“A Word About a Word Addressed to a Word.” On Embracing the Fictiveness of Fiction

“TV is dull, like the block of self in each of us.”
–Anne Carson
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Before I abandoned absolute clarity as my ideal, I wanted to write fiction scrubbed of fantasy; of plot and artifice; of fiction. Transparency was both my interpersonal and aesthetic ideal. I knew both were implausible. Now I find both undesirable.

I used to want my prose to achieve the mesmerizing first-person purity of Marguerite Duras’s The Lover. “The story of my life does not exist,” says its narrator. “Does not exist. There’s never any center to it. No path, no line.” She describes stretches of her past as a darkness, void of people, that holds buried “facts, feelings, events.” In my writing I wanted to be faithful to the formlessness of my life—the memories resisting the linear flow of time, the crude material of confusion and obliviousness, the lack of any discernable trajectory or pattern—while also honing an indelible voice that was reflective, observant, and unflinching.

To make things up, to impose a form on my amorphous past and consciousness, to create characters caught up in a plot, seemed not only antiquated but contrary to the imperative to write what was true.

I was as averse to the fictiveness of some fiction as I was to theatre. I have until quite recently found theatre-going a discomfiting experience. It didn’t matter if I thought the actors were excellent and the writing powerful; I felt as embarrassed as I might at a party watching a friend acting “out of character” to suck up to an influential person. The awkwardness of watching theatre is not unlike the painfulness of a first date.

You have committed to sharing a close space with a stranger as you try to get a sense of each other: not simply from what they say, but how they address you, how they look and move and smell. On the first meeting you don’t know how to act, how you are being perceived, how to interpret your date. In the case of theatre, the space itself is an artifice, a darkened auditorium. Across the table from a veritable stranger, I don’t feel like myself. I make a choice to make myself vulnerable to a stranger because I am ready to risk mortification, irritation, and boredom to discover organic attraction and natural sympathy within the contrived framework of the date.

This confusing mixture of awkwardness and yearning, attentiveness to and estrangement from a stranger performing before you, can arise between any two people. It catches me when I’m teaching a new class and erupts without warning in close relationships, too. One of my writerly preoccupations is impurity: the innocent, sometimes dangerous longing for purity and the inescapability of contamination or cross-pollination. A few years after I started writing  seriously, I realized that to set up a distinction between natural and unnatural, performance and authenticity, and even life and form might be habitual and intuitive, but was ultimately myopic and oppressive. It contradicts the fact of our porousness, our mutability.

One truth I learned from Ovid is that form is not as an artificial, fixed device. It is an expression of possibility.

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Virginia Woolf describes Charlotte Brontë’s work as the poetry of affirmation: Brontë’s writing says “with eloquence and splendour and passion ‘I love’, ‘I hate’, ‘I suffer.’” The power of such utterances is lasting; they cast a perennial sense of discovery. The governess is no longer a familiar figure in Anglo-American culture, but Jane Eyre and Villette continue to captivate no doubt in part because the positions of caregiver and nanny remain common, especially among women in foreign countries. The Lover, Annie Ernaux’s A Girl’s Story, Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter, Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light explore intimacy and intellect and interiority in ways that thrill us for their insistence, in every line, that “I am.” No identifiable plot undergirds these contemporary works. A specific situation in time and place stands as the Archimedean center from which these testaments, with their granular observations of consciousness, expand.

The affirmation of one’s existence is not simple; it is always an accomplishment, as well as an elixir for those with less power in a hegemonic society. The weakest novels of this kind offer not vital studies of the self but anemic expressions of alienation. They portray the individual as an impermeable block of self and read as symptoms rather than insights into our late capitalist moment, in which consciousness itself is reified as private and discrete.

By contrast, the novels I’ve listed here feel like a breaking open of existing discourse, as if they were creating a language for concealed experiences, unrecognized bodies, invisible domestic interiors. They accomplish this with relentless, searing focus on the elaboration of personal experience and possess the precision and uncanniness of certain untouched photographs. In Territory of Light a single mother’s year with her young child in a fourth-floor apartment is recorded in pristine sentences that give a cinematic clarity to the closed space. But even photographs aren’t unmediated documents. We have to be present to take a photograph, and we want it to be seen.

