I was tempted to write all of these sentences out of order, but that struck me as making my point with a hammer when a much smaller instrument might do. Like a fine, fine needle. Right to the eye. Ooh, the "injury to eye motif". Always a fun topic, although I think I'll save that for the column where we go into primal fears as demonstrated in graphic literature. Still, it's nice to be avant-garde once in a while, when the situation suits me. The only problem is that jumbling all the sentences up really only makes this thing even less readable than it normally is. And considering the raging popularity that I enjoy now, I really shouldn't make this any harder than it is.
There are a lot of ways to break the art of storytelling down. Today I'm just going to try and dissect one aspect of it: the progression of time in a story. Most stories that we read are linear in nature, in that one event follows another in a logical sequence. The beginning is the beginning and the end is the end and the beginning is always before the end. One follows the other. Simple, right? The advantage of this is that you really don't need a flow chart to describe everything that's happening since you know which order things happen in. You may not know what's going to happen but at least you know the sequence.
The alternative, or flipside to that, is nonlinear storytelling. That is, the story is told out of order. It may be as simple as putting the ending first and going back to it every so often, or just totally taking every scene and mixing them up (a good and bad example of this is William Burroughs' Naked Lunch, where all the scenes were literally dropped on the floor and sequenced in whatever order they were picked up in . . . except to be honest, I don't think the order really makes any difference with that book, it makes no sense either way and it's not supposed to) so that you have a narrative where events have both happened and not happened yet, where the perspective of time is different for both the reader and the characters.
If you want a quick version of that experience, take your favorite book, write all the chapter numbers down on pieces of paper, put them all in a bowl and read them in whatever order you pick the numbers out. The book seems different somehow, right? With all the scenes chopped up and jumbled, some bits are illuminated before others, some scenes have new resonance when parsed with the limited information at hand, and I'm sure lots of others make absolutely no sense at all. The story becomes a new experience, simply by messing with the concept of time.
I swear, Old Yeller will never be the same book to you again.
Just kidding. For a proper reading experience, the jumbling needs to be done by someone with an actual purpose in mind and not just performed as a sort of literary drinking game. But done correctly, a nonlinear story can have added depth and complexity that telling it all in perfect order might not have. Scenes that make no sense early on are explained later, character motivations become clearer, the narrative bends and winds around itself and you basically have this house whereby walking through different rooms, you uncover different facets of the story. Except it's not as simple as going from the upstairs to the downstairs. Out take you back, back takes you left, left takes you in, in takes you up. You get the idea.
It's not easy to do. Oh Lord, is it not. The people who do pull it off do it so well that we're convinced that simple writing a normal story and mixing everything up is the key to making yourself part of the new literary elite. But that's not the case. You have to know everything about the story before you go into it, so you can place scenes and details that reveal enough without revealing everything. Shining a light on just the right parts to keep the story itself going, so that the story still seems to unfold in a linear fashion, even though the sense of time is totally screwed up. Nothing happens when it's supposed to. Done right, it's a new reading experience. Done wrong, it's an utter mess. And you will know right away what kind of story it is, good or bad.
Notice, of course, that I am not even going near that most experimental of nonlinear styles, the type of story that literally loops back on itself. There's a reason that only one Finnegans Wake exists in literature, it's either Joyce's idea of a joke or the most mindblowing book of all time. Even the rare author that tries to approach that level, notably Samuel Delany's Dhalgren, can't come near whatever grand statement he was trying to make, or did make, depending on one's perspective. But if you want to try anything like that, well, buddy, you're certainly reading the wrong column. I'm crazy, not nuts.
And with that introduction, let's get to Rick Magers' story, "The Vault". See, now, that should have been my first sentence. Sometimes you succeed, without really intending to.
