Anatomy of a Story
All stories are infinite
Edited and arranged by Robert Friedman
Not that the story need be long, but
it will take a long while to make it
short.
Henry David Thoreau
It is a maxim: all stories are infinite. All stories have to be radically distilled. There is no “first cause” in a story as there can be no final line. Wherever the writer chooses to begin is arbitrary, in medias res. For—what came before the opening sentence? And before that? In an infinite regression, not to a beginning (for there is no beginning) but to an approximation of a beginning—Once upon a time.
The king died. The queen died.
Is this a story, or is this an anecdote? Perhaps it is not even an anecdote, and not even a single statement but two (unrelated) statements.
The two brief statements so juxtaposed seem to suggest a temporal relationship. A geographical relationship. Some sort of familial relationship. Yet, the two statements are not actually linked, and so cannot constitute a “narrative.”
The king died, the queen died.
The king died, soon then the queen died.
The king died, (and) soon then the queen died.
These three statements have entered the gravitational field of “narrative”—“story.” For they are linked in a (seemingly) causal way.
(Though there is no evidence that the queen died because the king died, it is a natural human predilection to make this inference. The great eighteenth century Scottish philosopher/skeptic David Hume might not have agreed, out of a perverse sort of Scottish common sense: how can we know with absolute certainty that the sun will “rise” in the morning, based upon the (mere, empirical) fact that the sun has always “risen” in the morning, in memory? We think we know, we behave as if we know, but Hume is correct, we cannot know as we might know that one and one are two, or two times five is ten.)
The king died (and so) soon then the queen died.
In this compound statement, the relationship between the two phrases is unmistakable and irrefutable: we are told by the small determinate word “so” that the queen died because the king had died, and there is no margin now for speculation.
Is this a story? And if so, is it a subtle story? Or is it rather a too-explicit story, that announces its meaning before it has even begun, so that there is no mystery, and nothing for the reader to discover?
The king died, (but then) the queen did not die.
Here is an orthogonal narrative, that does/ does not spring from a causal relationship. The inference is that the queen should die, but in fact, we are told but then the queen did not die.
Such a narrative, that seems to spring in a perpendicular fashion from the Once upon a time opening, is more engaging, more problematic, as it is less conventional and expected, than The king died, (and then) the queen died or its variants.
The queen died. The king had died.
The queen died, (for) the king had died.
The queen did not die, (though) the king had died.
The queen will/will not die, (for/ though) the king had died.
All of these are variants on the original statements and each could be made interesting in its own (original, novel) way.
Once upon a time is a (time-) honored way of beginning a story. For a story must begin in time; there is no story out of time.
Eudora Welty once said: “Time has to move through a mind.”
As there can be no story without conflict, no forward momentum without disequilibrium, so there can be no story that does not move through time. Even in the distant, detached, oracular Once upon a time there is a storyteller, pretending to be anonymous. It may be a master of the faux fairy tale like Hans Christian Anderson: the highly conscious craftsman emulating the visionary distances and impersonality of the fairy tale, the voice of the people. Such faux fairy tales are bold appropriations of folk art, very difficult to execute though (one might be led to think) appearing simple.
In great literature, the simple, artless is often the most brilliantly invented.
In tales beginning Once upon a time a narrator is telling a story in which he/she does not appear. Others appear, who are seen at a little distance—“characters.” But these are like figures in a dream, each figure generated by the dreamer, and each a part of the dreamer, however (seemingly) unlike the dreamer.
In most contemporary fiction Once upon a time has been radically distilled and delimited. The time-setting is likely to be a recent time, a time within memory, a few years ago, yesterday. Unless it is the present time: the historic present. Our tenses are but two: was, is.
When the tense is is, the conceit is that the story is happening even as we read it. The story hasn’t already happened but is happening.
Even a story that is was seems, to the reader, a story that is happening, whose outcome is unknown.
The excitement of the unknown!
Reading a story, the reader is the pursuer of the unknown—the not-yet-known. The reader is a kind of detective pursuing clues, trying to decipher a code, interpreting “tone”—“mood”—“language”—“meaning” which seem to flow beneath the surface of the story.
The “plot” is the vehicle bearing meaning. But if you summarize a plot, paraphrase a story, you will find that the reduction of a story to its plot yields no meaning. You will ask—“So what? What does it all mean?”
The first book I ever held in my hand, before I could read, was The Gold Bug & Other Tales by Edgar Allan Poe. With great fascination, though I could not yet read, I turned the mysterious and entrancing pages of this book, and studied the full-page illustrations that were intricately executed line drawings, “gothic” in nature. (Not that I had any idea of the “gothic.”)
