THE SECRET OF A NOVEL
Georges Michelsen
The idea that literature conceals
within it a secret is not new. Italo Calvino said the novelist always hides
a secret in order to reveal it later. Mystery novels are only the overt
expression of a more general literary truism: People read for the unknown,
for what is kept from them. They read for the pleasure of discovering the
secret hidden within the main characters’ personality, that will determine
if those characters survive, or are destroyed by, the book’s conceit.
But what if
there were more to it than that? What if fiction—especially novels—held a
second level of secrets that was hidden not only from the reader, but from
the writer as well? What if any process of creative writing—even this
essay—consisted not only of uncovering what was thought to be revealed, but
what lay under the verbs and descriptions, between the fears and obsessions
of the author’s mind?
Please understand: I am not talking
about semiotics. I leave to sleep the unconscious cultural and linguistic
patterns in a text. What I’m referring to is both deeper and more personal.
It is also more basic to human language and thought. Listen up: listen to
what I am going to reveal. I have a tale to tell.
#
I should confess from the start that I
don’t have much truck with the ouija board theory of writing. I tell my
students that fiction is not psychoanalysis. If you want to exorcise
personal problems, I say, go to a shrink, or a witch doctor. Get drunk, take
Prozac, shoot yourself if necessary, but for pity’s sake don’t write
fiction. Too many bad confessional novels already have been inflicted on a
cringing world.
I also teach my students that writers
work along a spectrum of planning. Each writer chooses the point on the
spectrum that suits him. At one end of the spectrum is the muse extreme,
where one starts writing without a clue as to what will happen to one’s
characters. At the opposite end is the engineer’s format, whereby one frames
a structure as one designs a bridge: no surprises. Over and over, I pound
home the message that no right way or wrong way exist. The only criterion is
the result. The only benchmark is, Does this story work? Does it move the
reader?
My own praxis falls in the middle. I
do a lot of thinking before I start to write a book. I live with the
characters and painstakingly research the environment they inhabit. The
research often opens up unexpected avenues, mini-worlds into which the
characters might wish to detour later. Still, by the time I start writing I
have a good idea what manner of secret they will uncover during their
journey.
This is not to say I don’t make
discoveries during the actual writing. But if the muse paradigm is like
being driven by a stranger through a landscape about which you have no clue,
my method is more like taking a walk through a countryside I have visited
before. The unexpected crops up the way it would on a walk; a new songbird,
the choice of a path one didn’t plan on taking, a farm one did not know was
there. A stranger. Perhaps, even, a corpse. But it’s rare for me to go
through the looking glass. It’s rare that the secret should be fundamentally
changed by what happens in the course of writing.
Or so I thought, until The Art and
Practice of Explosion. Let me tell you about this book. Here are the
surface facts: It’s a novel that was published by University Press of New
England two years ago. I wrote the first drafts eight years before it was
published. It tells the story of three people—a Hungarian neuropsychiatrist,
a French marine archeologist, and an American university professor, an
expert in the politics of aid. They had met during a hostage crisis in a
country that was not Guatemala. Nine years after the hostage-taking, Frank,
the American, ran into Eva, the Hungarian, in Paris. She had learned that
Rohan, the Frenchman, was working in that city. The three arranged to spend
a weekend together in eastern France. The train journey they shared was the
track, real and figurative, that underlay the narrative.
I meant from the start for
Explosion to be more than a linear tale. I hold a belief that every
novel constitutes a story-world, built by the author in collaboration with
the reader. To make the story live it has to break the timing-chain of the
reader’s life. It must screw up his pacing. This is a crucial step because
(so biologists tell us) everything we do corresponds to a deep rhythm of
activity and the brain waves that regulate it. Break that rhythm, and you
smash a core link to the world of jobs and family issues. Break this rhythm,
and the reader is free to drift into a time and place completely separate.
But once this cage of daily rhythms
has been broken the story world has to be good enough to sustain the reader.
This is especially true of the characters who live there. In Explosion
the characters had perhaps a greater weight to bear than in my other novels.
The idea was not to tell this story sequentially, according to changes in
external events, but rather by following the emotional sine-curve of a
character’s life, as recalled during the trip. The catalysts for individual
reminiscences were sense impressions—smell, flavor, sound—as well as
previous memories. As the little tales were triggered; as backstories from
the memory banks of my characters accumulated, they would add mass to the
people until a certain psychic criticality was reached. At this point, I
hoped, they would start to live and breathe, even more than characters in my
other books, and depart from paths I expected them to take.
