The Hidden Fact
Dear Friend,
Ernest Hemingway says somewhere that at the beginning of his writing career it suddenly occurred to him that he should leave out the central event of the story he was writing (his protagonist hangs himself). And he explains that with this decision he discovered a narrative technique that he would later use often in his stories and novels. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that Hemingway’s best stories are full of significant silences; the narrator causes pieces of information to vanish, managing nonetheless to give the missing data an eloquent and insistent presence in readers’ imaginations, contriving it so that readers fill in the blanks with their own hypotheses and conjectures. I’ll call this technique “the hidden fact” and quickly make clear that although Hemingway gave it a personal twist and used it often (and sometimes masterfully), he hardly invented it, since it is a process as old as the novel itself.
But the truth is that few modern authors have employed it with the same audacity as the author of The Old Man and the Sea. Remember “The Killers,” an excellent story and perhaps Hemingway’s most famous? At its heart is a big question mark: Why do the two outlaws with sawed-off shotguns who come into a little lunchroom called Henry’s in the middle of nowhere want to kill the Swede Ole Andreson? And why, when the young Nick Adams warns him that there are a pair of killers after him, does the mysterious Andreson refuse to flee or inform the police, resigning himself calmly to his fate? We’ll never know. If we want answers to those two crucial questions, we have to make them up ourselves on the basis of the few facts allotted us by the omniscient and impersonal narrator: before moving to town, Andreson seems to have been a boxer in Chicago, where he did something (something wrong, he says) that sealed his fate.
The hidden fact, or narration by omission, can’t be gratuitous or arbitrary. It is vital that the narrator’s silence be meaningful, that it have a definite influence on the explicit part of the story, that it make itself felt as an absence, and that it kindle the curiosity, expectations, and fantasies of the reader. Hemingway was a great master of technique, as is evident in “The Killers,” a model of narrative economy. Its text is like the tip of an iceberg, a small visible outcropping that gives a glimpse in the lightning flash of its appearance of the complex mass of detail it rests on and is then immediately snatched from the reader’s view. To tell by keeping quiet, through allusions that turn the trick into a promise and force the reader to actively intervene in the construction of the story with conjectures and suppositions: this is one of the most common ways narrators succeed in bringing their stories to life and thereby endow them with power of persuasion.
Remember the piece of information hidden in The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s best novel as far as I’m concerned? Yes, the impotence of narrator Jake Barnes. It is never explicitly referred to but grows gradually evident—I’d almost say that the reader, goaded by what he reads, imposes it on the character—out of a telling silence, a strange physical distance, Jake’s chaste relationship with the beautiful Brett, whom he clearly loves and who without a doubt also loves him or could have loved him if not for some obstacle or impediment of which we are never precisely informed. Jake Barnes’s impotence is an implicit silence, an absence that becomes striking as the reader notices and is surprised by the unusual and contradictory way Jake Barnes relates to Brett, until the only way of explaining it is by realizing (or inventing?) his impotence. Although it is silenced, or maybe precisely because it is silenced, that hidden bit of information bathes the story of The Sun Also Rises in a very particular light.
Jealousy is another novel in which an essential element—the main character, no less—is omitted from the story, but in such a way that his absence is projected in the book and felt at every instant. Jealousy, which doesn’t really have a plot, exhibits the signs or symptoms of a story that we can’t quite grasp. We are obliged to reconstruct it the way archaeologists reconstruct the palaces of Babylon from a handful of stones that have been buried for centuries, the way zoologists piece together prehistoric dinosaurs and pterodactyls from a clavicle or a metacarpus. We may safely say that the novels of Robbe-Grillet—all of them—are based on hidden facts. In Jealousy, though, the procedure works particularly well, since in order for the story to make sense it is essential that the absence in question, the central abolished self, make itself present and take shape in the consciousness of the reader. Who is this invisible being? A jealous husband, as the title of the book ambiguously suggests: someone who, possessed by the demon of suspicion, spies assiduously on his wife’s movements without being noticed. The reader doesn’t know this for sure; he deduces it or invents it, taking his cue from the narrator’s obsessive, deranged stare devoted to the mad minute scrutiny of the woman’s smallest movements, gestures, and errands. Who is this mathematical observer? Why does he subject his wife to this visual harassment? The novel does not reveal the hidden information as it progresses, and the reader must clear up the mystery on his own, with the few clues the story provides. These key hidden facts—eliminated forever from the novel—may be called elliptic, to differentiate them from facts that are only temporarily hidden from the reader, displaced in the novel’s chronology in order to create anticipation and suspense, as in mystery novels, which reveal the identity of the assassin only at the end. These facts that are only hidden for a while—or temporarily relocated—may be called anastrophic, anastrophe, as you’ll recall, being a poetic device in which a word in a line of poetry is displaced for reasons of euphony or rhyme. (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds / admit impediments” instead of the usual order: “Let me not admit impediments to the marriage of true minds.”)*
