Must the Great Novel be large, sprawling, frantic, and a bit of a mess?

No, I didn't disappear under a pile of fennel, but of work...which is like fennel, in that it is tough and large and sometimes hard to cut through, but very good roasted.

In addition, I have been racing to finish Roberto Bolaño's 2666, because I took it out of the library, and although I can renew it for another three weeks, there's a certain shame in that, a certain failure, and so I read and read most of last weekend, instead of working on my own stuff. OK, so I'm still not quite done. And I don't want to be done. This is a book that I'm going to miss when it's over, even though a great deal of it is concerned with war and murder, especially the mass murders of women in Ciudad Juárez, but also of Jews in World War II. In fact there is, at one point, an almost relentless cataloging of murders, a kind of theme with variations, that goes on for hundreds of pages, while various police officers, politicians, and reporters weave in and out, trying and failing to understand, and sometimes disappearing themselves. Yet, these depictions of atrocities never feel exploitative or sentimentalized; as a reader I felt a tremendous weight of confusion and sorrow, which, oddly, made me unable to put the book down.

The preface and afterword explain that 2666 was Bolaño's last work; he wrote it while becoming increasingly ill, and he knew he was dying as he was finishing it. This no doubt added a certain urgency to the prose, perhaps a certain wildness and willingness to plunge into depths that the rest of us either fear too much, or don't know. In addition there is a raggedness and repetitiveness to some sections, which Bolaño might have edited out, had he been given more time. Then again, his other work suggests polish and brevity were not his concerns. And in 2666, hearing of a friend's preference for "short, neatly shaped novels,"* one of the characters muses:

Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

I do think this novel is that other kind, imperfect and torrential. In my opinion, it's right up there with The Brothers Karamazov and Moby-Dick. It has the same vast scope, the same existential cri de coeur at its center, the same rage to comprehend--to encompass and understand--the entire range of human experience. Interestingly, the novel is not much concerned with God or religion, at least not overtly. Literature seems to replace God as a transcendent, unifying principle. Now, normally I don't approve of novels whose theme is writing (and whose main characters are writers), because they suggest that the author simply can't imagine people with professions unlike his own--which is a blatant failure of the writer's task. However, in this case, writing is the ultimate human quest for answers. The writer, as Bolaño has made clear in any number of works, is a detective. He is not, if he's doing it right, some kind of cloistered, disengaged commentator, but a seeker of truth, a religious pilgrim, outlaw, and professional wrestler rolled into one.

But is it true that an authentically great novel must be of this type--big, messy, overtly trying and ultimately failing to embrace everything? My own preference is, in fact, for such novels, though I have never attempted one myself (as yet). Still, this might just be a personal preference. Or is there a reason that the beautifully crafted, smaller "gem" of a book really does fall short of greatness? Does the perfection of craft represent a failure of intellectual or emotional ambition? Should the writer always bite off more than she can chew, or do battle with monsters she can never hope to catch or tame?

*I am quoting from the Note to the First Edition by Ignacio Echevarría.

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Instead of fiction, fennel

Not really feeling the literary life today; not sure why, but allow me to compensate by talking about fennel! It's awesome! Yeah, that stuff that grows in huge clumps along the freeway here in Northern California is just the best thing ever, roasted or sauteed. Nor does one need to park precariously on the shoulder and start hacking away at those bushes. Turns out they sell it at the grocery store, minus the coating of car exhaust (one hopes).

My fennel feeling started with this recipe from Bryant Terry's The Inspired Vegan* for Savory Grits with Sauteed Broad Beans, Roasted Fennel, and Thyme. It's vegan, and it's easy, and you should definitely make it either before or after you buy the book.**

So I used the bulbs for that, but hung onto the stalks and fronds, not sure what I was going to do with them, until just now. I just chopped up the stalks and fronds, and sauteed them with some garlic, walnuts, salt, and pepper, and served over penne pasta for a quick and delicious lunch.

No photos, because I'm a lousy food stylist.

*a much-loved holiday gift from Amy and Doug!
**the only part that might slow you down is that to make the creamy grits properly, you have to soak raw cashews overnight before pureeing them. But they're actually delicious in their own right, for smoothies and other uses, and well worth making. And if you don't remember to make these ahead of time, heck, just make polenta with some vegan margarine, even though Terry seems to frown on this...



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An adverb of note

From time to time I like to say something nice about adverbs. Stephen King has said the road to hell is paved with them, and no one knows the way to perdition better than King. And it's true that writers often employ adverbs for the sole purpose of shoring up weak adjectives or verbs--at which task they are destined to fail every time. However, the rare, weird, unexpected and yet perfectly fitting adverb is cause for celebration.

Today's example comes from Roberto Bolaño's 2666:

Then came an assembly of Germanists in Berlin, a twentieth-century German literature congress in Stuttgart, a symposium on German literature in Hamburg, and a conference on the future of German literature in Mainz. Norton, Morini, Pelletier, and Espinoza attended the Berlin assembly, but for one reason or another all four of them were able to meet only once, at breakfast, where they were surrounded by other Germanists fighting doggedly over the butter and jam.

I absolutely love the "doggedly" there. Of course, I don't know what word was used in the original Spanish, or even if the sentence was constructed in the same way: credit for the adverb must be shared between Bolaño and his translator, Natasha Wimmer. The word just gives the sentence an additional little twist, like fine-tuning a guitar string, that nudges the whole scene into sublimity.

The test of an adverb's necessity is whether the sentence would be the same or stronger without it, and/or if you can find a verb (or, sometimes, adjective) that incorporates the adverb, and becomes more powerful for having consumed it. The image of Germanists "fighting over butter and jam" would still be kind of funny and recognizable. Perhaps "squabbling" or "skirmishing" could be substituted for "fighting," which is not an especially vivid word in itself. But I can't think of a better way to convey the ritualized, determined, petty, hilarious, and hopeless nature of the fight depicted here than with "doggedly." The word gets a boost from the previous sentence, which reflects the relentless march of conferences at which the fight is played out over and over.

But adverbs are the Bigfoot (Bigfeet?) of grammar. They should appear rarely, and be rare and weird themselves. Spotting one should be memorable, and something to tell your friends or blog about.

A toned-down rant on education, with bonus crackpot theory

So this is very cool.

It's TED Curator Chris Anderson's animated talk, "Questions No One Knows the Answers To." Are kids everywhere watching this? And adults as well? I hope so.

As I have mentioned, I went to an excellent public school and had a presumably excellent science education therein. Yet never, not once, did it dawn on me that the purpose of this education was to be able to answer questions that were as yet unanswered. In doing countless experiments that turned out either right (yay, you got the blue foam!) or wrong (you idiot, you made black sludge!), and taking lots of multiple-choice tests, I was given to understand that science was about confirming what was already known. The black sludge was simply an error, not a result of processes that were just as real, and just as interesting in their own way, as those that made the foam. Science was proving you could follow the directions.

I can think of a number of reasons I got this message. One is that I was an extraordinarily rule-oriented child (I am only a little less so as an adult). After all, I also didn't get that art was about "expressing yourself," so much as properly rendering what you saw in front of you. So I may have simply missed the part about how we were learning scientific techniques through these repetitive experiments, so that we could later use them to make new discoveries. It may also be that my own teachers either didn't know or didn't think it important that science was about discovery. Their emphasis on mastery of the known might have reflected their own experiences and philosophies.

Or there may have been an even larger purpose behind this kind of teaching. The system cannot function if everyone in it is constantly innovating. Nothing would get done. In truth, we need people--lots of people--to implement known processes and principles. Maybe that's what this education was about: because most people will (by choice? by necessity? whose choice? whose necessity?) be implementers rather than visionaries, they must be trained as such.

Was there such a governing philosophy behind education? Is there one now? All the standardized testing going on now suggests that the answer to the second question is yes. Even if that is not the stated purpose of the testing, it will assuredly be a pronounced effect. Is that intentional on some deep, unacknowledged level? Or am I just being paranoid, or unrealistic? Should I just be grateful for the conscientious training of drones? I'm one, also, most of the time.

Freaks and Geeks and mining your childhood

We just watched Episode Fifteen of the eighteen total episodes of Freaks and Geeks. As we near the end, it's all starting to seem darker and sadder, because we know there will never be any more episodes, ever, and also because the later episodes explore darker themes (addiction, accidental pet death, accidental/deliberate human almost-death).

Still, it's a beautiful show, possibly the best TV show ever made. And one reason for that is mentioned in one of the commentaries. For months before they actually wrote the scripts, the writers sat in a room and dredged up all their most painful/embarrassing/astonishing high school experiences and shared them with each other. They then used these in the scripts, as they actually happened, or seemed to have happened in memory.

Now, sitting in a room and trading high school horror stories sounds like something I would gladly forgo in favor of a two-hour visit to the dentist. I also have a problem with fiction that sounds too much like someone reliving his or her personal victimization. (The Missouri Review has a blog post on the related matter of defining characters by their traumas.) However, F and G avoids such maudlin pitfalls, and instead just feels perfectly real and honest.