Eva, Frank and Rohan rose to the
challenge. As I wrote, none of them turned out to be exactly the person I
thought he or she was down deep. Frank was colder, Eva both stronger and
more vulnerable, Rohan more intellectually curious. Eva slept with a bank
robber, and at one point came close to suicide; Frank had a homosexual
episode. Rohan fell in love with his sister. None of these characteristics
or emotions was planned or expected. All of them had to happen because the
world I built made it impossible for them not to happen.
One other thing needed also to occur.
Right from the start, I knew something was off in this country that was not
Guatemala. Eva, Frank and Rohan belonged to a random group taken prisoner in
a luxury hotel by a guerrilla cell. The cell was led by the semi-mythical
Commandante Julián. As the crisis deepened, and the hotel was surrounded
by the tanks of the Gardia Nacional, it became clear the only way to save
the hostages would be to deliver Julián to the soldiers. The trouble was, no
one knew who the commandante really was—except Rohan, who was
friendly with one of the guerrillas. And Eva, who it turned out had slept
with Julián. And Frank, who was told this secret by Eva and Rohan. At the
end, someone did drop a dime, and betrayed Julián to the army.
I was not too worried, as I walked
through the landscape of the novel, about which of the three actually
committed the betrayal. All were capable of treason, and not a few of their
memories concerned instances where each, individually, sold someone he or
she loved downriver. More to the point, as Rohan says near the end, “Maybe
we are all guilty…if we presume to visit a place in such pain as Xelajú to
begin with.” Thus the real betrayal was cultural. By the very fact of being
Westerners in a poor country ruled by wealthy latifundístas, they had
endorsed a sellout of the men and women who suffered every day under such a
regime. Anyway the novel was not a mystery. There were clues, if one was
interested in following them. Many of the clues were contradictory, pointing
toward Frank, Eva and Rohan in turn. But by the time I finished writing,
enough circumstantial evidence had accumulated to build a solid case against
the American, Frank.
#
I get edit fatigue. After spending a
year writing and another six months revising and correcting and rewriting I
start to refer, in my critical reading of a book, not to my own vision of
life-the-universe-and-everything, but rather to the story-world I’ve created
in the novel, and to the various alternate orbits it could have swung into.
This is good, even crucial, while writing, but it does not work for editing,
which assumes a willful acceptance of the reader’s role. This in turn
implies ignorance, or at least an ignoring, of both narrative history and
alternate dénouements in order to gauge how the tale will play for someone
who has never read it before. The only way to break this cycle of
self-reference is to put the book aside for awhile. That “awhile,” for
Explosion, grew to eight years, during which time I fell in love, got
married, had kids, wrote other books. But my love affairs are not restricted
to my wife; I fall in love also with the worlds I create, and the people who
live in them. If these characters don’t get to break out of my writing room
and flee into the real world, causing others to love or hate as they would
any other living human, they grow resentful and whine loudly inside my head.
Eventually the whining grows intolerable. Then I must go back and pay
attention to the characters and finish polishing them until they can truly
be born.
Thus, eight and a half years after I
first started Explosion, I returned to the world of Frank and Eva and
Rohan. One morning in January I read the novel through again. It was that
first unsoured read when, after a long hiatus, you regained to some extent
your editorial virginity—when you could read a book you wrote, having
largely forgotten the nineteen versions of how else you tried a given
chapter; having spaced out on all but the coarsest details of the secrets
that came to light at the end.
It was a good read. The characters
breathed and struggled from the first. I felt the burn of happiness that
comes from living in an alternate world that seems, while you’re in its
pages, more valid and pleasurable than actual surroundings. But
three-quarters of the way through another feeling, of queasiness, of dread
even, began to rise inside me. I flipped back through the manuscript
searching for the off-key facts, the discrepancies in timing that betrayed
when someone had made that fateful phone call to the Gardia. Here are some
of those facts: Frank knew a government agent in the hotel. A key witness to
what happened in the bar was enamored of Eva. Rohan did not seem to be
around at a crucial point in their captivity. But the preponderance of clues
pointed one way only. I read to the end. When I got there, I put the
manuscript away. I remember staring fixedly into space for a few minutes.
Because what I had read told me Frank was not the culprit. The novel
said: Someone else betrayed Julían.
Had I gone crazy? I wondered. Or, in
my early forties, had my memory already deteriorated to the extent that I
could forget something so crucial in a novel I wrote? Filled with
self-doubt, I went back to the book again.
