Packing it all in

(this post was written by Kyle on December 12, 2006, and it concerns novel & process & self & writing)

Vernon Hardapple: “Why did you keep writing this book if you didn’t even know what it was about?”

Grady Tripp: “I couldn’t stop.”

——

I am confused.

I say to myself and to others that I am working on a novel, and this is a true statement, but to what extent? I have not typed up any drafts, nor compiled lists of characters, nor worked on the description of a particular place, nor even hinted at compiling the basic elements of plot. I have no idea of my thematic intent and have not designed any strategy of motif or symbolic development. I have not even decided on the basic style of narration, or even whether it will be told in the first, second, or third person, or even in what tense it shall be written. There are no maps of imaginary places on my wall and my dry erase board contains nothing relevant to a novel. And yet, I say to myself to and others that I am working on a novel and maintain that this is a true statement. By what right?

It is no exaggeration to say that I spend the majority of my time thinking about the novel. The issue I think is that I have come to no concrete decisions as to its form. I simply don’t know what I want my novel to be. I can see its potential to be several things, but I’ve yet to decide which of those things I prefer.

That is why I am here today: to discuss my options.

“The gods of the hills are not the gods of the valleys.”
- Ethan Allen

I have been telling people that I want to write a novel that somehow relates to the secession of Vermont from the United States. For the last two or three days, however, I’ve been starting to reconsider this. There are several reasons why, but the most pertinent is because I want to abandon the reader’s need for verisimilitude. I do not want to be beholden to reality. I want the freedom to play with any and every aspect of my novel. If a rock happens to talk or a housefly happens to enter into a sexual relationship with a human, I want the reader to be able to go along with it. By playing with the idea of Vermont, I fear that I will disrespect those who consider themselves to be “real Vermonters.”

On the other hand, I believe that I can write a playful novel that includes the secession of Vermont without it being a sign of disrespect. I think I could place the novel several generations down the line from this one, in a world where Vermont simply is its own nation and where the story of its secession is little more than legend and myth.

In this version of the novel, I believe that the general story would follow the paths of Vermont’s origins. The land would be wild, the people would be strong and free, and the enemy would be those who would take their liberty. The general mode of the plot would be adventurous, and the characters would fall into easy comparison with Ethan Allen, his Green Mountain Boys, the New Yorkers who wanted their land, and the British who gave the New Yorkers their power.

The landscape of this story would include a Vermont that has almost returned to a state of nature (not utopic, but natural) and a dystopic version of the United States (a systematically-controlled society). There must be some conflict that exists between these horizons — perhaps the U.S. needs Vermont’s lumber; perhaps Vermont wants to keep out the bad elements that now overpopulate the U.S.; perhaps the U.S.’s paranoia creates a conflict where none should exist; perhaps global warming or nuclear apocalypse has occurred and Vermonters are trying to stay united against the now-chaotic masses on the other side of their borders; etc.

Whatever conflict was to exist between Vermont and the U.S., the type of novel I would write would have the international element subsumed to the personal conflicts of the characters. One of the reasons for reconsidering writing a novel that includes Vermont’s secession is because I do not want the novel to devolve to a political tract. What, then, do I want to write about?

“All novels, of every age, are concerned with the enigma of the self.”
- Milan Kundera

Perhaps I am not one of those writers who can be motivated by plot. Stephen King has said that he is and J.R.R. Tolkien could, in some sense, be said to be, but there are plenty of other novelists — and I am thinking of Milan Kundera, Jorge Louis Borges, and Samuel Beckett here — who obviously are not. And when it comes down to it, I would rather my name be mentioned in the latter category than the former. My background is in theory and philosophy, not storytelling. This in no way means that I want to write theory and philosophy instead of a novel — using Husserlian and Heideggerian terms, Kundera writes that “the novel’s raison d’être is to keep ‘the world of life’ under a permanent light and to protect us from ‘the forgetting of being,’” (Heidegger might say this is art’s “saving power”) — but it is to say that the novel I want to write does not originate from the compulsion to tell a story. It originates, instead, in concepts.

There are two philosophical concepts about which I am passionate and towards which I am curious. The first is the concept of the self. The second is the concept of the self’s relation to others, otherwise known as ethics — Italo Calvino once wrote, “Ethics has alwaus provided an excuse for literature and philosophy to look each other in the face.” Basically, I want this novel to say what I was trying to say in several of my college papers but at which I failed. In some sense, I am hoping that the form of the novel will give me a vocabulary that I can use to make myself clear — to make my self clear — to make my notion of the self clear.