How did they do that? My guess is that it came about precisely because the writers refused to protect themselves when telling their stories to each other, and thus refused to protect the characters. Of course we are not talking hideous tragedies here, only the ordinary but highly significant failures of adolescence. Yet, speaking for myself, I can well imagine wanting to somehow "spin" these excruciating memories either to make myself look better, or to punish my youthful self more severely (which is another form of self-protection). But what happens if you just tell the story without trying to steer the reader's or viewer's reaction one way or the other? The F and G writers, as they mention in other commentaries, often didn't set out ahead of time to write comedy or tragedy; they just let the stories play out. Some turned out to be funny, some were sad, and most of the time they were both.

I'm not sure what it would take for me to be able to tell such stories honestly in fiction or--god forbid--memoir. Perhaps the group process the writers used helped: they all must have realized that everyone had experiences that still gouged their insides out when they thought of them. Their personal disaster wasn't so bad in the great scheme of things. In the same way, when we see the stories on TV, as viewers, we find them funny, forgivable, and ordinary in the most redeeming sense. Maybe that's the best kind of group therapy (mass group therapy) of all.

The Hound of the Baskervilles: Pwned by Holmes

So, three weeks ago precisely, I wrote a terribly excited post about how Holmes and Watson had accidentally allowed their client, Henry Baskerville, to be killed! And it was really cool, because, see, Conan Doyle had introduced this really troubling moral dimension to the whole sleuthing business, and...

Well, so I was so excited about this development that I stopped reading and fired off the post, and then I got busy with other stuff, and only got back to the novel yesterday, at which point I discovered that the dead guy wasn't Henry at all, but the escaped convict, Selden:

"We must send for help, Holmes! We cannot carry him all the way to the Hall. Good heavens, are you mad?"
He had uttered a cry and bent over the body. Now he was dancing and laughing and wringing my hand. Could this be my stern, self-contained friend? These were hidden fires, indeed!

"A beard! A beard! The man has a beard!"

"A beard?"

"It is not the baronet—it is—why, it is my neighbour, the convict!"

With feverish haste we had turned the body over, and that dripping beard was pointing up to the cold, clear moon. There could be no doubt about the beetling forehead, the sunken animal eyes. It was indeed the same face which had glared upon me in the light of the candle from over the rock—the face of Selden, the criminal.

Then in an instant it was all clear to me. I remembered how the baronet had told me that he had handed his old wardrobe to Barrymore. Barrymore had passed it on in order to help Selden in his escape. Boots, shirt, cap—it was all Sir Henry's. The tragedy was still black enough, but this man had at least deserved death by the laws of his country. I told Holmes how the matter stood, my heart bubbling over with thankfulness and joy.

The troubling dimension to Holmes's rational zeal is still kinda there--the scene is "black enough," as it were. In fact the issue comes up again a few pages later, when Holmes uses Henry as bait to catch the hound, and the experience is traumatic enough that Henry has to take a trip around the world with his doctor to recover. Clearly, Holmes's primary concern is not with his clients' well-being, except as it represents his success in solving the case. Nevertheless, the ironic edge is considerably dulled. And I have to admit to having been pwned by Conan Doyle, whose main interest is not in Holmes's moral complexity, but in keeping the reader off balance till the end. I was an easy mark because of my literary training; I'm always going to leap into multilayered considerations of Theme whenever the slightest opening is given to me.

Ah, well. Of course, Conan Doyle and his characters also did a good job in selling the false identification, with lots of hand-wringing and self-berating. All of this goes to show us--and them--that nothing, nothing, is as it seems in a Holmes story, not until the last period has landed at the end of the last sentence. That is, looking at a piece of evidence once is not enough. Looking twice may not be, either. And one's emotions, even for Holmes, can get in the way of remembering this basic fact. In this instance, Conan Doyle used his detectives' overwrought emotions, which were especially surprising in Holmes's case, as a sleight of hand to distract the reader. We all forgot to look at the dead man's face.

I think that's a good and impressive technique that mystery (and literary mystery) writers can use. But probably only once in a novel.

For the love of the flawed novel

From Emily St. John Mandel's review of Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker on The Millions:

[I]t seems to me that there’s something magnificent about sprawling and ever-so-slightly flawed novels.

It seems so to me, as well. Part of what I love about The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, is the sense that its author, genius as he is, is just barely in control of his material. His writing often has the feel of a man trying to wrap his arms around a large bag of demonically possessed squirrels. The source of his novels' grandeur is struggle, reflected in his characters' existential anguish. His greatest success, like theirs, is not in overcoming anguish but in giving it voice--sometimes seemingly by accident, as in convoluted prose, rushed scenes, and characters who appear and disappear for no evident reason. I suppose if the whole novel was nothing but these kinds of accidents, we'd call it a promising first draft, or simply a mess. But these flaws coexist with clearly defined conflicts with stakes even larger than life and death, masterful set pieces, and characters whose flesh and blood we come very close to actually touching. The flaws, in fact, make these successful parts even better: they roughen the edges of the masterpiece, making it a visceral experience.

In contrast, I love Marilynne Robinson's Gilead in a very different way. As my previous commentary on it shows, I experienced it as a Work of Art that more or less drove me to my knees. It inspired awe, and had the heft of cathedral tunes. As an artistic achievement, I think it deserves mention in the same breath as Brothers Karamazov, but on an emotional level I'm less drawn to it, because it is not flawed. There is no badly worded sentence, no misstep in the (admittedly much simpler) plot. The artist is in complete control, and there is something vaguely off-putting about that. Maybe because I suspect I can never achieve that level of mastery myself. Or maybe it's because consciousness itself is messy and surprising. As Annie Murphy Paul explains in Sunday's NYT editorial, a recent analysis of MRI data

concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals — in particular, interactions in which we’re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people’s intentions “theory of mind.” Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers. 

With its irruptions, dead ends, and coffee and blood stains, the map of Dostoevsky's mind looks far more like mine than Robinson's does. Hard to believe, since her work is set in twentieth-century Iowa and Dostoevsky's in tsarist Russia. But there you go.

A brief but passionate rant about education

I break my usual Monday silence to share some thoughts that came to me after reading this article. Its overall point is that homeschooling must be more closely regulated. While the author, Kristin Rawls, acknowledges that few formal studies have been done on the matter, anecdotal evidence suggests many homeschooled kids, particularly in fundamentalist movements like Quiverfull, are not achieving even basic levels of literacy. The reasons this may be happening look compelling: overwhelmed mothers with large numbers of children to educate, along with full responsibility for household chores and an ideology that holds "moral" (i.e. religious) education far above the factual and intellectual kind.

Fair enough. But it's also true that public (and probably even private) schools across the country are also turning out illiterate kids at an embarrassingly high rate. The fact is, this country has always had a ferociously conflicted attitude about education: parents' aspirations for their children to better their circumstances crash head-on into the old frontier suspicion of "book learning" (you don't want some weakling with his nose in a book next to you when a bear, or an Indian, is charging). Although I have no evidence for this myself, I suspect our ongoing debates about education policy, and the current fad for threatening and punishing educators, speak directly to this ambivalence. American individualists (and I'm one, in my own way) hate that we need education and educators. We hate that someone else knows more than we do about something, and that we have to subordinate ourselves, or our kids, to that person's expertise. Hence the appeal of homeschooling: it says that no one knows what's better for kids than their own parents do--no matter what the subject. The rugged individual merges with the expert.

But it's not just homeschoolers who feel this way. The recent decision by the New York City Public Schools to publish their highly problematic rankings of teachers gives non-experts another weapon to attack those who think they're so damn smart. Look, I get that there are bad teachers who are hard to root out of the system. I get the need for some objective (or close to objective) measure of students' success, and for accountability to both the school system and parents. I was lucky enough to attend excellent suburban public schools, and I still had a handful of teachers who were out-and-out lunatics, who traumatized me. But in this country there's a deep suspicion and even loathing of anyone who dares to educate others. And while I lack expertise in education policy, let me suggest these two culturally based efforts, which all of us can apply this very moment and into the future:

1. Encourage the aspirations of children and adults who seek education. Do not mock them.

2. Encourage the aspirations and work of educators. Do not humiliate them.

Justice and the satisfying ending

Today's writing lesson is nominally about Hound of the Baskervilles. But since I haven't read any further from last week, I will have to speak about Larger Issues as opposed to specific literary techniques. For example, the matter of justice: What does fiction have to do with it? Can it bring about justice literally, as Uncle Tom's Cabin supposedly did? Or does its real power lie in creating a sense of justice, which we experience rarely in real life? As I suspected, I have written about this before. You may wish to review that post, particularly if the term "altruistic punishment" strikes your fancy.

Today I'll go a little further and suggest that justice in fiction can also be an aesthetic experience. Writing workshops tell us that the ending of a story must be both surprising and inevitable to be satisfying. That's a paradox, certainly, and it raises the possibility that paradox itself is aesthetically pleasing. Now, it might not be ethically pleasing, not in real life anyway, where we want our good folks rewarded and our evildoers punished unambiguously. Yet, that hardly ever happens. In life, the ironies--e.g. the embezzler who spends a month in jail, and then gets a book deal and his own reality show--are often maddening. However, in literature, possibly because we know we can't do anything about it, and aren't expected to, a certain kind of success-in-failure (or vice versa) feels just right. Moral ambiguity can be safely viewed as an aesthetic problem.