#
Another thing that happened between
when I stopped working on Explosion and when I picked it up eight
years later was, I started teaching. I still teach, creative writing at the
undergrad level at New York University. Teachers often claim, mock-humbly,
“I learn more from my students than they do from me,” but in my case I
believe this to be true. One of the lessons that I’ve learned from my kids
is that the process of concealment is far more central to writing fiction—my
own as well as other people’s—than I ever realized.
Another way of saying this is: Winter
is the writer’s season. I am suspicious of literary chestnuts but I know
exactly what this one means. Winter, at least in the temperate zone, is a
time of hiding, of concealing reserves of warmth and sustenance in caches
where wolves and frost can’t get at them. It’s the season when you bank your
fires, cover them entirely so they can hibernate, and breathe, and leap into
orange life when spring returns. Winter is the symbol: so I tell my
students; but hiding, concealment, misdirection are the key. They are not
just tools, they are the source-code of how a story works, because they
typify how our language functions, and our logic behind that. Look: Our
logic is built on defining nouns, that proceed to verb and action to affect
a person or event in hidden ways—hidden in the sense that they were unknown
when we started the experiment. Our history, our evolution, our survival as
a species; our language which is the chief instrument of that survival; all
are built on this progression.
But there is more. Humanoids have
been around for a million years and for all but ten thousand of them—one
percent of that history—they lived in the wild, in an environment that was
seriously hostile. Bears, sabre-toothed tigers, wolves, enemy tribes, rival
clans; dust-storms, lightning, whole geological epochs of ice; all were out
to destroy you and your bloodline. To survive the brute environment you had
first and foremost to safeguard the secret of the actions you took. You had
to learn how to slink, and camouflage, and hide the stories you made to map
your resources in the world. Because hostile humans were part of the enemy
environment, you also had to know how to hide in a human way, that is to
say, how to lie. Misdirection, false trails, and mendacity; these are the
real spoor of human civilization. It follows, since finding and concealing
secrets is so basic to our makeup, that it is in large part through the act
of lying, and hiding, that we betray the secret of who we really are.
This instinct runs so deep (so runs
my argument to students) that your fiction will only convince if it follows
the same process. It’s not just the tired aphorism of lying for the sake of
honesty; the two elements, of veracity and concealment, are so interlinked
that it is only by lying—or at least by closely parsing the process of
deception and discovery—that one can arrive at, to quote Tina Turner, what
(we) loosely call the truth. We look at people, and characters, as we
approach an oyster. If the shell opens easily we know something is rotten
and soft, and throw away the meat. If we have to struggle to open the
bivalve, scraping our knuckles and maybe inflicting a deep wound in the
metacarpal area so that finally, using all our might, we can force the blade
between the tightly clamped shells; then we’re sure that what is hidden
inside is worth the effort.
I would argue this holds true of all
good fiction and literary non-fiction as well. Who would care about Gone
with the Wind if Scarlett did not hide her love for Rhett from herself?
What would Great Expectations be but one long device if we knew from
the start that Estella was who she said she was? Would we follow that
fatuous circle of knights through Morte d’Arthur without the secret
seduction of Guinevere? Would we care a tinker’s damn about Dick Diver if he
told everyone in Tender is the Night how and why he was fated to
self-destruct? If man is the story-telling animal, and stories are built on
the process of deception, it follows that it must be the details and the
intensity of our secrets, and the fine-print of how we guard them, that
validate what is revealed at the end. Through exactly the same process, it
is how deftly and hard our characters hide their secrets that convinces the
reader he or she is looking at a world so functional it can offer us the
different vision, the spectrum of new choices, that is perhaps the greatest
objective gift of reading.
This is true of narrative, and plots.
It holds true in the tiniest nooks of the writing process. The most common
mistake beginning writers make is to force their characters to communicate
honestly through dialogue. Damn it, I rave to my astonished classes, don’t
you understand that dialogue has nothing to do with communicating “truth”?