In the farmhouse of my childhood there were few books. Perhaps there were no other books until, a few years after my discovery of The Gold Bug on a shelf, my grandmother began to give me books for my birthday and for holidays, notably Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. (From the approximate age of five onward, I became what is called a “voracious reader.” A child happiest with a book in hand, or the prospect of a book.)
The experience of Poe in my life is a complicated one since it began, literally, before I could read. And then, when I began to read, in a childlike and stumbling way, the tales of The Gold Bug were utterly mysterious, unfathomable, and tantalizing; Poe’s dense, tortuous prose was totally unlike the speech of the adults of my life, and bore virtually no relationship to the primer prose of my school books and to the newspaper and magazine articles my parents read, at which I glanced, or tried to read out of curiosity. It was a notion of mine that the early prose fiction I encountered, by Hawthorne as well as Poe, was “real”—“realistic”; that is, I took for granted that these writers were writing about real subjects, though totally strange to me, like those upsetting dreams of childhood in which I could not quite determine if I was awake or asleep or somehow both, simultaneously.
A child’s sense of reality differs enormously from an adult’s sense of reality which is informed by skepticism as well as experience. A child does not know enough to realize what she does not know and any voice of adult authority carries with it an air of the absolute, not to be questioned as (when a child is very young) she does not “question” the adults who surround her.
How many years passed, during which time I tried to read the short story “The Gold Bug”—five years? six? ten? Here as elsewhere in the more obscure works of Poe one encounters dense thickets of prose in the convoluted, overwrought style of the nineteenth century, in which nothing is stated clearly, or directly: all is filtered through the prism of a “gothic” sensibility, in the case of Poe often a narrator whose unreality is compounded by mania, paranoia, psychosis. (In other tales, notably “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poe is dazzling as any contemporary writer giving voice to extreme states of mind with obvious zest and virtuosity; but the denser, more “gothic” Poe tales outnumber the more fluid.) In fact I’m not sure that I ever comprehended what was happening in this awkward mixture of what Poe called “ratiocination” and nineteenth-century European gothic mystery involving the deciphering of an elaborate cryptogram message. (Though I recall as a young child being fascinated by “secret codes”—“secret languages.” Very likely I felt a natural attraction to the act of writing in code [so that no adult could know what I was writing?]—which isn’t very different from the writing of fiction generally.)
Found amid Poe’s papers after his premature death on October 7, 1849 on a Baltimore street was a single-page manuscript titled “The Light-House.” It was a challenge to a writer of the twenty-first century to reimagine Poe in present-day terms: to transform nineteenth-century gothic into contemporary themes of ecology and evolution, male-female relations, a re-examination of the “Romantic.” But my story “Poe Posthumous; or, The Light House” (originally titled “The Fabled Light-House at Vina de Mar” and written for a special edition of McSweeney’s edited by Michael Chabon before appearing in my collection Wild Nights!) is essentially a variant of the archetypal Poe adventure story in which a hypersensitive protagonist confronts gothic horror and succumbs to it. In this story the Poe-like narrator lapses by degrees into an altered state of being, not madness, or not madness merely, but an aroused consciousness in which brute survival is the great, immediate and prevailing challenge. “Poe Posthumous” is intended as a nightmare tale, not without moments of comedy, depicting the ways in which human beings might adapt themselves to radically altered environments; how against the grain of their own “inborn” personalities they may discover themselves behaving. For it is not enough to maintain one’s distinct identity—one must survive as a living organism.
The story is also an ironic portrait of the Romantic male, for whom the female is idealized and de-animalized. In Poe, as in gothic writers generally, there are no bodies, and no bodily functions including even eating. And so in this postmodernist appropriation, the Poe-like narrator realizes fully, and with some appetite, the range of his animal instincts, long suppressed in his former life in genteel Philadelphia literary circles. Rare among Poe, a happy ending!
The first great writer whose work I read with avid interest, and set out as a young writer to emulate, was not the fevered Poe of childhood but the cool and understated Hemingway of early adolescence. In a tenth grade English class at Williamsville High School in Williamsville, New York, under the tutelage of a wonderful teacher named “Mr. Stein”—(Harold Stein?)—we were assigned short stories from an anthology of American classic stories dating back to Washington Irving, Hawthorne, Melville and Poe, and including such near-contemporaries as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Irwin Shaw, Conrad Aiken (“Silent Snow, Secret Snow”—mesmerizing!). The Hemingway story in the anthology was “Soldier’s Home”—sparely narrated, taut with irony (which I did not understand but certainly felt), a minimalist language that seemed to me very beautiful, if enigmatic. Soon then, I acquired a copy of Hemingway’s early short stories in our time from the library, and set out to immerse myself in these elemental-seeming tales written when Hemingway was a young expatriate in his twenties, living in Paris, and already married, and a father. Oddly, these early stories are less accessible to the reader than the more famous stories of Hemingway’s maturity—“The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”—as they more resemble prose poetry than conventional prose fiction. The governing principle of Hemingway’s prose in in our time is “less is more”—though only in the hands of a master craftsman does this adage really apply. (“Indian Camp” is an ideal story for writing students to contemplate. Line by line, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph this minimalist story, hard-cut as a diamond, yields a kind of shadow-story beneath its seemingly artless, idiomatic surface. Each element of punctuation is carefully chosen, with a mild, dramatic surprise in the final line.)