That in itself isn't bad; it might allow a more nuanced and less heated consideration of the issues at hand. For example, in Hound, Holmes and Watson, in their zeal to solve the case, allow their client to get killed.* In real life, that would be shocking and galling; in the novel, it creates a sort of frisson, an uncanny halo around the supposedly good work of solving crimes. Part of the reader's satisfaction with the surprising/inevitable ending is that it feels real, while being explicitly unreal. Awareness of that aesthetic/ontological balance, I think, is one of the great pleasures of fiction. (There, I worked in the Hound reference.)

Which is also to say: one must resist the temptation to impose the aesthetic tenets of storytelling on real life. At that, our culture is failing miserably.

*UPDATE: Ah, the dangers of commenting on a Sherlock Holmes novel before finishing it. Wasn't Henry Baskerville after all. More on this later.

Staying in touch with your writing

Over the last few weeks I've been fairly consumed with editing work. Which is good! Very, very good! But it has left me a tad depleted on the verbal front, not to mention reluctant to spend any more time in front of a computer screen than necessary. So I didn't work on my novel that much.

However, this wasn't the same kind of hiatus that I've allowed to happen in the past, because I recalled some advice I read years ago. I really wish I could remember who wrote this, but the gist was, even if you can't actually write, find a way to "stay in touch with your writing." So I decided to do that. At least once a day, for maybe fifteen minutes, I thought about my novel--specifically, the point where I'd left off on my revisions. I did this while making dinner, or just before going to sleep. I tried to fully inhabit that place in my novel, without rushing off to take notes or open the file on the computer. So as not to overload the experience with layers of worry, I told myself I'd recall what I'd imagined when the time came, and that the important thing was to be in that place, if only for a few minutes every day.

That seems to have worked. Later in the week, and yesterday, I found an hour here or there to actually open the file and work. And unlike in the past, when I just shoved my own work completely aside in favor of the paid stuff, I was able to dive right back in. I did remember what I'd thought of (and expanded on it). Also, I suspect that setting aside the anxiety about not writing actually helped me find time to work. I accepted that I might only have an hour, or less, but that I could still do something with that time. I didn't spend time lamenting the time I didn't have.


In short, I think worrying about not writing is worse than simply not writing. This doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing enterprise, i.e. either you have four hours a day to work, or you have nothing. Writing can happen in the interstices. So find a way to stay in touch. That's my advice for today.

A small accomplishment, overblown

I'm short on time and brainpower this week, so I'll just show you this picture--

--which is of me at Pt. Reyes, just before I free-climbed that rock wall in the background.

Yes, well. I didn't climb the part that's over the water. Also, the same feat was achieved by many others, including women notably older than me, children, and at least one small, fluffy dog.

Still.

The Hound of the Baskervilles: Holmes and the uncanny

Well, Hound gets very exciting in the section I read this week. A murderous convict loose on the moor! An encounter with a fallen woman! Horrid, blood-chilling screams and/or baying in the night! Another mysterious man loose on the moor, who appears silhouetted atop a tor in the moonlight, and when Watson traces him to his hiding place, he turns out to be...

...OK, you probably knew this before I did, but I admit, I was surprised to find out it was...

Sherlock Holmes! He has been out on the moor the whole time Watson has been conducting his investigations and proudly sending reports back to Holmes.

I stooped under the rude lintel, and there he sat upon a stone outside, his gray eyes dancing with amusement as they fell upon my astonished features. He was thin and worn, but clear and alert, his keen face bronzed by the sun and roughened by the wind. In his tweed suit and cloth cap he looked like any other tourist upon the moor, and he had contrived, with that cat-like love of personal cleanliness which was one of his characteristics, that his chin should be as smooth and his linen as perfect as if he were in Baker Street.

While glad to see his partner, Watson is understandably pissed that Holmes has been doing his own detective work while making him believe he was actually contributing something. Holmes reassures him that his reports, which he's had forwarded to him at the hut, were indeed valuable, because they allow the two of them to compare their observations. Watson is persuaded, and ends up, as usual, admiring Holmes's cunning.

What interests me in this section is how closely Holmes is tied to the spookiness--the uncanniness--of the moors. Before he knows the identity of the man on the tor, here's how Watson describes him:

And it was at this moment that there occurred a most strange and unexpected thing. We had risen from our rocks and were turning to go home, having abandoned the hopeless chase. The moon was low upon the right, and the jagged pinnacle of a granite tor stood up against the lower curve of its silver disc. There, outlined as black as an ebony statue on that shining back-ground, I saw the figure of a man upon the tor. Do not think that it was a delusion, Holmes. I assure you that I have never in my life seen anything more clearly. As far as I could judge, the figure was that of a tall, thin man. He stood with his legs a little separated, his arms folded, his head bowed, as if he were brooding over that enormous wilderness of peat and granite which lay before him. He might have been the very spirit of that terrible place. It was not the convict. This man was far from the place where the latter had disappeared. Besides, he was a much taller man. With a cry of surprise I pointed him out to the baronet, but in the instant during which I had turned to grasp his arm the man was gone. There was the sharp pinnacle of granite still cutting the lower edge of the moon, but its peak bore no trace of that silent and motionless figure.

This, combined with Holmes's odd, "cat-like" cleanliness while living in a hut on the moor, suggest that he's not exactly super-human, but maybe extra-human. Anyway, not human in the way Watson is. I wrote a few weeks ago about Holmes as an enchanter whose magic is reason. In these passages, Holmes appears as a spirit or specter, and perhaps some kind of sprite with dancing gray eyes. He may represent reason, but he's otherworldly all the same.

All this suggests that for all Holmes's brilliance, there is something not quite right about his enterprise. That notion is reinforced pronto, when, as he and Watson are comparing their discoveries of the past few weeks, they hear a terrible cry. Rushing to investigate, they find their client, Henry Baskerville,* dead.

A low moan had fallen upon our ears. There it was again upon our left! On that side a ridge of rocks ended in a sheer cliff which overlooked a stone-strewn slope. On its jagged face was spread-eagled some dark, irregular object. As we ran towards it the vague outline hardened into a definite shape. It was a prostrate man face downward upon the ground, the head doubled under him at a horrible angle, the shoulders rounded and the body hunched together as if in the act of throwing a somersault. So grotesque was the attitude that I could not for the instant realize that that moan had been the passing of his soul. Not a whisper, not a rustle, rose now from the dark figure over which we stooped. Holmes laid his hand upon him, and held it up again, with an exclamation of horror. The gleam of the match which he struck shone upon his clotted fingers and upon the ghastly pool which widened slowly from the crushed skull of the victim. And it shone upon something else which turned our hearts sick and faint within us—the body of Sir Henry Baskerville!

There was no chance of either of us forgetting that peculiar ruddy tweed suit—the very one which he had worn on the first morning that we had seen him in Baker Street. We caught the one clear glimpse of it, and then the match flickered and went out, even as the hope had gone out of our souls. Holmes groaned, and his face glimmered white through the darkness.

"The brute! the brute!" I cried with clenched hands. "Oh Holmes, I shall never forgive myself for having left him to his fate."

"I am more to blame than you, Watson. In order to have my case well rounded and complete, I have thrown away the life of my client. It is the greatest blow which has befallen me in my career. But how could I know—how could l know—that he would risk his life alone upon the moor in the face of all my warnings?"

That last self-accusation by Holmes sums it up: he has sacrificed his client for the case itself. (Notice how he says it's the "greatest blow which has befallen me...": it's still all about him, isn't it?) One suspects, despite his expression of regret here, that he'd do the same thing again in a minute.

Conan Doyle seems keen on showing us that there are consequences to Holmes's single-minded brilliance. He is not a simple hero, a seeker and defender of justice. He is driven by ratiocination for its own sake, and anyone who hires him for protection risks meeting the same fate as Baskerville.

The character of the flawed detective is itself a cliche by now. But a detective whose very brilliance is a danger to his clients is compelling. Holmes himself is the "hound" of the Baskervilles--a spectral and seemingly supernatural hunter.**

*UPDATE: Except it isn't Henry Baskerville. This is the second time I've been foiled by a plot twist in this novel. Note to self: in a Holmes story, there is no resolution until the end.

**I still think the overall point stands: Holmes's concern is with the facts, rather than with people. And he's uncanny, all right. More about these twists and turns in a subsequent post.

On sexism and sympathy

I read Jonathan Franzen's now notorious piece on Edith Wharton a few weeks ago, and I admit to not being immediately enraged. Mostly I was focused on his ideas about how authors create sympathy for characters, since this is a preoccupation of mine (and I taught a class on this topic a few years ago). Franzen suggests that characters who evoke our sympathy have some kind of strike against them, some recognizable handicap that they must overcome. He then pivots to the meta-suggestion that Edith Wharton's own handicap was her looks, I believe in order to engender our sympathy for her--a successful, talented, and privileged person of the sort we (Americans? women? who?) might otherwise tend to resent. The handicap notion is not new, but certainly worth considering as a way of understanding why readers root for certain characters. Maybe in reading fiction (and nonfiction, for that matter), we seek reassurance that we can overcome our own flaws as we make our way through our real lives. But that would be a "therapeutic" reading, of which more in a moment.