Stories bend, in a way that life can't. Or mustn't. We live every day in the same order as the last, moment by moment, second by second. We may discover things in a different order than the people around us, in the way that shadows come down and all the pieces start to make sense. Like finding out that your uncle was dying, instead of just growing old and knowing that takes the previous six months and makes them new, turns them into another life. All the gestures become apparent. It's revelation by way of deception by way of interpretation. I don't tell you now so I can stab you in the heart later, the delay of imparting making the actual moment that much more exquisite. Showing you the footprints only to trace the path to find out where they came from. It's the landmarks on the way that make all the difference, those markers that say it all. A footprint sometimes is just a footprint, it's the soil that it parts that lend it meaning, or context.
That's why we start with a body. Or rather, a man looking over a body. The body of someone he knows, or once knew. Lord Chesterfield has either just killed a man, or stood there and watched him die. Footprints, we've seen them but where do they come from. We can't say. We can only trace. We're introduced to Lord Chesterfield, your typical "proper" English gentleman, but not really a nice person. We're told this and maybe it would be better to show us this but even when we started we've already run out of time. The story is over, and we've got to run through the curtains before they close completely. Time and space and a sense of everything falling apart. The man's dead and he hasn't died yet, in the next paragraph. That's the wonderful thing about stories, in that nobody ever really has to die. Turn back a page and they haven't gone anywhere. But that's the terrible thing about them as well, because to keep them alive you have to trap them in a sort of stasis, never progressing. We wouldn't tolerate that in real people, so why accept it in the fictional world. As Neil Gaiman taught us a long time ago, if you keep the story going long enough, it has to end in death.
Except this one starts that way, and then we're taken back. Lord Chesterfield is a sketch of a man, seen through shrouded windows and gradually filled in with a magic marker. We need to go back, in order to see where we're going. He's seen only in silhouette, in broad strokes. He clearly has little regard for his fellow man and we're told that and we never see why. At least not at this stage. All we have now is the dead and the reason he's there, with the dead. A character sketch, done out of sequence. The future leading to the past leading back to the present, down the twisted path. That's how it should be. More jumbled, maybe. The bare bones work but it needs a proper framing, a sense of shape to give it context. In the first famous Alan Moore Swamp Thing story, the wonderfully evocative "Anatomy Lesson", we're greeted with the sight of a man staring out a window drenched in water and saying to someone, himself, the reader, "It's raining in Washington tonight." And he goes to tell us about things that have nothing to do with rain and everything to do with horror and he tells us what is happening and his thoughts on the things that have happened but that we haven't seen yet. Life bends, stories don't. You turn the page and there's another one and that's the way it has to go.
Sometimes I think we're left with too much too early. The dead man is abandoned and the explanation is given, almost too fast. It needs structure and a sense of pacing. He's standing there and time is passing around him, but it's amorphous, lacking a certain firm rigidity. The paragraphs are out of order and they need to be put in order. And to do that, you have to break them apart. Perhaps a better way to have done it would be not to start with a dead man, but a dying man, a gasping, clawing, clutching wreck of a man, his body already failing and his mind gone. All he's got left is that tiny spark, that one little bit that we don't give up until we have no other choice, until the gravity becomes too much. And Lord Chesterfield is going to use that last second to explain exactly what was done, so that the one thing you have to take down into the dark with you is that image of being defeated, of your demise being so eloquently orchestrated by someone who could really care less about you as a person.
Your life flashing before your eyes, but inverted. It's your death, instead and it's flashing through our eyes. What the story misses in some sense is that inexorable pacing that can only come when you're moving toward something without actually moving toward it. Circling it, maybe, homing around a central point that we're not even clear on. The helicopter trying to get through the smoke, only to finally have the smoke clear at the last second, so we can finally see the conflagration below, and the crater that caused it. After the glorious dancing around of those first paragraphs, the rest of it feels too linear, a throwback to a style that we weren't promised. Scale those back and integrate them, an explanation between the lines, a thought to pass the time as the dying man gasps out his last breaths at your feet. Lord Chesterfield has plans, he could be telling us those plans, an offhand account of his life. A story told in three parallel lines, one line telling us about the good Lord Chesterfield and his aloof existence. The second line telling us about the vault and how it came about and maybe why he put it there. And the third line, the man with the knife bringing him down, driving the story to its conclusion, while the other parts swirl around him, trying to warn him of what we already know, and what he can't know, because he's locked out of it. It's happened already and all you can do is brace yourself for the impact.