The more I wrote, the clearer it became to me that I needed to write a novel focused not on myself but on the charged space between myself and others. I wanted to embrace the artificiality of plot and the creation of literary characters; to give form, not to my formless life, but to my relationships with others. I realized that, though it might be true that the story of my life doesn’t exist, a story of some kind irresistibly takes shape when two or more characters bear equal weight within a narrative. I wanted my writing to reveal the eloquence that emerges only within a dramatic situation, in the often fake-feeling and embarrassing encounters we have with strangers and therapists, partners and potential lovers, relatives and unknown neighbors. This kind of eloquence draws its force from the moral and erotic tensions between intelligent bodies.

This is the fantasy animating my novel, The Sisters K: that the differences between people can never be entirely revealed or reconciled, but will nonetheless generate words of power and meaning, and life. That we change when we are with others and need them to understand who we are.

And so I turned away from Duras and other writers often described as makers of autofiction, and returned to some of my earlier artistic loves: Dostoevsky and Antigone, Henry James and King Lear, Women in Love and the great films of Ingmar Bergman. As Mikhail Bakhtin writes of Dostoevsky’s work, they compose “a word about a word addressed to a word.”

The idea that a novel with a plot, with a defined and crafted storyline, implies that our lives have the shape of a structured narrative betrays a literal-minded conception of storytelling. Our lives are not commensurate with stories. Storytelling lends form to experience. “My experiences, if described, wouldn’t portray the vision they gave me,” writes Alexander Chee. Our hours and days will always be both irregular and dull, formless and familiar. A story provides a vision gleaned from the actual.

In the story of our lives, we reveal ourselves to others only in part because of the eternal constraints of time and contingency, so keenly decried in much love poetry, as well as the changeability and essential mystery of our selves, also fiercely lamented in lyrics of love. When we face another, we present a form, a possibility, in that moment. We may be another person in the next.

The story of my singular life doesn’t exist because it wouldn’t explain who, or what, I am.

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My novel is a dream of expressiveness as dialogue. In most encounters and conversations, we don’t manage to say everything we wanted to say, and we misunderstand not only the intended meanings of our interlocutors, but often, amid the noise of everyday life, simply mishear or fail to listen. I don’t, however, think my novel is any less true to life for the polished coherence of my characters’ dialogues. The underlying reality I tried to wrestle into language is the ways that we are locked in meaning with others.

I have been reading popular writing on quantum theory lately because I suspect that only the most surprising and counterintuitive revelations of science can offer some account of what I think is the weirdest aspect of language and human thinking: metaphor. When I came across Carlo Rovelli’s explanation of how an elementary particle travels in spacetime, through what he calls “a cloud of possibility,” I gained a clearer notion of one of the functions of plot. “It is as if the electron, in order to go from A to B, passed ‘through all possible trajectories,’ or, in other words, unfurled into a cloud in order to then converge mysteriously on point B, where it collides again with something else.” I began to see plot, itself a metaphor for metamorphosis, as the dramatization of a path between two encounters that describes all possible paths.

Point B represents movement itself as relational. With The Sisters K I wanted to create distinctive, evolving characters together traveling a visionary path—a plot—through the realm of the possible to meet another point of collision, imbrication, relation. I tried to construct a plot based on a series of dialogue-rich encounters that illuminated something about all possible paths for my characters.

My characters are fictional, imaginary forms of being, and thus expressions of possibility. And their encounters represent a fantasy of transformative openness that can be realized in real life.

A number of people have asked me if my novel is autobiographical. I’m not sure I’d describe it so, though like most fiction it has assimilated countless small and large aspects of the writer’s life. It does depict the sense of isolation I’ve carried for much of my life. But my objective was never to represent isolation as the truth of my human condition.