When you talk to someone, what they believe is not what you say but what you
don’t say—the things you withhold. Even when a character, or a living
person, sets out in good faith to tell what he believes to be the truth, it
is what he shows, not what he tells, that convinces us of his probity. I
cite the Chekhov truism: When the master wishes a character to confess his
love for someone, he causes him to ask for his galoshes. I cite also this
dialogue from Rio Bravo: (John Wayne) You better get out of those
skimpy things or I’ll have to arrest ya. (Eva Marie Saint) Why don’t you say
what you really mean? (JW) Whaddya mean? (EMS) That you love me. (JW)
I said I’d have ya arrested!” People don’t say what they mean
in real life, because everyone’s character is actually a number of
personalities. Which personality we hide or display depends on the status of
the power game, the social situation. Think of how you present yourself to
friends, to colleagues; you highlight your quick wit, your self-confidence,
and cover up the midnight doubts, the suspect penchant for knock-knock
jokes. Is this dishonesty? No. Is an iceberg dishonest because eighth-ninths
of it is hidden? No—although those eight-ninths can, of course, cause
problems. Conversely, does honesty imply saying exactly what you think about
everything all the time? No again. I had this proved to me once by a
girlfriend who took pride in being a compulsive truth-teller. She refused to
fudge the facts or white-lie under any circumstances. If she thought someone
was stupid or inept she would often tell them outright. The turmoil this
invariably caused skewed the communication between the people concerned far
more than lying would have. It also did not take into account the fact that
we cannot always know for sure how we feel. What we think, what we perceive,
can and will change with circumstances. Because we see this instinctively,
the normal human’s idea of “truth” is less an absolute reference than a feel
for balances between the hidden and the revealed. We speak our minds only at
the very end of a long process of feints and deceptions; or in emergencies,
when we have nothing left to lose.
My students are indulgent, and
usually forgive such forays into socio-psychological commentary. For myself,
as a writer, the fascinating angle to the issue of concealment and secrets
remains what I learned in the pages of Explosion: that hiding happens
inside, at the level of the writer himself, so that he might build a world
so real, and so realistic too, that it will start to hide things on its own
from the human who gave it life. I believe this comes down to the same
phenomenon I call the “story subconscious” in class. I have collected many
examples of this phenomenon from my students’ work, of which I will list
only a random sample: A female narrator who spends her time flirting with
two possibilities: knifing her father, and writing in the journal of her
friend Nino. A Texas teenager who inexplicably takes off cross-country on a
motorbike with her boyfriend and (she does not tell her boyfriend this) her
Daddy’s credit card. An apparently autistic farmboy, and the flagrant
absence of a father figure in the story. You’ll have to take my word for it,
but the authors saw no link between the two key elements that I have
described in each story. Yet it was clear to me, reading their narratives,
that not only were the two elements closely linked, but it was the tension
between them that provided gasoline to make the stories burn.
This brings me back to my own story,
to Explosion. In trying to understand what happened to exonerate one
character and find another guilty against my express command, I now saw that
the world had worked as it was supposed to, turning so complex and yet so
consistent that at a certain point in the writing I was forced to make
changes the world needed, as opposed to what I intended at the outset. That
was fine, and it fitted my theories. But the world in Explosion went
further because it changed the way I thought about the three central
characters, so that without being aware I was looking at them differently
than when I conceived of them; and subtly, unconsciously, I changed their
personalities to the point where the man who was meant to betray Julián
became incapable of doing so. It was a covert shift. I still felt Frank
could have taken this selfish, cynical step. But now, eight years later, I
marked the incidents in his emotional history that argued against it. Once,
when he worked in Afghanistan, he found himself isolated, at the mercy of
the winter mountains and the mujahideen; and he had one of those
Buddhist moments, of letting go, of being at peace with whatever might
occur. Much later, he had the opposite experience. Waiting outside the
delivery room where his wife was undergoing serious complications in
childbirth, he was seized by a deep rejection of a world that could snuff
out a person as fundamentally innocent as Jodee. Frank was in some ways
morally corrupt but he had also become strong enough inside to withstand the
temptation of sneaking into that hotel bar, during the few minutes it was
unguarded, to pick up the phone. And somewhere in the long process of
writing the book I apparently changed the narrative’s timing to make clear,
if you looked closely enough, that only someone else could have committed
that act of betrayal. I don’t remember how it happened in detail. Perhaps I
made the changes as an experiment, and forgot about them, or thought I’d
changed them back. The shadings of evidence were subtle enough, unimportant
enough to the novel’s gist, for me to lose track. Or more interestingly, as
the character changed, I put off implicating Frank until it was too late.
Whereupon in a fit of consistency, or in the course of that experiment I
forgot to correct, I opened a window through which the other character could
sneak to commit the act. Because the other character, the true culprit, had
changed also, becoming so wrapped up in a feeling of loss, of needing to
help a loved one at home, that the idea of never getting out of this
besieged hotel became intolerable.