All that said, Victoria Patterson and others who've seized on this piece as yet another example of Franzen's sexism aren't wrong. I mentioned this very issue when describing my ambivalent but generally positive response to the treatment of Patty in Freedom. In Patty's autobiography particularly, I sensed Franzen struggling with his own handicap as a writer, which is his contempt for women. I think he realizes that this holds him back, and in a strategy that works on an interesting level, he represents his own contempt as Patty's self-loathing--thus creating sympathy for her, if only as the author's helpless tool. This is not to say Franzen only feels contempt for women; I think he wants not to feel it, and Freedom and the Wharton piece are both efforts to struggle with an aspect of himself that he doesn't like.

My, I am making assumptions about the author's personal life based on his writing, though. How about that? As it happens, this gets at the main point I wanted to make about this latest Franzen face-plant. For Franzen--and a very large number of other critics--fiction written by women is always read as "really" autobiographical. Not just women, but all non-straight-white-male authors, are subject to this treatment: critics read their novels sociologically, to find out what it is, or was, like to be them. This is fair and right in the case of memoir, but not in fiction. Why is it that Edith Wharton's novels are really about her own resentment of pretty women, whereas Franzen's novels--also about women and their families--are about The Human Condition? Why don't we read Freedom to understand Franzen's feelings about, I dunno, his divorce, his mom, his own looks? To be fair, in interviews he has alluded to events in his own life, suggesting they shape his fiction. The point is, that's true for every writer. To pretend that our biographies play no role in creating our art is ludicrous. However, I don't write fiction to tell people my personal problems. I think it's safe to say that we choose to write fiction in part to convert our experiences into something different, something that's no longer ours as such, but might pertain to a wide range of people, all of whom will interpret the story differently and make it their own. And if Franzen's fiction is about The Human Condition, then mine is, too.

I suspect (continuing my psychological analysis of Franzen, which, I should point out, I have no real business doing) that Franzen's real concern is that his own novels will be read as "personal" and not "universal." That they'll be seen as therapeutic documents and not as Art. Really, the more I think about Patty's autobiography--written explicitly as part of her psychotherapy--the more it seems like Franzen's own struggle with the whole concept of women as writers. Are they capable of creating Art that transcends their own neuroses, Art for Art's sake? Or will their writing always be tied to--and tied down by--their own unmanageable bodies and emotions? By encasing Patty's autobiography in his own larger Work of Art, Freedom, Franzen seems to suggest the latter.

This idea resonates with Franzen's famous spat with Oprah Winfrey years ago, which seemed to center on his not wanting female readers. Oprah does use books for therapy, and her audience is overwhelmingly female. But by choosing Franzen's The Corrections for her book club, she made the horrifying suggestion that his book could be used that way as well. Of course, they've since made up, and Oprah's book club read Freedom.

So let's just lay out the diagnosis. Franzen's condescension toward women writers represents his own fear of being a second-class artist. I have that same fear, although I would settle for second-class status at this point in my career...

The Hound of the Baskervilles: More on character in mystery stories

I suppose I've been hitting this topic pretty hard lately, but I continue to be amazed at the importance of characterization in Hound.  This is my first time reading a Sherlock Holmes story, and I expected it to be formulaic, at least when it came to the rendering of people. Yet, as I discovered in the opening pages, the relationship between Watson and Holmes is complex, and not only contributes to, but in some ways drives the process of detection.

This issue is proving especially important to me at the moment, as I'm trying to write a literary mystery novel. I want plot and character to be equally important, and indeed to be bound together inexorably. Reading Conan Doyle has helped me discover that this is not only possible, but perhaps even necessary for delving into the true nature of mystery. Before attempting my novel, it seemed to me that mystery writing was primarily about plot, and by plot I mean a series of circumstances. A is in line to inherit B's money, but B has fallen in love with C and altered his will, making A the prime suspect when C is found floating in her nightgown in the lake. None of these characters is interesting, beyond their singular motives, which correlate to their functions in the plot: A is greedy (or desperate), B is blinded by love, C...well, C is a victim. D, the detective, comes in and puts the pieces together, because D, whatever her personal quirks, does her job expertly.

Now, Holmes is that quirky expert in Hound, but thus far, it's Watson whom we see doing most of the investigating. And here, he makes a mistake. Not only because the plot requires him to do so, although it does, but because of who he is.

After the conversation which I have quoted about Barrymore, Sir Henry put on his hat and prepared to go out. As a matter of course I did the same.

"What, are you coming, Watson?" he asked, looking at me in a curious way.

"That depends on whether you are going on the moor," said I.

"Yes, I am."

"Well, you know what my instructions are. I am sorry to intrude, but you heard how earnestly Holmes insisted that I should not leave you, and especially that you should not go alone upon the moor."

Sir Henry put his hand upon my shoulder with a pleasant smile.

"My dear fellow," said he, "Holmes, with all his wisdom, did not foresee some things which have happened since I have been on the moor. You understand me? I am sure that you are the last man in the world who would wish to be a spoil-sport. I must go out alone."

It put me in a most awkward position. I was at a loss what to say or what to do, and before I had made up my mind he picked up his cane and was gone.

But when I came to think the matter over my conscience reproached me bitterly for having on any pretext allowed him to go out of my sight. I imagined what my feelings would be if I had to return to you and to confess that some misfortune had occurred through my disregard for your instructions. I assure you my cheeks flushed at the very thought. It might not even now be too late to overtake him, so I set off at once in the direction of Merripit House.

I hurried along the road at the top of my speed without seeing anything of Sir Henry, until I came to the point where the moor path branches off. There, fearing that perhaps I had come in the wrong direction after all, I mounted a hill from which I could command a view—the same hill which is cut into the dark quarry. Thence I saw him at once....

Watson's mistake--disobeying Holmes's instructions to accompany Sir Henry everywhere--is plausible, because it fits his character: from the beginning, we've seen that he's polite, a bit meek (especially in the presence of Holmes), and even a little insecure (a hazard of working with Holmes). Thus he's easily put off by Sir Henry's entreaty not to be a "spoil-sport." But just as quickly, he feels terrible about letting Sir Henry get away, and imagines having to confess his error to Holmes--reactions that are also consistent with Watson's character. To fix his mistake, he runs off after Sir Henry, gets lost, and finds himself in a position to witness a telling interaction between Sir Henry, Miss Stapleton, and her angrily gesticulating brother.

So here's my point: a lesser writer, or at least one less concerned with character, could still have arranged for Watson to stumble upon this meeting. Watson could just decide to mosey off to a nearby hilltop of a morning, thinking Sir Henry asleep, and unexpectedly come upon the rendezvous. But this plot point is brought about, instead, by Watson's distinctive and very human nature. He falters, and then, alarmed at his failure, rushes to amend it. Yes, overall, Watson's discovery still reflects the operations of chance, which, in the case of a novel, means the author's hand. Yet we don't feel the author's hand here so strongly, because he lets Watson, or Watson's humanity, lead to the discovery.

On the thin ice of a new day (on Twitter)

Yes, I caved. My first day on Twitter was largely spent blocking a passel of unusually friendly young women who for some reason wish to follow me. It will take me awhile to get comfortable with the form, which seems to me less like birdsong, and more an endless series of hiccups and burps. But that is a human song, is it not? Besides, there are many great writers, like Colson Whitehead, who have mastered the form. So I will study, and learn.

Because it has come to my attention that the profession of "writer" means something quite different than it did just a few years ago. Competence in a wider variety of forms has become necessary. Saying I didn't use Twitter almost began to seem like saying I didn't use commas. I suppose I'll be using fewer of those now...

And so the leaky ship that is my online privacy springs another hole. The leaky vessel that holds my time, ditto. My first tweet was the title of an obscure Jethro Tull song that seems to have inspired exactly no one. Ian Anderson, are you out there?

The Hound of the Baskervilles: Point of view

I will get to this week's discussion of Hound via Transsiberian. I mean Transsiberian the film, of course! Like most people I had never heard of this 2008 film, and that's because it opened the same day as Dark Knight. We watched it last night; in accordance with the consensus on IMDB, I thought it was a little better than average. However, there was a certain moment about 1/3 of the way in that put me in mind of how very difficult it is to narrate a thriller/mystery.

Roy, played by Woody Harrelson as a less sophisticated version of his Woody-the-bartender character on Cheers,* is taking the Transsiberian railway back from China with his wife, Jessie (Emily Mortimer). They share a compartment with a young couple, Carlos the Suspicious Spaniard and his girlfriend, Abby. Now, there are a few reasons Carlos is suspicious. He knows a lot about crossing borders while evading scrutiny by customs. He lugs around a cache of matryoshka dolls, which he shows to Jessie but not to Roy, or, it turns out, to Abby. Carlos is showing a tad too much interest in Jessie. Abby is unhappy.

