MIRAMARE

Coffeehouses, cobblestones, phlegm. “Hostler!” Pronounced ‘ostler. Inside it’s smoke, various smoke, high and low, smoke itself seemingly the only source of light, illuminating dimly the faces of the men, men, men, each with his own mug the landlord wipes once with a rag and hangs up afterward on its own wooden peg when that day or night of coffee has come to an end. But the talk, talk, talk never seems to cease. Wigs pushed back, serious lined faces, barks of laughter, harsh coughing. Pipe smoke, cigar smoke, wood smoke, coal smoke, wet heavy air on the brinks of the doors and windows. Outside it’s London, inside too. From the corner nearest the fire where the air is paradoxically clearest, a hush is spreading after a great cough and hawk into the coals. Sizzle, silence: the great man is speaking. We will leave it to others to record what he said, though we might easily conjecture his beginning with Sir. The word Sir in small capitals enameled on the surface of this century, our confidence in its confidence, though the colonies will be lost, though Enlightenment is a half-despised import from the north, from the pens of Scots with their accents drilled out of ‘em. In this room soaked with sawdust and coffee grounds it’s voice alone that carries the day, that bears sentences stately and majestic from the great man’s lips into history’s ears. And all around him—the heavy face, the hands gesticulating inward, as though gathering his listeners to his ample bosom—shines the light of smoke, like a printer’s devil bearing buckets of ink, bearing the great man and those who surround him into memory. We can only imagine the grain and timbre of that voice, imagine the pen swifting across a curling page of foolscap as what was only ever intended to be conversation, table-talk, flummery turns into history and literature under the Author’s monomaniacal eye. And yet the great man believes with the same certainty he has in God in His Heaven that the Author’s eye, his pen, are there to catch each pearl from his lips, and that listeners distant in space and time bend their eyes to that trace, that voice. The hands are convulsive and strange, they shape the air. The bellows revives the fire, the voice touches its listeners, out in the damp dark a blindered horse snorts and champs. Not too far off the great black bell of St. Paul’s hovers over the city like another listener. The great man falters, harrumphs, stops. He fixes me with the white of his eye. Sir, you have only two subjects, yourself and me. I am sick of both. But that’s not how it happened, but that’s how my pride rises in me and sinks, in shirtsleeves of a morning, coalsmoke weakening the sun, pride like blood in my veins and ink for my pen, a heaviness blunting its tip, forming a blot on the page. Toss it aside, choose another, well-stripped, reaching up for a new sheet of paper, throwing my whole upper body across it, writing, writing his greatness, my abasement, our mutual life, by which we strike like some eight-limbed monstrosity out of old books at fame. The insult tingling in my limbs. I write it all down.

The semester has called a halt, or rather a crawl, to all activities not related to teaching or caring for my family. The page count of the novel remains stalled where it was in late August. But I can’t shake a sense of momentum in spite of this, a sense that this period of not-writing is pregnant with writing to come that will be richer for the pause.

When I think about the work in progress - when I contemplate the paths of the characters, or reflect on the inchoate personal investments that are manifesting in the plot, or wrestle with specific problems such as the novel’s frame inside a kind of film (is it necessary? what does it add?) - I am inside the pleasure of narrative, of having a second world in which to perform mental ballet or to survey or to float in. This is different from the pleasure of writing, which for me always centers in the shaping and unfurling of lines (in poems) and sentences (in prose). It’s the sense of having a secret life, a double life, inevitably a mirror which I trust (and perhaps fear) will ultimately dump me out again into the desert of the real.

I’m thinking here of the travelers in the portal into John Malkovich’s mind, or perhaps I should say his being, in Being John Malkovich; how after their prescribed period of fifteen minutes inhabitation of the actor’s consciousness visitors are unceremoniously dumped onto the edge of the New Jersey Turnpike.

The single advantage of the Turnpike being that it’s a reasonably quick way of getting somewhere. And obviously, not writing, I’m getting nowhere, a tourist in my own half-created fictional world, collecting snapshots I can show only to myself. Yet this nowhere is a pleasant place to be. And tolerance for not writing has become a necessary generosity, given the realities of teaching and family life. I trust, ultimately, that there is no nowhere. We are always somewhere and in history. Forward progress happens until the moment of abandonment that we call failure or completion.

Hey you wild and crazy guys!

rangelives asked: Perhaps this applies more to shorter works, but do you ever find that the creation of narrative becomes a sort of contrivance rather than something real and necessary? And if so, how do you combat this tendency?

Traditional literary fiction subordinates narrative, or at least plot, to character, whereas genre fiction works in the other direction. But I come from poetry, where language and music are king, and these other elements take a back seat.

Coming from poetry has inculcated me with a healthy suspicion of narrative and character - has fed my sense that these elements bestride the narrow world of literature like a colossus, leaving language and linguistic ideation to find themselves dishonorable graves. I’ve adopted two perhaps incompatible strategies to combat this in the novel I’m writing:

1. Contriving out in the open. This metafictional maneuver takes the form of a narrator who calls attention to the point of focalization of the story - a half-sinister, half-goofy character named Frank - as being just that, a kind of cartoon, the minimally necessary frame whose wanderings determine the unfolding of story. A lot of the motivation for this stems from my preoccupation with film and video as being the narrative arts par excellence in our age; it seems to me that they have “realism” sewn up, which ought to free fiction to pursue other aims. At the same time, the kind of “film” that my novel pretends to be is deliberately stylized, artsy, and pretentious - the sort of film that aspires to literature. So the tension between these two narrative modes is partly what the novel is about.
2. If the above is the framework that gave me permission to write a novel, and which may ultimately have to be abandoned, the second technique is more in the book’s DNA, and mine, and this is simply the transference of what I can only call “flow,” the essential forward movement that characterizes narration (which apparently has etymological roots in the Greek gno, to know) from the level of plot and character to the level of the sentence. That is, poem like, each sentence is its own pleasurable unfolding that inspires the next sentence. Plot and character are there - in fact, they are so much more there than I expected that the flow-orientation I speak of might be invisible to most readers - but this was the only way I could set about a task of this magnitude: to write it as if it were a poem, associatively, but on the level of the sentence and eventually the paragraph (whereas my poems depend much more heavily on word and phrase association).

We’ll see if this dual framework is ultimately supportable. I sometimes think what I need is a more overt contrivance (just another word for “form,” really) or constraint, Oulipo-style, to provide an appropriately astringent counterpoint to the prose’s lushness. Without that, the writing has a tendency toward a more traditional sort of container, character, or more specifically voice. There are multiple narrators in the novel whose voices I find compelling and it may be that they are sufficient to bear the novel toward readers without all that folderol. But again, it’s their narration - their voices, if you like - that compel me, not their “characters” per se - and that points back toward the mode I emerged from and will return to, the lyric poem.