All of this could only happen in a
narrative as long and multileveled as Explosion. Still, the process
was essentially the same as in my students’ papers, where elements of power,
the bricks and mortar of character, were thrown in almost randomly; yet
because they were such potent elements—because they corresponded also to
strong facets of the writer’s subconscious—they grew mightier as the
narrative progressed, to the point where only the writer, who had some other
finale in mind; who was convinced she had a different secret to reveal (and
who probably also had a physics term paper to write) was incapable of seeing
what had altered in her story. And just as my students are often reacting to
drives they do not clearly understand: the need to release control, the urge
to procreate, the rejection of/desire for a father figure; with hindsight I
see now, in the choices I made regarding Frank and the others, a retracing
of older conflicts. Because I don’t think the change I made, by exonerating
the American and fingering one of the Europeans, was random. Of course it
was not random on the book’s terms because the book made its choices
according to its own parameters. But the process of discovery did not stop
there. The story, like every intelligent device in the history of fiction,
turned against its creator, digging up a facet of my own personality that
caused me to choose the options I did in an early draft; forcing me to
recognize, at a later stage, in the gut dynamics of my three main
characters, the dynamic of my own upbringing.
For my childhood was a process of
deep electrolysis, bubbling between a European cathode and an American
anode—a paternal European pole that was harsh, Cartesian, and deeply
layered, versus a maternal American side that was sunnier, more flexible,
pragmatic. And, while it is impossible for me to prove this, because of
Chartin’s Paradox, I believe I felt instinctively that the rigid European
personality traits I was familiar with might crack more easily, in the
context of these three people, than the less structured New World mentality.
And this is the revelation I have finally been forced into, through the
process of writing this essay. After all my rejections of the notion of
fiction-as therapy, the secret at the heart of Explosion likely found
its roots in my own primary Oedipal split.
Yet the ukhaze against
fiction-as-therapy remains valid, I think, because it applies to the intent
and process of writing, as opposed to the final effect. What I learned from
Explosion—what I learned, as I said, in the process of writing these
pages about writing Explosion—is that the deepest secret of crafting
literature is not that it is built on the act of deception, though it is.
Nor is it that the accurate reenactment of the hiding process enhances the
virtual reality of the story-world, although it clearly does. It is not, or
not only, that the story-world can achieve life on its own, and change the
characters and the environment they inhabit without the writer’s
consent—this I knew before. And it’s not that these changes can happen
covertly, without the author’s even being aware of them, which is something
I was not conscious of before becoming a teacher.
It’s not even that this process can
happen to me, which was unclear before writing Explosion. But a
profound secret does lurk at the heart of writing and it is this: that the
creation can turn against its creator, to qualify a precious theory, dig out
a facet of his personality that for all its arguable banality has always
acted as a secret agent of the writer’s life. It is no coincidence that this
pigeon came home to roost, with my novel, during the editing process.
Because it is during the process of editing that the writer makes the
partial switch from author to audience, leaving himself free to be altered
by the higher dynamics of fiction. He becomes at this stage a reader again,
and readers, consciously, or no, at the deepest level have always been aware
that they read to discover the secrets, however recondite, however flat,
that lie cached within their own psyche. Much of the thrill of reading comes
from the fact that a well made story-world, as a working model of how our
language and logic function—of how we lie about and hide the blackest
secrets of our heart—is as uncontrolable as Frankenstein’s creation. It’s an
unguided missile, an independent tool. It will and must work in ways its
author cannot control. To tell such a story is the most revolutionary act
possible because it is by definition beholden to no ideology nor theory
about how the world ought to be. The secrets it digs out can hurt as well as
heal.
The reader will notice I have not
revealed the secret at the heart of Explosion’s narrative—namely, who
betrayed Julián. That is because it would be treacherous to the spirit of a
text to betray its secret independently of the process whereby it is
concealed and laid bare; divorced, that is, from the sacred process of
reading. You can learn its secret in the usual way; by reading the book.
©
2005 Georges Michelsen
Georges Foy Michelsen, a
Franco-American novelist, writes in both English and French. He is a
graduate of the London School of Economics and Political Science, and
recipient of a fellowship in fiction from the National Endowment for the
Arts. He has published eleven novels, the latest of which, The Art &
Practice of Explosion, won the honorary mention prize for 2003 Book of
the Year in ForeWord Magazine. He has written for Harper’s, Men’s
Journal, the Boston Globe, Poets & Writers and Rolling Stone.
He has worked as a commercial fisherman, and as chief cake-transporter in a
biscuit factory. He currently teaches creative writing at New York
University.