The trick is juxtaposition. The hardening of Lord Chesterfield as a child, put next to the hardening of his basement, the installation of the vault. And next to that, the hardening of his resolve, his desire to never let a certain thing happen to him again, a resolve that allows him to let a man walk right into his own death. He could tell us that, as he paces around the dying man, the only real sounds the soft brush of his footsteps on the concrete floor, the wheezing hiss of the indrawn breath you can't expel, the way a man's knuckles clack against the floor as he spasms, like the physical grasping will somehow let air in. If you bang against the invisible long enough, maybe it will yield. But how will you know? Lord Chesterfield spends his life trying to fight against a thing he can't name, a thing that leads him not into murder but execution. This could be the story of that, wrapped around a tiny tale of horror, the lengths we'll go to be kept safe and prove to the world that nothing matters more than staying alive. Despite all costs, we continue.
The horror in this story is not really the ultimate fate of Rubin, who we know right from the beginning is dead. Even without knowing their history, without knowing how they got here, we know he's failed. Whatever task he meant to accomplish, it never gets done. All Rubin is doing is taking down the steps to his own dissolution. The real horror isn't there, in a man being undone by his own greed or by the simple instincts of a lower animal. It lies in Lord Chesterfield, in the question of whether the world did this to him, or is this the way he tells the world that it can't beat him. The outward pressures versus the inward pressures. We could debate it all day. It is debated, with simple lines, with the barest actions of a man who takes vengeance into his own hands and finds that an eye for an eye is just a start. If you want the world to really know you mean business, you've got to take both eyes out and maybe some teeth while you're at it. Leave it staggering in a corner while you stand over it and say, in a perfectly normal tone of voice, Is that all you have? Backing it against the wall and snarling Whatever you have, it's not enough. It never was. It should go like that, if it has to go at all. I never find horror in the obvious spots, maybe because I've seen too much of how it's supposed to go. I'm always the one staring at the background, ignoring the main action to see what goes on when nobody is paying attention. That person leaning up against the wall, staring into space and trying not to think of anything at all. The horror lies in that gap between what we intend and what we actually do and trying to figure out where it went horribly wrong.
Lord Chesterfield isn't a hero. Not by any means or standards. He kills a man simply because that man threatens his property and his life. But if the man took his money, he'd simply go and leave and never come back. But the good Lord values money more than life and thus Rubin has to die at the hands of nature turned into a weapon. It's not equal justice, it's not even defense after a certain point, it's doing something merely because you can. But we're told nearly in the first sentence that this is how things are going to be, so all the story is accomplishing is proving itself right. Is that a goal, or even a desired outcome? All we're doing is following the path of the man down as he takes us back to where the story began. James Joyce is with us still, as the end bends into the beginning. What is the story really trying to tell us? It can't just be entertainment, to watch a common thief die. There's no challenge, no grand game being played out before us. The lord of the manor has hidden a snake in his vault and the snake kills the thief. They go down and he dies. Rubin doesn't even really seem that bright, to be honest. And all Lord Chesterfield cares about is keeping the walls sealed tight and murdering anyone who gets too close.
