among the phrases. Like the snow upon the roof, they seek to "test themselves" at the risk of self-obliteration -- in other words, at the risk of meaning nothing, and of not being understood.

Stories like The Father and How slowly evening comes base themselves upon long, extended metaphors running to twenty lines or more, and these, like the stories themselves, invariably meet with a dim reception. Yet the key thing to understand is that, for me, metaphor isn't really metaphor; in the wider sense, metaphor, like verbs and adjectives themselves, are only means to make associations, propelling thought and emotion toward different places. I think of all things, for that matter, it is the noun that I find most difficult to work with, the thing about which I have to be most picky. It's no accident you'll scarcely find a proper noun anywhere in my work, nor that, if you were to try to search for my stories by way of a search engine, there's almost nothing you could use, excepting phrases taken in isolation, to locate them. The world and the experience of language I am trying to create does not have to do with nouns, or rather, it needs nouns to be as quiet as possible, even silent, and certainly fluid. I'm not sure, indeed, that I ever really use a noun without being aware that I could as soon use another, and the narrative I find most barren and annoying is narrative that deals excessively with things at the expense of abstractions.

As if sensing the change, he started again, this time praising me for actual things that I had done and knew I had done. But, such was his genius, he still succeeded in belittling everything he discovered, rampaging after butterflies, always heading the wrong way, too fast or too slow, tiring both of us out, never bringing back anything substantial. As time passed, there seemed less and less to celebrate, and even the small achievements I cherished as absolutes started to stiffen and lose their shine as he repeated them again and again from different corners of the room, heaping them up one on top of the other, as if to subdue them with their own weight and make a mockery of them so that everything would be impossible. My triumphs were grey triumphs, I noted mirthlessly, my victories all of them empty, and even the tightly-wound handfuls of memory that governed them both and set them apart were like knots fraying at their edges, things to which it would be unwise to trust one’s weight, things on the point of collapsing outward with a sickening fall.

This paragraph, of course, is not *about* the father, or about the son. It is about the equal reality thought and materiality hold in a common place -- this story of a mind and of a room -- and how language can guide and propel itself by dint of little more than its own grip, its own prejudice, which draws certain words closer than others. And, as a reader, to move among all this, one needs to respond to language as it guides us in this way, as it rediscovers its somnambular flow, as it recovers the natural, unconstrained, elusive transitions that are its own. Indeed, it operates much like the following passage from Zalman's Daughter:

"Have you finished my boat yet?" she demanded. But I had not finished the boat; I had not even started on the boat. In lieu of it, there was the prototype, in defence of which I could only assert that it was a prototype, and I had made it. Nevertheless, occupying as it did some strange and inescapable state midway between finished and unbegun, it came as no surprise to either of us that my mother had contrived to lose it in her pocket - an innocent enough mistake, and an innocent enough fate to befall a well-intentioned but somehow permanently nascent idea.

“So you haven’t even begun; you’ve shot yourself in the foot at the starting pistol; you can’t even raise the conjecture to move from there to here,” she added automatically, as if she were searching around in the space that was left over, where idioms and meanings overlapped one another like a dark sky among the rain, and discarding everything she found. It was an innocent, propitious place she was combing over, however insolent and stricken it must have appeared to her, and I saw that her anger was in fact no different from her martyrdom; alike, they were a brooding, bitter search for finalities, infused with an excess of emotion in compensation for deficiency of faith.

Similarly, in Szalb:

I met his gaze. Nothing had changed in the room. Now he was standing up; he was standing by the window: "Does that mean nothing to you? Or not very much?”

"What am I supposed to do with her unhappiness?" I contested.

"You are supposed to wear it," he answered shortly.

Then I realised that, all the along the seam of the sentence, there were little hooks upon which my own life had caught itself, and threatened to unwind. For an instant, with a glittering hiss, the insides of my feelings flash by; who knows with what unique destiny they were created? Who knows when their rightful time might come? Who knows how we can ever reach the desire that drives us onward - the yearning to be here, though it's impossible, though everything's impossible, and both because and in despite of this?

Why write this way? Well, because: this is what I can do with language. And, if I can do it, and no one else seems to care to, then I owe language an obligation to do it as best I can. I must write with such tools as I have, and I don't see the benefit of saying anything which has been reliably and better said before. The best I can do is to try to push the envelope of language as close as I can to fragmentation, because it is only in that place that innovation and therefore a future subsists. In brief, if I wrote in a conventional way, what would be the point of my writing? If I have nothing new to say, no new images, no new ways of creating an emotion or understanding by means of doing something new, improbable and yet somehow dextrous with language, then there is no point in my writing at all.

