Final Matters:
All Our Stories Are in Us

175}Q: WHAT IS A DISTRACTING DEVICE?

A student’s story strikes me as witty and intelligent, though I’m distracted by the story’s quirky structural conceit: a question-and-answer format that’s more eclectic and provocative than efficient or amusing. I couldn’t help thinking of the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses, which also uses the Q & A format, but with a purpose—to parody the catechisms forced upon him in childhood.

I’m not sure what organic purpose, if any, is served by the device in my student’s story, nor am I sure who’s asking and answering all these questions if not an author with a penchant for calling attention to himself. And since I have no idea who the narrator is except via this quirky device, I’m left grabbing at straws.

Such devices and gimmicks are quite popular in these postmodern times. Novels are riddled with footnotes (David Foster Wallace), photographs (W.G. Sebald), charts and chemical formulas—or they are tattooed, one word at a time, on the bodies of volunteers (Skin Project, Shelley Jackson). Collage, pastiche, metafiction, fragmentation; novels that can be read backwards or forwards, or in any order (Hopscotch, Julio Cortázar); novels with the letter e missing (La Disparation, by Georges Perec⁶²); cyberpunk, hyper and “maximalist” texts.

For a recent example of a work in which the narrator calls constant attention to herself through gimmicks, pick up Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl. Among other things, Pessl tries to make a virtue of her protagonist-narrator Blue van Meer’s having plowed through every book in her college literature canon, by naming each chapter after a different classic and hypertextually linking events of her story with works referenced. If that’s not impressive enough, she throws in her own gouache drawings and peppers her narrative with other bibliographic references. All this is very droll until it turns annoying, as do some of Pessl’s overwrought similes (“Her eyes were shockingly beautiful … sudden sneezes in the dull silence of her face”). Given the author’s youth (she published the book at twenty-seven) and her obvious gifts, such excesses are more than forgivable. And—as the reviewer for the Guardian Unlimited noted of the novel—“after page 311 it is unputdownable.”

Devices can serve a purpose. They can reflect elements of a plot or milieu, or carry associations germane and organic to a story’s theme(s). Or, they merely aid and abet an author’s irresistible urge to show off.

I’m reminded again of James Joyce, who loved his literary gimmicks and who was said to suffer from “association mania.” At a party in his Paris flat, the writer Frank O’Connor noticed a map of County Cork in an unusual frame that called more attention to itself than to the map it served. O’Connor asked his host,

“What is that?”

Joyce replied, “It’s Cork.”

“I know it’s Cork,” said O’Connor. “But what’s the frame made of?”

“Cork,” said Joyce.

176}WHAT WRITERS DO

And what do we writers do, essentially? We sit alone in a room. We sit there with a purpose, but we sit alone. We sit with ideas and characters and scenes, alone. We sit with dreams of artistic glory and even of fame or, better still, fortune, but we dream alone. We sit with heads full of thoughts, trying to sort them out, to get them to add up to something that might, just might, mean something to others. We sit longing to share things that so far have been ours in solitude, to make something out of this miraculous disaster: life. We sit and stare out the window, we water plants, sharpen pencils, answer letters, pay bills; anything but write, because as soon as we turn to writing we know, with certainty, that we turn to it alone: No one else can write what we must write. And so, we sit, and sit. If we’re lucky it goes well, and if not, not, but still we sit alone.

We sit alone in a room.