But then the movie gives us a false reason to suspect him. While the train is stopped at a station, Roy, a train buff, heads off to see some old trains in the yard, and Carlos goes with him. While Roy is enthusing over some gizmo, we see Carlos, behind him, pulling a metal railing loose. He bangs it on the ground as Roy trots ahead, and...end of scene. In the next scene everyone is back on the train except Roy. Carlos insists that Roy wandered off and probably lost track of time; he and the train personnel are certain he'll be on the next train (arriving tomorrow), so the three other main characters get off at the next stop to wait for him at a hotel. But Jessie can't send him a message or receive one from him ("Thees ees Rah-shah," the hotel manager keeps saying, while shrugging). Meanwhile Carlos, as we later learn, has taken the opportunity to stash his matryoshkas in Jessie's luggage, and they're not dolls so much as they are compressed and painted gobs of heroin. Before we discover that, though, Carlos convinces Jessie to take a long walk in the woods with him, where they come upon an interesting old church, where Carlos and Jessie start kissing, only Jessie changes her mind and Carlos tries to force himself on her and Jessie beats him to death. OK, so: Carlos killed Roy, right?

No, Roy is on the next train. I suppose you could imagine that Carlos meant to kill Roy but didn't have the opportunity. But he had the perfect opportunity in the train yard, and Roy's absence from the train seems to accomplish what he set out to do, which was to separate him from Jessie. Also, Roy, as oblivious as he is, might have noticed someone trying to whack him with a length of metal pipe. Carlos's grabbing the pipe, followed by Roy's absence from the train, is a trick on the audience, and nothing more. The real action is yet to come, with Jessie trying to hide the fact that she killed Carlos, and get rid of the dolls, while the ominous Ben Kingsley, supposedly some kind of cop, is on her trail.

We see these tricks all the time, especially in movies. They're meant to make us jump or to feel foreboding, like thunder or lights flickering or unintelligible whispers in a hallway. But they also feel unfair, because we know the storyteller knows they lead nowhere. The storyteller is blatantly manipulating us, which is sometimes OK if it's done especially elegantly, but it usually isn't. And one reason we feel manipulated is that the film medium tends to suggest direct access to what's actually happening. We aren't seeing the events through a single character's point of view; we're seeing the events themselves. If those events turn out not to be true, we sense the storyteller/filmmaker is dishonest.

Conan Doyle, in the Sherlock Holmes tales, gets around this problem by having Watson be his narrator. Watson works especially well in this role because he's a participant-observer. He does a lot of the sleuthing himself, as in Hound, when Holmes sends him off to Baskerville Hall to learn as much as he can while Holmes is doing other stuff back in London. Watson collects his observations meticulously, knowing Holmes will question him about everything, and he also ventures some interpretations. Many of these interpretations will necessarily turn out to be wrong, but when they do, we won't feel tricked--because the point-of-view character was only speculating. We trust Watson; we know he's doing his best, so his mistakes are honest ones. He's not deliberately misleading us, even though the author can use Watson, up to a point, for that very purpose.

The bad news is that if we contemporary writers try to adopt too obvious a Watson figure to tell our own mystery stories, everyone will probably realize we've stolen him or her from Conan Doyle--unless we make it clear we know we've stolen him, in which case, fine. But for mystery writing, some kind of competent, honest, but necessarily unreliable narrator seems like a good bet. I don't know how you would accomplish the same thing on film. There really is a sense that the movie camera is omniscient, which make any false threats, or cuts at the crucial moment, feel cheap.

*By the way, when is Woody Harrelson going to age? Is he just an excellent advertisement for veganism, or is something more sinister afoot?

Stories without consequences

So like just about everyone else I've been watching Downton Abbey. I've now watched every episode, always a day or more late, since we don't have TV, only the Internet.* I can't say I have Downton-mania, exactly. I don't love it or hate it. Most of the characters leave me cold, and I've conceived an outright loathing for Mr. Bates that I can't explain. Even Maggie Smith's well-delivered witticisms seem forced. When the camera turns to her, I sit up with a chuckle at the ready, and am always a little disappointed with the zinger.

Yet I keep watching, because, I think, of the storytelling itself. More precisely: because of what seems to be very flawed storytelling. I have never seen a show in which huge plot points so often turn out--thus far, anyway--to have such minimal consequences. I guess the rest of what I have to say involves spoilers, so stop reading if you really don't want to know what's been happening. But, just of late: Only one minor character dies in the war, and his widow never loved him anyway. A major character is paralyzed for life, feels a tingle, and is dancing by the next episode. Same character's betrothed dies from the Spanish flu so that he is free to marry the woman he really loves. Headstrong daughter runs off with chauffeur, causing Lord Grantham to withhold his blessing and his money until...he doesn't anymore and everyone hugs. Lord G embarks on an affair with a maid, who then decides she ought to resign for the good of everyone, and leaves. Lady G gets deathly ill and then better within ten minutes.

So: no real freakin consequences. Or, not yet. If everything comes around again in some ingenious interweaving of these previously pallid storylines, I suppose I will have to print out this blog post, spread it with Earth Balance, and eat it. I will be especially delighted if (SPOILER) Mr. Bates really did kill his wife and has to do real jail time for it--even though he would be blameless because his wife was so purely, inexplicably evil. The bottom line is, these episodes feel like first drafts.

I've had the same problems in the first draft of my second novel. Now that I'm revising, I can see how often I wanted to leave my options open as I felt my way along. I could see plot lines heading a particular way, but realized that if they went too far, that character would no longer be around for the rest of the story--and I might still need him or her. So there's this repeated phenomenon of minor consequences for what seem to be major events or threats or screw-ups. The characters, Wile-E-Coyote-like, bounce up after being crushed by anvils, and then wait around to see what else I've got for them to do. At least when writing a novel you can, theoretically, revise once you get to the end, and do so more than once. Perhaps you don't have time for such with series television. You have to get it right the first time, which would be a pretty scary assignment. No wonder Lost went off the cliff.

*Which does not make us more virtuous than those who have TV, at least not anymore. I waste far more time in the Internet than I ever did watching TV.

The Hound of the Baskervilles: Learning to look at faces

This week's reading of Hound is really just a commentary on one phrase. But this little description of Stapleton's physical appearance came pretty close to astounding me. Describing his new acquaintance in a letter to Holmes, Watson writes:

There is a dry glitter in his eyes, and a firm set of his thin lips, which goes with a positive and possibly a harsh nature.

First, the bad news. In searching for the phrase "dry glitter" in the Gutenberg e-text, I discovered that Watson has used it once before, to describe Holmes himself. So points must be deducted for repetition, and for applying what I think is a quite distinctive description to two different characters. Also, the "firm set of his thin lips" doesn't really break new ground imagery-wise. The interpretation of how Stapleton's features might relate to his personality should probably not be attempted except in special circumstances such as these. It's classic showing and then telling, which would normally indicate authorial distrust of the reader--but this is what Watson and Holmes do, of course: observe and then interpret. So Watson gets a pass, although he's probably relying on outdated notions of physiognomy here.

Still--that dry glitter! I like this image immensely, perhaps because it reminds me of a snowy field on a sunny January day. It's also (at least to me) quite unexpected. When eyes glitter, it's usually because they are moist with tears, or sparkling with merriment, or gleaming with malice. The dryness is the surprise, and it intrigues Watson enough to set him speculating. If we want to be really generous--and because I haven't finished the story, I can't be sure this isn't true--we could say that Watson, on some level, recognizes the "dry glitter" in Stapleton's eyes as the same one he's seen in Holmes's, and suspects a similarity in character as well. But right now it feels like a mistake. In any case, Watson--and Conan Doyle--clearly see the image as striking, and worthy of close attention.

Back in 2003, Charles Baxter wrote an article for The Believer about the lack of facial description in contemporary fiction, as opposed to fiction from previous centuries. Reading all these "old" stories for my Borrowed Fire series, I've really come to see how true that is. And it's made me frustrated with what seems like my own limited repertoire for describing characters physically: stocky, short, thin, tall, blue eyes, brown hair, glasses... Dull! Without making the kinds of claims Watson makes about the direct relationship of appearance to inner character, surely we all can do better.

Why not spend an afternoon in a cafe surreptitiously glancing at the people nearby and describing their features in our notebooks? Not just their faces, but bodies, gestures, voices. Pay more attention when walking down the street or across campus or through the airport. I'm already thinking of someone I passed on the way to the bank this morning: slightly pigeon-toed, wearing glasses too wide for her face so that her eyes, rather than the lenses, seemed connected by the glasses' bridge... One could even keep a list of these characteristics, to mix and match later.

How Sherlock Holmes enchants the world

I'm a little behind on my Hound reading, but fortunately I have a great link to keep that Sherlockian tingle going till next time. Via Andrew Sullivan, Michael Saler says that the deep appeal of the Holmes stories is a kind of enchantment--and not the usual kind, either. Holmes goes against the grain by making enchantment an effect of reason:

Unlike many contemporary scientists and logicians who disdained the imagination, Holmes brought reason and the imagination, logic and intuition, together in a new synthesis that he called “the scientific use of the imagination.” He made critical thinking into a romantic adventure. Through his discerning eye, every detail of modern life, from newspaper advertisements to the footsteps of a giant hound, became charged with meaning, possibility, and wonder.