A question I sometimes ask myself: where did all this *come from*? After all, in the preceding paragraphs it seems that I have views about writing, perhaps even clear views, though at no point have I really tried to make them explicit. Something I recognise is that my stories must retain an innocence, a lack of self-regard that means they would be failures if they tried to make sense of themselves. For the same reason, as you might well imagine, the most tedious writing in the world to me is anything "metafictive." I find self-consciousness in a text not only ugly but essentially pedestrian; there is nothing "clever" about it, and from an emotional point of view, it gives me no sensation whatsoever; it's like turning Hamlet into Hangman. For the same reason, dialogue of almost all kinds is to me like so much black ink spilt over the page, and that threatens to blot out everything else.

The only dialogue I find acceptable is dialogue that is really narrative, dialogue in which the speaker is scarcely distinct from his context, or from the abstract idea of speaking. I suspect this is because I feel that speech disrupts narrative; conversation therefore is impossible in a narrative text since it is a perpetual interruption both of argument and language. For continuity of register, the speaker must be at one with the text that includes him. For example, I shall always feel an emotional attachment to the following lines from "Zalman's Daughter":

I passed the library, only to find Christiana again, sitting dolefully on the wet steps, still in her nightgown, and I suddenly wanted to gather her up forever and hold her tight against me, like a sharp little word wrapped up in a shawl. Under her arm she had a package of books to return, and, sitting down silently beside her, I felt an animal anguish for the leagues I hadn't climbed up, for the continents I hadn't crossed with her.

"Let's talk. Are you hurt? Are you hurt? Let's talk," she kept repeating. "Your heart cries," she added under her breath. It made so little sense, I thought she was talking about an umbrella, and so we started to argue about something, and she turned her face away and dipped the head of her parasol in the inky puddle at our feet.

The circularity of Christiana's speech is at one with the hypnagogic paragraphs preceeding it, the image of a "sharp little word wrapped up in a shawl", the impossible idea of "climbing up" the "leagues", the "animal anguish" which, in its elemental primacy, renders comprehensible yet scarcely more bearable that involuntary confession: "Your heart *cries*."

I think perhaps most trenchantly where it all came from is this: I do not have stories to tell. I do not see things in my mind; I do not have visions of the future. I cannot command a great canvas, and, at heart, I would much rather not write at all. However, for psychological reasons I daresay I shall never understand, I feel a great dissatisfaction with anything material I do, and feel instead that my only "true" life is the life of expression by way of language. The complication, remember, is that my own life bores me; it is not a suitable subject for a story, and it never could be a suitable subject. This puts me, clearly, in a very awkward position, and it has taken me nearly fifteen years finally to achieve a voice that satisfies me -- which means, as much as anything, coming to an understanding of the things I will *not* say or even try to say. Essentially, I have drawn together a small subset of language, a collection of particular images, a restricted, largely symbolic vocabulary, particularly so far as nouns go. And my "project" is to work within this small and close-knit set of images, allowing language free play so far as I can provoke it, so that it reaches places, thoughts and feelings that have not been reached before.

On the one hand, you might view my approach as "escapist", but, on the other, I see it actually as the only real allegiance I can bear to myself, and thus the most "authentic" way that I can live. Because nothing is really denied by my particular choice of subject, narrative method, or anything else. Rather, what is ordinarily explicit becomes implicit, and vice versa; my narrative, of course, is about my own feelings and hopes, because if it failed to answer sympathetically to me at that level, I would doubt the integrity of what I wrote. My writing is a way to write, given a particular problem -- the problem I've imposed upon it. And, as I've said, it's proved a great restriction, something it's taken it a long, long while to find a way about, and even this escape it's made now was never certain.

So I see how hard it is for those coming to my work who do not know all this, who don't appreciate that what remains is what has survived by dint of the suppression and refinement of other things. And I see, also, that while I can accord an "intellectual" explanation like this, I cannot engage a reader psychologically and force that same reader through those fifteen years in order to attest to the truth of what I say. My work instead is something of singularity, blinking in the sunlight, and you must take it on trust, even as I myself take everything on trust. For if one has no need to trust the language before one, then that language can never be true to us. And in secular times, language is our best and only trustworthy guide.