It is perhaps unexpected that the story in Wild Nights!, “Papa at Ketchum 1961,” is not at all in the tradition of Hemingway’s minimalist stories, nor even in the tradition of his later, more expansive stories. It is rather more a meditative, introspective, postmodernist prose poem that builds through something like incremental repetition; the obsessions of the aging, ailing, near-paralyzed and deeply depressed “Nobel-prize winning author” constitute the plot, examining layers of motive and personality as Hemingway’s fiction rarely did. Such inwardness would have dismayed Hemingway for it would seem to signal the kind of unmanly, self-exhibitionistic weakness more appropriate to Scott Fitzgerald (particularly in the memoirist “The Crack-Up”) than to the hyper-manly Hemingway for whom the confession of weakness, any sort of intimate self-revelation or self-pity would be humiliating. The story moves back and forth in time as Hemingway’s fiction, with its focus upon the present tense, and the present setting, resolutely did not. For the aging, ailing, deeply depressed and suicidal author (already in his late fifties an elderly man) the only way out of his quagmire was through writing—but writing was what he could not do, because (this is my theory) he could not confront his true subject, the paralysis of the spirit, the wellsprings of his own depression, the enigma of his own divided personality in which any sort of sentiment was softness, “feminine.” That the portrait of Hemingway is clear-eyed does not mean that it is not wholly sympathetic: there is a sense in which, like James Joyce in a very different way, Hemingway is the essential writer’s writer, a hero of writing, perhaps a martyr.
I take for granted the fact of Hemingway’s genius—indeed, this is true for all of the subjects of Wild Nights!
Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn was another of the great, influential novels of my adolescence, which I would subsequently teach as a university instructor so frequently, with such intensity, that decades later I’ve discovered, leafing through my old much-annotated copy the other day, that I had virtually memorized the novel; just to glance at a paragraph is to uncoil the familiar words, as a strain of music can precipitate an entire work of music once played on an instrument.
Yet, the protagonist of the elegiac “Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish 1906” is not portrayed in anything like Twain’s own prose. Here is a very different sensibility, not self-aggrandizing (in comic excess, in Twain’s usual masterly vein) but obsessed with the self’s guilt. (It is ironic that Twain would have considered such a story obscene and unfathomable. Though the writer was emotionally drawn to young, prepubescent girls he could not have confronted anything like the chastely modulated pedophilia depicted here, in himself; if he had, he could not have forgiven himself as we are moved to forgive Grandpa Clemens.)
It was my intention in Wild Nights! to present classic American writers in their “secret” lives. Not as they are usually perceived, and might have wished themselves perceived, but as, essentially, they really were in the coils of their own deep fantasies, in the last weeks, days, hours and minutes of their lives. The exception is Emily Dickinson who appears transmogrified, physically truncated and “distilled” as a computer-operated manikin, EDickinsonRepliLuxe—no longer mortal but immortal (as long as her owner doesn’t destroy her in a fit of jealous rage); the author of the most exquisite verse, whose language is indeed iridescent—“Bright Knots of Apparitions/ Salute us, with their wings—“ that is maddening to those who don’t understand poetry (or, perhaps, women).
“The Master at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital” is my homage to Henry James. It is an elegy for James’s not often heralded courage, and for the vanished way of life of the Master; a depiction of a sudden flaring up of (sexual, spiritual) passion in an elderly gentleman-artist whose life has been almost totally repressed. This is the true subject of the story, that erupts in gothic excess in the Master’s fever-dream of the demonic adversarial female, Nurse Edwards, who peers into his most secret longings.
In life, Henry James behaved with extraordinary courage and generosity in volunteering to work with wounded soldiers at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London, as noted by his friend and benefactor Edith Wharton; it would be good to think that, at the age of seventy-three, James died with his romantic fantasies intact—a fate all writers might wish for themselves.
So thought provoking, thank you.
Fabulous insights.