If this is true, and I think it is, then the Holmes stories should be taught in every school in the land. Intellect and reason are the path to enchantment, not its enemies! Understanding, not ignorance, is the source of transcendent delight! Never mind that Conan Doyle himself got pretty woo-woo in his later life, when he fell for some "photos" of fairies that make the guy in the Bigfoot film look like Bigfoot. Perhaps Holmes is the unique product of a mind that craved magic, but couldn't (or wouldn't) yet accept its actual existence. So, like our best realist fiction writers, Holmes makes magic from the everyday.

Books, ebooks, and how everything's always changing

So Jonathan Franzen has gone and said another odd thing in public, this time about ebooks and their apparent threat to civilization. Not surprisingly, I'm ambivalent about these remarks. I do wonder about the relative impermanence and mutability of ebooks (though the corollary is that ebooks won't go out of print, at least not in such a definitive manner). Personally, I have yet to read an ebook, though not for any ideological reason. It's just that I do so much reading on screens, and this reading is mostly of a scattered, nerve-jangling quality. (When I'm online, I picture my brain cells as little bubbles in a pan of simmering water.) I turn to physical books for relief from that kind of reading--for immersive reading experiences. But I doubt I'll be doing this forever. There's too much to like about the convenience of ebooks.

See? Ambivalence.

However, last night I watched this NOVA documentary about attempts to authenticate a drawing thought to be by Leonardo. As Walter Benjamin told us long ago, our definition of "artist" relies on the physical presence of a single work of art--even as technology makes those works more and more reproducible. What will it mean to authenticate written works, once they all go digital? Probably most authors these days compose on a computer, with a minimum of handwritten notes. In theory, we still have Stephen King's Wang to give us some sense of origin (although not in practice, as it turned out). But as books become less and less physical, all sloshing around together in the "cloud"--itself a metaphor for an even less physical entity--will our sense of the term "author" change, too? Will we start to seem less like physical beings who made something, and more like wisps in the cloud ourselves?

And if so, is that all bad?

The Hound of the Baskervilles: Things May Not Be As They Seem

This week's reading of Conan Doyle's Hound of the Baskervilles gives me to understand that I am still learning how to read the novel. Last week I confidently asserted that Conan Doyle had shut down a possible path to solving the mystery. I heartily approved of this because, as I noted at length, it's important not to give your story--or your reader--too many options, otherwise the mystery seems too easy to solve. You need to set up plausible obstacles for your detective, to enable a satisfying process of unraveling the mystery.

Well, not so much. That is, the above is still true, as far as it goes, but at least one of the paths has turned out not to be permanently shut off. Having been dispatched on a fact-finding mission to Baskerville Hall--minus Holmes, for the time being--Watson discovers that the telegram he and Holmes sent to Barrymore, in order to determine whether he was at home, was not actually delivered into his hands. This means the mysterious bearded stranger who was following Henry Baskerville in London could plausibly be Barrymore after all. Therefore, contrary to my assertion last week, no path can be considered fully closed down until the book is closed. There still needs to be a mechanism for deferring various threads, for making one seem more important than the other at various times. But the world of Sherlock Holmes, I am learning, is one in which you can never quite be certain that you know what you know. This is why Dostoevsky loved detective stories: they're about epistemology.

This whole approach to reading the book, and the world, gets underscored many times over as Watson begins poking around Baskerville Hall and the surrounding moors. First, in the middle of the night, he wakes to the sound of a woman wailing. In the morning he and Baskerville ask Barrymore about it, who replies: "There are only two women in the house, Sir Henry," he answered. "One is the scullery-maid, who sleeps in the other wing. The other is my wife, and I can answer for it that the sound could not have come from her." However:

And yet he lied as he said it, for it chanced that after breakfast I met Mrs. Barrymore in the long corridor with the sun full upon her face. She was a large, impassive, heavy-featured woman with a stern set expression of mouth. But her tell-tale eyes were red and glanced at me from between swollen lids. It was she, then, who wept in the night, and if she did so her husband must know it. Yet he had taken the obvious risk of discovery in declaring that it was not so. Why had he done this? And why did she weep so bitterly? Already round this pale-faced, handsome, black-bearded man there was gathering an atmosphere of mystery and of gloom.

 
Then, walking back from his trip to the post office, where he discovers the slip-up with the telegram, Watson is accosted by a man introducing himself as Stapleton, who seems to know an amazing amount about the Baskerville case and Sherlock Holmes's involvement therein. Watson deflects Stapleton's questions about Holmes, to which Stapleton responds: "You are perfectly right to be wary and discreet." So are we, Conan Doyle is telling us, as Watson is our representative in the story. Still, Watson accepts Stapleton's invitation to lunch, as Holmes has tasked him with "study[ing] the neighbours upon the moor." But can Watson trust what Stapleton tells him? We don't know.
 
Even the landscape participates in this duplicity, as Stapleton points out:

"...You see, for example, this great plain to the north here with the queer hills breaking out of it. Do you observe anything remarkable about that?"
"It would be a rare place for a gallop."

"You would naturally think so and the thought has cost several their lives before now. You notice those bright green spots scattered thickly over it?"
"Yes, they seem more fertile than the rest."

Stapleton laughed.

"That is the great Grimpen Mire," said he. "A false step yonder means death to man or beast. Only yesterday I saw one of the moor ponies wander into it. He never came out. I saw his head for quite a long time craning out of the bog-hole, but it sucked him down at last. Even in dry seasons it is a danger to cross it, but after these autumn rains it is an awful place. And yet I can find my way to the very heart of it and return alive. By George, there is another of those miserable ponies!"

Sadly, Watson sees the truth of the Mire with his own eyes, and let's not dwell on that any more than we have to. (I recently stopped reading a book I was otherwise mostly enjoying because a character killed a puppy. But I will soldier on here.) The point I wish to make here is that in Holmes-world, you must use your eyes, and all your senses, constantly and intensely. Your antenna are always up. At the same time, you must distrust the signals those antennae give you. You're caught in a constant tug-of-war between discovery and doubt--a sort of mire in itself, in which Conan Doyle hopes to trap you, the reader.
 
I've often wondered how mystery writers contend with the need to dump information on the reader. What are the alternatives to having some witness magically appear and provide, in large chunks of dialog, key information that the reader and detective need to go forward? How do you keep that from just being tedious exposition? Conan Doyle doesn't avoid the large chunks of dialog, as is clear in this section. But so far, all this exposition all coming from people we have at least some reason not to trust. So we are never sure about the status of the information--or of information, period. Maybe it's entirely false, or only partially true, or true, but not in the ways we might think. We're very much off balance and becoming more so, and that's a good thing.

What is vocabulary for?

Back in the day, when there were no iPads and we did our homework on the backs of shovels using lumps of coal (boy, did teachers hate grading papers then), we once had to do the following assignment: Write a story about something you did yesterday. Then rewrite it, replacing as many "little" words as possible with "bigger" words. This was an exercise in stretching our vocabularies. I can't remember what grade this was, possibly third, or maybe fifth (it couldn't have been fourth, as I had a particularly memorable and colorful--OK, frightening--teacher that year, so I would remember that). Anyway, I distinctly recall hearing another kid reading one of her improved sentences, which came out: "My friend and I purchased each other Christmas gifts." I have remembered this sentence all these years, because of how it grated on my pedantic little ears. What, I silently wondered, was wrong with "bought"? Swapping it out for "purchased" made no useful difference in meaning, and it wrecked the grammar of the sentence besides. But the kid had done the assignment correctly, and so was praised.

Now, I'm not saying this exercise was a terrible idea--it was just an exercise, and even a rather inventive one. But it did convey the idea that the purpose of using "big" words (two syllables are better than one!) was simply to sound more impressive, more educated. I honestly think that this is still what most students believe when they are made to study "vocabulary" for various tests. I once worked on a vocabulary CD-ROM whose selling point was that it spat words randomly at the user, and he or she racked up points by selecting the correct meaning for each one before time ran out. Now, it isn't news that context makes it a whole lot easier to learn new words, and that a richer vocabulary develops most efficiently, and least painfully, through extensive reading. But the question still remains: Apart from getting through all those damned tests, is the point of improving one's vocabulary really just to sound educated? To impress potential employers and mates with your great big verbal display?

A much better reason--which only occurred to me rather recently--is that language is a set of tools. The more words you have at your disposal, the greater the precision of those tools. If you know only the word "buy," you have a hammer, and you have to use it on everything from a rock to a Ming vase. If you know "buy," "purchase," "acquire," "obtain," etc.--and understand the subtle differences they make in different contexts--you have a scalpel, or a laser beam, or a pair of tweezers, or a brush. Words are for finding and expressing meaning in the most accurate way possible. They're for refinement. A large vocabulary gives you not only options, but a sense that there are options. Maybe you can't even think of the right word immediately--but knowing that it, or at least something close to it, exists will make you pause and work on that particular thought or sentence, until it says what you need it to say. The thought, the sentence, and civilization itself are all better for that effort.

The Hound of the Baskervilles: Closing Off Possibilities

In this week's reading of Hound, I'd like to look at a technique that is probably especially important to mystery writers. Then again, aren't all works of fiction mysteries in some way? The questions, in the end, are the same: What happened in the past? What is going to happen? How will the characters understand what happened, and how will we?