This story could be divided into three decks of cards. Shuffled together, they could form a crystal, each facet showing a new moment. Because every facet leads to the center regardless, just as every entrance is a way in, and it all comes to the same place. The different views of how we get where we are. Rubin exists not so much as a person but as a catalyst and a culmination. Lord Chesterfield needed someone like the poor thief to finally execute what was inside of him the whole time. As I said before, it's not so much what happens that fascinates me as how we get there. Lay a card down, take a step. Another card and another step and mixed together, they form both an outline and a path, a map cut up and taken out of sequence. Put together the wrong way, to show us more than we though we'd see. That's what I mean by nonlinear storytelling and what we have here is a structure blown too early, the intricate crisscrossing abandoned for a more straightforward "this is what happens" style, which things become resolutely linear, in that dismal way that real life is. We're born, we grow old and we die and one thing follows the other the same way every single time. You can rearrange the insides but not the overall structure. Here, you can and maybe it should be. The stages of a man hardening, giving us all the pieces and not showing us until the very end just how hard he has become. The final horror, that the man you think is a hero is nothing more than a murderer, the kind who thinks that the ends justify any means. The kind that could be me or you or anyone you know, when you're pushed so far that the only response you can muster is so extreme that you don't even realize it until someone points it out to you.
Lord Chesterfield goes through a lot of trouble to prevent someone from stealing a couple of quid. That's not the point. Rubin wants to get back at his crappy former employer and make a few bucks in the bargain. That's not the point. The snake is just wondering why it takes so long to get a decent meal around here. If you take these events in order then you have nothing more than a flowchart and a flowchart isn't a story, it's a chart, it's an outline telling you where you have to go. Stories aren't charts, because charts are angular, chiseled things, sterile and cold. Stories are flexible and pulsating, bursting with the hot kind of life you only see when the veins are cut, when it all bubbles out into the soil, with each diminishing breath. Take the pieces, mix them up and instead of forming a line you'll form a constellation instead, an image that can be connected one way and form a picture we all might recognize, or a daring reader may take the dots and link them up another way entirely.
Don't let the ends overwhelm the means. Someone has to die but that's not important. What's important is how he gets there and how the man who kills him gets to that point and how the simultaneous stories, separated by years and distance, come together at the same time. Don't think of a story as connecting point A to point B, but rather a shotgun sprayed aimed at a wall and you've got to make a picture out of the random pattern that emerges. That's what writing is, taking the bits that nobody else can make sense of and making some sense of them and convincing everyone else that they're seeing the same things that you are. Sleight of hand, maybe. Magic, perhaps. But it's what we do.
I do have to say, just as a matter of record, that I did a bit of research and the thing that king cobras actually feed the most on in the wild is other snakes. Apropos of nothing but I thought it was interesting. Also, from the one account I read of a cobra biting someone, I thought they really didn't strike like a rattlesnake but had to sort of "chew" on you to work the poison in. But that might have been a different kind of cobra. It hardly matters, in the end.
In the hands of a writer time is nothing more than another tool to use, to mix and mingle and manipulate until it does your bidding. I can't juxtapose my life, I can't shuffle the scenes together, living the life of Billy Pilgrim and lurching from one disconnected moment to the next. But we can in here and anything that wrings a bit more meaning out of a tale, anything that can bring us inside just another inch, it's a chance worth taking. Break the story apart and reassemble it and see what you get. It may only lead to a mess but it might also open up and unfold and let us see right down to the very heart of it. Disrupt the sequence of the familiar, make it new and strange and perhaps just once people will see the world the same way you do all the time. Just once, and it's a start. A start, and then they can show you how it looks to them. It's how we connect and how we see. If we can do nothing more than that, then we've done enough. We've done nothing. We can't do any more.
- MB
10.11.2006
"I want to wander through the night as a figure in the distance even to my own eye..." – Silver Jews, "How to Rent a Room"
We correct all errors of substance!– This missed the last update by thatmuch but I wanted to correct it anyway. In my column for the May 2006 edition, when reviewing "Tyrannicide", I made the statement that the name "Isocrates" is a typo and they actually meant Socrates. Alas, I was wrong and Isocrates was a real person, a master of rhetoric. So everyone go back and mentally delete that sentence. Thanks! And thanks to Christopher Howard, the author, for not doing the proper thing and making me look like an idiot over a stupid error that two seconds of research would have cleared up. It's much appreciated, even if I don't deserve the courtesy.
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