Reading Why I Write Novels by Amit Chaudhuri took me several days. I admit, I am not sure what to make of the essay. Its subtitle is "Is it from your life? Did this really happen?" interests me. All I know is that the author brought up points I have not formally considered, and I think there is importance in the essay. Here are my notes:
Yet it’s only in the novel that time is a significant subject; rather than, say, a thought-process, as in the essay, or image, metaphor, or language, as in the poem. And, as a form, the novel is unimaginable without the simple past tense and the “The Marchioness went out at five o’ clock” kind of sentence. But, while time can be presented as a recounting, it is also coterminous with the present moment, which is where we encounter time. Resolving these two things—the first a formal concern, inextricable from the grammar of narrative; the second (to do with encountering the moment) a matter of the possibilities of the form I’m most interested in—has been my chief preoccupation as a novelist, voluntarily undertaken. If I had written only essays and poems, there would have been nothing to resolve in this regard. It’s because I’m a novelist that I need to work this out. It might even be that I am a novelist because I want to work this out. If you were to take Barthes literally, then exchanging the simple past tense to present tense should fix the problem. This is not the case. “He walks into the room” is really no better than “He walked into the room” at placing the life that’s being written about (I mean not just the man’s life, but the room’s and what’s outside it) in the present moment rather than in a story.
I have been very interested in the interplay between memory and current action. For myself, memories intrude into my own life constantly. I am also a bit expansive about memory - not just the recollection of past actions, but also memories of books read and things learned. It is my own version of William Faulkner's the past is not always past, and maybe not even the past.
I have molded and welded some things that I have experienced into my stories without them exactly duplicating the actual events - whatever refuge there is to be had from those who will recognize the originals still needs to be seen - and find a passing recognition of my own efforts in this passage:
There’s a popular TV show on British television called Would I Lie To You? Two teams face each other, and tell each other stories. The aim is to find out which of these stories are lies: points are giving to teams accordingly. The winning team is the one whose members have been best at sniffing out the other one’s bluffs and themselves been most successful at bluffing. What makes the lies and truths—all of which constitute real or so-called episodes in each team member’s life—so hard to distinguish from each another is that they’re equally absurd or unbelievable. What’s clear is that no claim that has the air of the commonplace or everyday could ever be anything but true. The lies pose as truths, and truths pose as lies: they can play these double parts because they all possess an element of the extraordinary. As I write about what’s deemed to be “ordinary,” my stories are taken to be true. Why would anyone make up an episode that has nothing aberrant or outrageous in it, a “story” that has no “story”? But this is precisely what I do. I make up stories about my life, but, unlike the contestants on the panel, about those bits in which nothing much is happening. I turn to the syntax of fictional narrative to do this. My aim is the same as that of the bluffers on Would I Lie To You—to make the extraordinary seem plausible. None of my stories—according to the rules set down by the show—can be called true.
Here comes the passage, the ideas, where I feel myself as out of my weight class:
By outlier I mean something inessential that waits for years for a plot to accommodate it. In the meantime, it lies out there, without a home, but also without impatience. Nabokov’s subliminal coordinate is a structuring device, working in cooperation with the syntax of realist narrative. The outlier waits for the plot to structure itself around it. The outlier sees no inherent purpose in plot or narrative except as an excuse to give a home to its own redundancy. A great deal of the process of artistic composition has to do not with narrative using detail to inform and order as it goes about the business of recounting a story, but with detail waiting for plot to recognize what its own function truly is: a structure justified by the outlier’s existence.
What I have done - and sometimes been criticized for - has been something like this, not quite a grace note but something to the side that I think illuminates the main action or the character. I may have the skill to pull off what I am trying to do; I certainly lack the time now to get it right. What I think of this passage is that it gives much to think on and a rightness in its aims.
I have read and written hard these past twelve years, trying to live up to expectations I once ran from. I have no idea what I am doing. One rejection of "Passerby" called my characters stereotypical and my writing inartistic. The character comment rankled a little, but I know little about being artistic. I think one madness may have been exchanged for another. In the following paragraph I can see some of my own madness driven b y the same trying to understand the form.
A year prior to my making those notes, I was intent on becoming a published poet. I had no idea I would begin writing a novel the following year, not least because I’d never been a great reader of fiction. Today, I still wonder why I write novels. It isn’t to master an art that I have no desire to master, but, evidently, to create something out of my perplexity with the form.
sch 10/16/22
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