The most rem arkable piece of hidden information in a modern novel might be the information omitted from Faulkner’s gothic Sanctuary, in which the crux of the story—the deflowering of the young and foolish Temple Drake by Popeye, an impotent, psychopathic gangster who uses a corncob—is displaced and dissolved into rivulets of information that allow the reader, little by little and retroactively, to piece together the terrible scene. It is out of this abominable silence that the atmosphere of Sanctuary radiates: a climate of savagery, sexual repression, fear, prejudice, and barbarism that gives symbolic significance to Jefferson, Memphis, and the story’s other settings, marking them as places of evil and associating them with the ruin and fall of man, in the biblical sense of the term. When faced with the horrors of the novel—the rape of Temple is only one of them; there is also a hanging, a lynching, several killings, a wide-ranging display of moral degradation—we understand that they arise not from the transgression of human laws but from the victory of infernal powers, from the defeat of good by a spirit of perdition that has taken over the earth. Sanctuary seethes with hidden information. Besides the rape of Temple Drake, important incidents like the killing of Tommy and Red or facts like Popeye’s impotence are silences at first: only retroactively are these blanks filled in. Then, supplied with the information hidden in anastrophe, the reader begins to understand what has happened and to establish the true chronology of events. Not just in this story but in all his stories, Faulkner was the consummate master of hidden information.
For a final example, I’d like to skip back five hundred years to one of the best medieval novels of chivalry: Tirant Lo Blanc by Joanot Martorell, a book I keep by the side of my bed. In it, Martorell manipulates hidden information—anastrophic or elliptic—as dexterously as the best modern novelist. Let’s see how the narrative material is structured at one of the cruxes of the novel, the “silent marriages” celebrated by Tirant and Carmesina and Diaphebus and Stephanie (in an episode that stretches from the last half of chapter 162 to the middle of 163). This is what happens: Carmesina and Stephanie lead Tirant and Diaphebus into a room of the palace. There, not realizing that Pleasure-of-My-Life is spying on them through a keyhole, the two couples spend the night engaged in love play, innocent in the case of Tirant and Carmesina, much less so in that of Diaphebus and Stephanie. The lovers separate at dawn, and hours later, Pleasure-of-My-Life reveals to Stephanie and Carmesina that she has been witness to their silent marriages.
In the novel, these events appear not in “real” chronological order but discontinuously, the information concealed and revealed in temporal shifts and anastrophic leaps; as a result, the episode is extraordinarily enriched by anecdote. The plot supplies the setup—Carmesina and Stephanie’s decision to bring Tirant and Diaphebus into the room—and explains how Carmesina, suspecting that there will be a “celebration of silent marriages,” pretends to sleep. The impersonal and omniscient narrator proceeds in “real” chronological order to describe Tirant’s astonishment when he sees the beautiful princess, and how he falls to his knees and kisses her hands. Here the first temporal shift or rupture in chronology occurs: “And they uttered many amorous words. When they thought it was time, the knights returned to their quarters.” The story leaps into the future, leaving in the gap, the abyss of silence, a sly question: “…between love and grief, who could sleep that night?” The narrative next brings the reader to the following morning. Pleasure-of-My-Life gets up, goes into the princess Carmesina’s room and finds Stephanie “in no mood to be disturbed.” What happened? Why Stephanie’s voluptuous abandon? The insinuations, questions, jokes, and gibes of the delicious Pleasure-of-My-Life are really directed at the reader, whose curiosity and prurience are roused. And at last, at the end of this long, clever preamble, Pleasure-of-My-Life reveals that the night before she had a dream in which she saw Stephanie escorting Tirant and Diaphebus into the room. Here the episode’s second temporal shift or chronological leap takes place. There is a retreat to the evening before, and through Pleasure-of-My-Life’s supposed dream, the reader discovers what happened in the silent marriages. The hidden information is revealed, restoring the episode’s integrity. Full integrity? Not quite. As you will have observed, there has been a spatial shift, or change in spatial point of view, as well as a temporal shift, since the voice narrating the silent marriages no longer belongs to the impersonal and eccentric original narrator. It belongs to Pleasure-of-My-Life, a narrator-character whose testimony is not intended to be objective but rather charged with subjectivity (her frank, jocular commentary doesn’t just subjectivize the episode; most important, it defuses what would otherwise be the violent story of Stephanie’s deflowering by Diaphebus). This double shift—in time and space—therefore turns the episode of the silent marriages into a series of Chinese boxes; that is to say, an autonomous narrative (by Pleasure-of-My-Life) is contained within the general narrative of the omniscient narrator. (Parenthetically, I’ll note that Tirant Lo Blanc often makes use of the device of Chinese boxes or nesting dolls. The exploits of Tirant over the course of the year and a day that the festivities last in the English court are revealed to the reader not by the omniscient narrator but through the story that Diaphebus tells the count of Varoic; the capture of Rhodes by the Genoans is made known in a story that two knights of the French court tell Tirant and the duke of Brittany; and the adventure of the merchant Gaubedi is revealed in a story with which Tirant regales the Widow Reposada.) In this way, then, after examining just one episode of a classic narrative, we discover that resources and processes that often seem as if they must be modern inventions because of the showy use contemporary writers make of them are really part of our novelistic heritage, since classic narrators were already using them with assurance. What the moderns have done in most cases is to polish, refine, or experiment with new possibilities implicit in narrative systems that are often manifest in the most ancient written samples of fiction.