Also, I'll wager that all fiction writers, especially novelists, have run into the problem of having seemingly too many options to choose from. At a certain point in the writing process, you start to realize that the story could go, well, a thousand different ways. How do you know which one is right? Having experienced this a ton of times myself, I'll say that the only solution is just to plunge ahead through the weeds until you crash into a brick wall, then backtrack to the fork in the road and try another branch. (How's that for an overgrown thicket of cliches?) Otherwise, your fate may be paralysis.

Having eventually chosen a path, however, you will still have to go back and clear it for your readers in the revision process. That is, you have to make sure your reader--while possibly seeing all the different forks in the road that you could have taken--understands why the path you took is the right one. You can't leave a bunch of loopholes open in the plot, or in your characters' motivations, which would immediately allow your protagonist to solve the problem easily--and bring the story to a dead halt. It's the old "why doesn't someone just kill Ahab?" question, which you have to resolve in some convincing way.

In the early going of Hound, Conan Doyle shows us one way to block off possible avenues for solving the mystery too early. Sir Henry Baskerville, heir to the Baskerville estate and possibly to its giant, slavering devil-dog, has just arrived in London, where he receives this immortal message: "As you value your life or your reason keep away from the moor." All but one of the words, "moor," were clipped from a newspaper and pasted onto a piece of paper. Holmes, through his obsessive knowledge of fonts, determines that the newspaper was yesterday's Times. He also determines that the letter was created in a hotel room, because the word "moor" (the only one that did not appear in the paper, so had to be written by hand), is in the kind of dried-out ink you'd only find in a hotel room. (Don't you hate that?)

So, to find out who sent the note, Holmes pays a kid to go to every hotel in the area and ask to see yesterday's trash--looking for a Times with words cut out of it. Meanwhile, he and Watson have also spotted a mysterious bearded man following Baskerville in a cab, and Sir Henry suggests it might be Barrymore, the butler of Baskerville Hall. Holmes sends a telegram addressed to Barrymore there, to see if he's home. Soon:

Just before dinner two telegrams were handed in. The first ran:—

"Have just heard that Barrymore is at the Hall.—BASKERVILLE." The second:—

"Visited twenty-three hotels as directed, but sorry, to report unable to trace cut sheet of Times.—CARTWRIGHT."

"There go two of my threads, Watson. There is nothing more stimulating than a case where everything goes against you. We must cast round for another scent."

Holmes is right; there is nothing more stimulating than a case (or a story) where everything goes against you. Obstacles are mounting, increasing the challenge to Holmes, and thus allowing the story to move onward and upward. The key point is that the obstacles mount plausibly: without slowing the story down too much, Conan Doyle shows Holmes addressing two clear paths to solving the case, and being convincingly thwarted by each one. Then, literally in the next line, a third path opens up:

"We have still the cabman who drove the spy."

"Exactly. I have wired to get his name and address from the Official Registry. I should not be surprised if this were an answer to my question."

The ring at the bell proved to be something even more satisfactory than an answer, however, for the door opened and a rough-looking fellow entered who was evidently the man himself.

"I got a message from the head office that a gent at this address had been inquiring for 2704," said he. "I've driven my cab this seven years and never a word of complaint. I came here straight from the Yard to ask you to your face what you had against me."

The relative ease of contacting the cabman would have been really annoying, if Conan Doyle had not preceded it with the failed efforts at locating the newspaper and identifying Barrymore. The cabman's appearance still seems a little convenient, but now we suspect whatever information he tells us will not be as helpful or as straightforward as it might otherwise seem. The chapter is called "Three Broken Threads," after all, and Holmes has just said that everything is going against him in this case. The author has trained us to read his story as Holmes would: with enthusiastic suspicion.

We shall see...

Parsnip, black-eyed pea, kale, and barley stew

So this blog is "mostly about fiction and writing," but it is sometimes about food and cooking. Especially vegan food and cooking. And cooking is like writing, right? It definitely is the way I go about it: 1) Open vegetable drawer (analogous to brain and/or journal). 2) Say: Jeez, I gotta use up these things before they rot (analogous to ideas/fading youth/ambition). 3) Wonder/worry/chew nails/pace. 4) Put stuff together and see what happens.

The best guidebook ever for the above approach to cooking is Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. I recommend ordering yourself a copy and then spending an afternoon just paging through it. The only downside to this otherwise delightful and enlightening experience is that the book weighs about 50 pounds, which precludes my favorite reading style of lying on my back and resting the book on my stomach. It will crush you. Anyway, for those not familiar with Bittman's deal, this is less a cookbook in the ordinary sense (although there are recipes), and more a giant permission slip to try new ingredients, or use common ingredients in new ways. He's not big on precision; instructions tend toward "throw in some more x if it looks like there isn't enough," and the repeated injunction "don't worry."

My own recent stroll through the book brought two neglected items to my attention, barley and parsnips. The former is a great way to add starch/bulk to soup or stew, without it getting all huge and slimy, as pasta does. The latter add a rather exotic, sweet taste to the proceedings--a nice alternative to carrots.

With those ingredients, a bunch of rapidly expiring dino kale, and a bag of black-eyed peas on hand, I concocted the following, and it is really damn good. Especially on a cold evening...

Parsnip, black-eyed pea, kale, and barley stew

A couple tbsp of olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
4 medium parsnips, peeled and diced (remove woody core if necessary)
1 cup dried black-eyed peas or 1 can cooked
1 bunch dino kale or other green, chopped and tough ribs removed
1/3 cup pearled barley
1 28-oz can crushed or diced tomatoes
4 cups water or vegetable stock
Salt and pepper to taste

Saute chopped onion in olive oil till transparent. Add parsnips, and cook until both onion and parsnips begin to brown. Add everything else (note: if you are using canned black-eyed peas, don't add until about 15 minutes before the stew is done). Bring to boil, reduce heat, and partially cover. Simmer for about an hour, till beans and barley are soft.



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The Hound of the Baskervilles: Establishing Character through Dialog II

Moving slowly through Hound, I am discovering, Holmes-like, that there is much to discover. Last time I wrote about how the early dialog between Holmes and Watson quickly established the nuances of their relationship, and thus their characters. Now let's take a look at the spoken language of the first guest-star, one James Mortimer:

"Glad to meet you, sir. I have heard your name mentioned in connection with that of your friend. You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes. I had hardly expected so dolichocephalic a skull or such well-marked supra-orbital development. Would you have any objection to my running my finger along your parietal fissure? A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available, would be an ornament to any anthropological museum. It is not my intention to be fulsome, but I confess that I covet your skull."

To which Holmes astutely responds:

"You are an enthusiast in your line of thought, I perceive, sir, as I am in mine," said he. "I observe from your forefinger that you make your own cigarettes. Have no hesitation in lighting one." 

Holmes helps the reader feel like a smartie here, by stating the obvious: Mortimer is an "enthusiast" (Watson prefers the term "strange")--an obsessive, in other words.

This leads me to the point of this week's reading. On a web site I recently visited, one agent said she particularly looks for stories in which the dialog is vivid and distinctive: that is, all the characters should not sound the same. I think this aspect of dialog-writing often gets overlooked; we get hung up on what the characters are saying, and making sure they say it in the least boring way possible. But, although all these guys all come from a single source--the author's brain--they must appear to reflect their own separate and distinctive development as human beings. For example, Mortimer is a phrenology nut--which means his language is peppered with the language of his profession, and also reflects the rhythms of obsession: his stated attempt not to be "fulsome" suggests he's been criticized for ranting on and on about skulls before, but his preemptive apologies only reveal his interest more strongly.

In other words, to be convincing and distinctive, characters need to use language in ways that reflect their particular physical and emotional circumstances. A doctor is going to use precise anatomical language, which means that if we are creating a doctor character, we have to become familiar with such language and the ways in which that particular doctor would deploy it. She might speak in a notably detached way about, say, the progress of cancer in a lung. Or, for a different effect, she might speak in peculiarly loving detail about it, unsettling her interlocutors and readers. Or she might convey an unusual capacity for empathy by constantly checking to see if her patient understands her terms. The point is, because the doctor is this particular doctor, she isn't going to sound like that other doctor over there. Mortimer and Watson are both men of science (Mortimer says he's a mere "dabbler,") but they don't talk the same way. On the other hand, neither Mortimer nor Watson is going to use a term like "that lumpy thingie on your head"; their scientific backgrounds enable them to know the contemporary, technical language for it.

See what I mean? This is not to say you should lard up your characters' dialog with "distinctive" (i.e. distracting) verbal tics and professional jargon. But it is worth thinking about different people you know in real life, and how they all express themselves a little differently, even if they're in the same profession. And if they're from different professions and backgrounds, their speech should differ accordingly, if still subtly. Finally, speech reflects temperament. If someone's impatient, don't just tell us that: have him speak impatiently.

Writing as meditation

At one time I had something like a real meditation practice. That has not been the case for awhile now, largely because I can't figure out how to meditate with cats either a) climbing on me or b) hurling themselves at the closed door. No, really: this is a good excuse.