“Fiction does its work by creating a dream in the reader’s mind.”
- John Gardner

I lumber after the notion of the self.
The lumber comes after the notion of the self.
From the lumber, comes the structure.
I find myself in top form.
I find my self in form.
Find your self in the form of your novel!
What is the form of the novel? my novel.

“Bliss may come only with the absolutely new, for only the new disturbs consciousness.”
- Roland Barthes

The first part is a stylistic tour-de-force. Allow for no preface, but the let the sound trickle in, like musicians tuning their instruments. First one voice, then another, slightly out of tune. Still more join. Three, four, maybe five voices in all. Then hints of the song, played at different time-intervals.

A cue is given, and one voice takes control. Leave it be for now. Allow the others to fade away, disperse, cowed by the manner in which the single voice is able to convey them all at once: the musicians disappearing behind the music itself. The many form the one, which is always already the many’s motivation for forming as the many, and hence, as one, in the first place. The first part communicates the one’s presence in the many. I am trying to get across the point that many selves exist within the single self — that the self of the moment may not be the self of the past, nor the self of the future.

In its way, I hope the first part makes clear that the author they are reading is in no way like any other author they have ever come across, nor like the author they may find later in the same book. I want to make the first part stretch the bounds of possibilities, to make the reader progress through the book unaccompanied by expectation. I do not want this to be confusing, however; rather, I want it to be fun. I want the reader to experience the book as if it were a kind of Space Mountain, a harmless roller-coaster ride through the dark.

Given all this, what is my story? What is it, exactly, that the reader is reading? Where do I begin and where do I end? By what route do I proceed? Who are the voices that speak and disperse? And what is it that takes control?

“The creating consciousness stands, as it were, on the boundary line between languages and styles.”
- Mikhail Bakhtin

On a mountaintop, there is a man. How did he get there? What does he want to achieve by being there? What is he doing currently? Is he alone? All good questions.

But perhaps the better question, why have I put him there?

The voice here seems sneaky, conspiratorial; what’s more, it suffers from delusions of grandeur. This is my first voice. Possible models include Grima Wormtongue (for the obvious), the editor of Pale Fire (for the cleverness), the academic narrator of the Glass Bead Game (for the irony), and any schmuck who just doesn’t get it (for the fun of it). The voice is most definitely male.

If the schmuck — and I think it is the schmuck — then this voice must have absolutely no connection with the reality of the story. I don’t want this voice to be gratuitous, however, and so what it says must reveal something that would remain otherwise unknown about the story. Possibilities include making the main story adventurous, but this voice’s story romantic — a concrete example: the main female character takes an active role in the adventure; this male voice knows the female character and confuses a onetime action of hers as being directed towards him (a meaningless gesture is transformed into a sign); the man behind this voice, while not evil in intent, begins to stalk her, though she does not know the schmuck is tailing her; through his eyes, we get to see what the female character does when she is not partaking in the adventure; this man begins to develop her character for us, creating a narrative intent behind all of her actions; he focuses our eye on her, and we watch her the way a boy watches his crush. That is my first voice, my first character, and the setting of my first part.

The setting is childhood, and verily, the location is the child’s neighborhood. The larger village is not unknown, but it is only as big as the child knows it.

In the village, there is a girl. A boy watches her. Part the first.

Let it never be forgotten that the boy is imagining everything.

But who is the girl and what role does she play outside of the boy’s eyes? Furthermore, what do we learn from the boy that we could not know otherwise, and how do we learn it if he doesn’t really see it? At the moment, it doesn’t matter; the reader is as in the dark as the writer and they both can proceed with the same expectations.

Where did the man on the mountain go and who is he?

Is the boy imagining everything?! Is he, in truth, the first voice, the premiere voice? The turn I am thinking of has an ending that is little more than “the boy shakes free his head from his reveries.” Is the mountain man also in his imagination?

In the concept of the self, the structure of the book is the structure of a self’s history. I should identify my memories, compile them, deconstruct them, and rebuild them into a new form. But of course, I won’t really.

The book is the structure of the self. 6/7/77. Six parts. Seven years pass in each. Each part is seventy-seven pages. There is a goal. No meaning in it, but still, a goal.

Let’s test the lumber.

——

Vernon Hardapple: “Why did you keep writing this book if you didn’t even know what it was about?”

Grady Tripp: “I couldn’t stop.”