Before finishing this letter, I think it might be worthwhile to make a general observation—relevant to all novels—about an innate characteristic of the genre, from which the Chinese box technique is derived. The written part of any novel is just a piece or fragment of the story it tells: the fully developed story, embracing every element without exception—thoughts, gestures, objects, cultural coordinates, historical, psychological, and ideological material, and so on that presupposes and contains the total story—covers infinitely more ground than is explicitly traveled in the text, more ground than any novelist, even the wordiest and most prolific, with the least sense of narrative economy, would be capable of covering in his text.
To underscore the inevitably partial nature of all narrative discourse, the French novelist Claude Simon—intending to poke fun at realist literature’s conviction that it could reproduce reality—set out to describe a pack of Gitanes. What qualities should the description include in order to be realist? he asked himself. The packet’s size, color, content, inscriptions, and the material it was made of were necessary, of course. Would that be enough? In a totalizing sense, no. In order not to leave out any important piece of information, the description would also have to include a meticulous report on the industrial processes involved in the making of the packet and the cigarettes it contained, and—why not?—the systems of distribution and marketing that got them from the producer to the consumer. Once this was done, would the description of the pack of Gitanes be complete? Not even close. The consumption of cigarettes isn’t an isolated act: it is the result of the evolution of habits and the introduction of fashions; it is inextricably bound up with social history, mythology, politics, lifestyle. And on the other hand, it is a practice—a habit or vice—on which publicity and economic life exert a definite influence and that has certain effects on the health of the smoker. Following the thread of this demonstration as it progresses to ridiculous extremes, it is not difficult to conclude that the description of even the most insignificant object, if extended in a totalizing manner, leads purely and simply to a utopic proposition: the description of the universe.
Something similar may doubtless be said about fiction. If, theoretically, a novelist didn’t impose certain limits when he set out to tell a story (if he didn’t resign himself to hiding certain bits of information), his story wouldn’t have a beginning or an end but would somehow end up connecting itself with all possible stories and become that chimeric totality: the infinite imaginary universe where all fictions coexist and are intimately linked.
If you accept the supposition that a novel—or rather, a fiction set down in writing—is just a part of a full story from which the novelist finds himself inevitably obliged to eliminate much information because it is superfluous, dispensable, or because it gets in the way of information that he does make explicit, one must nevertheless differentiate between information excluded because it is obvious or useless and the hidden information I refer to in this letter. That is, my hidden information isn’t obvious or useless. On the contrary, it has a function and plays a role in the narrative scheme, and that is why its elimination or displacement has an effect on the story, producing reverberations in the plot or points of view.
Finally, I’d like to repeat a comparison I once made in discussing Faulkner’s Sanctuary. Let’s say that the full story of a novel (including all selected and omitted facts) is a cube and that, once the superfluous pieces of information and the bits omitted deliberately in order to obtain a specific effect are carved away, each particular novel takes on a certain form. That object, that sculpture, is an expression of the artist’s originality. It has been shaped with the help of many different tools, but there is no doubt that the hidden fact (if you can’t come up with a more appealing name for the device) is one of the most valuable and widely used instruments for cutting away material until the desired beautiful and persuasive form emerges.