At any rate, I am now applying meditation techniques to my writing. For the last several weeks I have just not felt good about anything I've written, which has led me to put whatever creative energy I have into thinking up excuses for why I don't have to write today. The bottom line is, I don't want to write if it's going to suck, and there seems to be a better than even chance these days that it will.

So what I've decided to do is institute my own personal NaNoWriMo, except without, necessarily, the "No(vel)" part. From now till the end of January, I am going to write 1,000 words per day which are nominally related to the story idea I am currently least repelled by. I am not going to craft my sentences or delete sections that seem irrelevant, and above all I am not going to pounce on the thing and strangle the life out of it by declaring: Aha! I know what this is about! This is definitely a novel/novella/short story, from the point of view of the alien baby, and there's a big shoot-em-up at the end! There is to be no, repeat, NO anticipation.

This is related to the technique in Insight Meditation in which you don't try to stop yourself from thinking, but rather notice the fact that you are thinking, without pursuing any particular thought. You notice, and then return to the breath, as they say. So I notice the anticipation (This is a novel! I know it! Ooh, I can really build on that scene!) but make no commitments to it. I just go back to churning out words.The words are the breath.

Like meditation, this process sometimes really feels like crap. But I have become aware of how little tolerance I have both for writing poorly, and for not knowing what I am doing--that is, not being able to anticipate the outcome. In the past, it seems like I have been able to work around this and get stuff done anyway, but now, for whatever reason, this is not so. Therefore I am resorting to the kinds of writing advice one always gets in beginning writing classes, and which I have generally scorned.

I really don't know what will happen, but at least I'm writing.

The Hound of the Baskervilles: Establishing Character through Dialog

So it's the new year, and I resolve to be less lame. Which means that, among other endeavors, I am going to resume the Borrowed Fire series on this blog. In this series, I read works of classic literature, all available on Project Gutenberg, in order to see what contemporary writers like me can learn from them. So far it's been all dead white guys--a consequence, though not a necessity, of the whole public-domain thing, but they still have one or two things they might teach us. And since we've had our vampire (a super-dead white guy), we must now turn to werewolves, or potential werewolves, or at least large dogs, and so let us dive into The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!

Before we begin, I should mention that I had never read a word of Conan Doyle before about an hour ago. However, I have recently become obsessed with detective stories, spy stories, and stories of deduction in general, and have spent spent many hours watching both Jeremy Brett and Benedict Cumberbatch portray Sherlock Holmes. I also just saw the first Robert Downey, Jr. version on a plane, and it was better than I expected, but there was little attempt to make the character Holmes-like, at least as I have come to understand him. Jude Law's Watson is another matter, as today's rumination will, I think, bring out. Anyway, what I wish to stress here is that I'm coming to this novel with a bunch of pre-set expectations and at least some general knowledge about the characters--as is likely true of just about everyone who's had any contact with Western culture. Sherlock is an icon, on a par with, I dunno, Santa Claus, and Watson is his humble sidekick and sounding board.

But what is that genius-sidekick relationship actually like? Well, it's quite nuanced. Hound starts off with Holmes challenging Watson to use his "system" to deduce as much as possible about the owner of a walking stick, which has been left behind in their apartment. Watson gamely offers that it likely belongs to a country doctor, and deduces from the inscription on the stick that it was given to the doctor by a hunting club. Holmes then bathes Watson in backhanded compliments:

"Really, Watson, you excel yourself," said Holmes, pushing back his chair and lighting a cigarette. "I am bound to say that in all the accounts which you have been so good as to give of my own small achievements you have habitually underrated your own abilities. It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it. I confess, my dear fellow, that I am very much in your debt."

He had never said as much before, and I must admit that his words gave me keen pleasure, for I had often been piqued by his indifference to my admiration and to the attempts which I had made to give publicity to his methods. I was proud, too, to think that I had so far mastered his system as to apply it in a way which earned his approval. He now took the stick from my hands and examined it for a few minutes with his naked eyes. Then with an expression of interest he laid down his cigarette, and carrying the cane to the window, he looked over it again with a convex lens.

"Interesting, though elementary," said he as he returned to his favourite corner of the settee. "There are certainly one or two indications upon the stick. It gives us the basis for several deductions."

"Has anything escaped me?" I asked with some self-importance. "I trust that there is nothing of consequence which I have overlooked?"

"I am afraid, my dear Watson, that most of your conclusions were erroneous. When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth. Not that you are entirely wrong in this instance. The man is certainly a country practitioner. And he walks a good deal."

In this exchange, Conan Doyle conveys the light S/M dynamic that has clearly been going on between these two for some time. Watson, habitually humble, is embarrassed to admit to us, his readers, that Holmes's words give him "keen pleasure," especially in light of his usual "indifference to my admiration." He strongly desires Holmes's approval, and seems further driven to seek it the more Holmes dismisses him. Of course this means that he can't, or won't, listen to closely to what Holmes is actually saying to him, which is more along the lines of "thank you for being such an idiot; if you were smarter, I couldn't use you." In fact, I myself was a little caught up in rooting for Watson to receive some genuine praise from his hero; it wasn't until Holmes announced that most of Watson's conclusions were "erroneous" that I went back and marveled at the blithe condescension of Holmes's compliments. Watson is a little stung, and seeks reassurance, which Holmes rather patronizingly gives him:

"Then I was right."

"To that extent."

"But that was all."

"No, no, my dear Watson, not all—by no means all. I would suggest, for example, that a presentation to a doctor is more likely to come from a hospital than from a hunt, and that when the initials 'C.C.' are placed before that hospital the words 'Charing Cross' very naturally suggest themselves."

So Watson, his head duly patted, is back in line, ready to be slapped down again. We've got some serious co-dependence issues here. But this is precisely what makes these characters more than just a smart guy and the admirer of the smart guy. Watson makes an especially poignant stand-in for us readers. We see that the admirer's admiration, while genuine, also costs him emotionally; in this, we feel for him, because admiration is rarely pure, or purely rewarding, in real life. Watson is the unrequited lover, hurt by Holmes repeatedly but unable to quit him. This is an interesting analogy for readers of fiction generally. Like Watson, perhaps we, too, want something from literary characters--love, or at least acknowledgment--that they are utterly incapable of giving us. We are so close to them, yet they elude us in the end.

Through this early dialog, Conan Doyle has given us an emotional investment in the mystery that we'd otherwise be lacking. Why should we care, right from the beginning, about the provenance of this walking stick? Because of Watson's--and Holmes's--own personal investments in knowing, around which their whole relationship is structured. This relationship raises and complicates the emotional stakes of deduction, which would otherwise be a purely intellectual exercise.


Oh, about Jude Law as Watson. Partly because he's just too gorgeous to play it otherwise, Law eschews the fond, slightly doddering exasperation of other Watsons. He's sharp, witty, and gets seriously pissed at Holmes--rightly raising the question of why he sticks with him.

What art is for: yet another explanation

Reading Adam Hochschild's review of Laurent Dubois's new book, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History, in the NYT Book Review, I was drawn to these lines: "American officials declared, accurately enough, that the Haitian government was in bad shape and needed reform. But as the troops on the ground discovered, like their counterparts in Iraq and Afghanistan, no one likes to be reformed at the point of a foreigner’s gun."

We've all read sentences like that last one hundreds of times in the past, oh, ten years, right? The point seems simple enough, and yet, as stark as that reality is, the failure of huge numbers of policy makers to understand it is more so. This problem goes beyond the well-known failures to become familiar with the invadee's language, history, culture, religion, etc., though these are encompassed by the overall problem: the failure of imagination itself.  In Haiti as in other misadventures, invading powers could not--or would not--imagine what they might do if some other country tried to impose its values on them by force, even if they agreed with some or most of those values.

In literature classes I've taught over the years, we've often discussed the role of fiction in fostering empathy. In fiction, we are given direct insight into the minds of other people, albeit fictional people, a position we are absolutely denied in real life. (In fact, even in nonfiction works in which the author tries to reconstruct the thoughts of, say, George Washington, that Washington is necessarily fictional, because we cannot know the real thoughts of the real Washington.) Martha Nussbaum, for one, has argued that this experience of putting oneself in the place of another (or another in the place of oneself, maybe) transfers to real life: for Nussbaum reading fiction, at least certain realistic kinds of fiction like Dickens's, makes us more empathic, i.e. better.

Personally I would not go that far. In my experience, it is possible to voraciously read the most refined literary fiction while remaining an asshole. And I don't think reading Hard Times would have done anything for all those who jittered with anticipation to invade Iraq; it would have fallen on blind eyes, as it were. Something else is involved in making that leap, in having both the ability and the desire to make that leap. But this thought did occur to me: if nothing else, the existence of fiction and other forms of art remind us of the importance of the leap--that is, of imagination. Where imagination is valued--widely praised, engaged in, and made available in the richest possible variety of forms--the leap is valued. Trying to picture what it is like to be someone else, even someone not obviously similar to oneself, will come easier. Will seem like a more obvious thing to do. Will not seem silly or beside the point in deciding what to do and how to live.

So bring on the art--art we hate, art we love, art we aren't sure about. The more the better.