Whose Book Is It?
The recent publication of one of my novels, Ashley, has turned out to be the occasion for one of my old friends to discover that I have become a writer here in the second half of my life. His response to Ashley was enthusiastic and thoughtful. He went so far as to compose a short essay on the book, something that no one else has taken the trouble to do and for that I am flattered and grateful. When he e-mailed me, he wondered if I might recommend some of my other titles and so I suggested Goldengrove because of all the novels, that one has found most favor among my small but devoted group of readers. A few days later, my friend, having finished Goldengrove wrote back telling me that compared to Ashley, it was a bit of a struggle. For a moment I was surprised, but I soon came to see that I shouldn’t have been.
If you’re serious as a writer, you end up intending something when you make a book. This is to say that one’s efforts have, as my students liked to say, “hidden meaning.” Of course, the meaning isn’t hidden; it’s all right there on the page, right on the surface. (Students are in the business of learning to see what’s in front of them.) The serious stories are illustrative. They show us something about ourselves. They illuminate experience and the really good stories illuminate most brilliantly. Sometimes stories entertain, and entertain only, and the best of those are excellent achievements: It’s no mean feat to keep one’s audience rapt. But I’m talking about stories that illuminate as well as entertain.
So, you might start out more or less groping blindly, the first lines, the first few chapters pointing you in a direction that, often, you can’t see. At this point it’s tempting to quit, to give up the enterprise as a foolish waste of time. But if you keep at it, if you have faith in the muse, slowly the “hidden meaning” starts to come clear. Like an image appearing on photographic paper in an old fashioned darkroom, the pattern starts to emerge and, at last, you’ve discovered what it is you want to say and that initial emergent pattern serves as a guide that takes you right to the end. Next you revise in light of your discovered intention. You patch the narrative so that the early sections are consistent with the later ones. English teachers call this, confusingly, foreshadowing, a term suggestive of immensely clever craftsmanship, when it’s simply recalling that it’s helpful to have Ann lose the bracelet in Chapter 2 since it’s something she finds in Chapter 28. And once the patching is complete, there you have it, the finished work, maybe even a piece of art, complete with authorial intention.
Into the world it goes and after a while, with luck, people read it and, with even more luck, tell you what they thought. Sometimes the pattern you discerned in the act of composition comes through; sometimes it does not. More: What does come through differs with readers. Annabelle likes your character Edward because he reminds her of a kind uncle; Simon finds Edward flat and boring. For you, the bewildered author, Edward was clearly a character beset by satanic pride, someone who could have stepped directly out of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
What’s to be made of this? I think novels are like children. You conceive them, nurture them, shape them as best you can, watch them grow and mature and then you send them out into the world and they are no longer yours. Children, of course, belong to themselves; novels belong to readers. Annabelle is right about Edward and so is Simon. And this is to say that readers are co-creators in making a work of fiction. There is no true and definitive Ashley, no true and definitive Goldengrove. There is text, an object, inert, a bunch of black marks on white pages. Text comes to life in the minds of readers and the life it becomes is gloriously variable. What fun!
A former high school teacher, I used to impose Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome on my susceptible students. The story is usually understood to be a tale of thwarted romance. The old ugly, whining, sickly wife, Zenobia (the name itself is enough to make you want to send her to rehab) does all she can to make the life of Ethan, her poor long-suffering idiot husband a misery and chief among her crimes is her insistence that the dewy eyed, luscious love interest Mattie Silver be sent away so as to keep the marriage between Zenobia and Ethan intact. There is nothing Ethan and Mattie can do; they must obey the horrid witch and so they attempt suicide by crashing their sled into a tree. It’s an idiotic response, especially since the crash turns Mattie into Zenobia Two: querulous, disabled, a mess. Read as romance, Ethan Frome is an irritating, silly story, and one utterly unworthy of the usually competent Wharton. Consequently, I taught the novel as a parody of the standard fairly tale. You know the pattern. The lovelies—Snow White, Cinderella, Ariel, all interchangeable—are kept from Prince Charming (another cipher) by the wicked older woman. In the fairy tales the ditz and the wooden soldier marry and live happily ever after. In Ethan Frome, the crone holds sway. In Ethan Frome we see what happens after “happily ever after.”
I am certain that Wharton’s intention is satire, but others, most others, would disagree. And so, whose Ethan Frome is the correct one? There are, one supposes, as many versions as there are readers. You can make what you will of my novels.
They can be found at:
https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Store-D...
If you’re serious as a writer, you end up intending something when you make a book. This is to say that one’s efforts have, as my students liked to say, “hidden meaning.” Of course, the meaning isn’t hidden; it’s all right there on the page, right on the surface. (Students are in the business of learning to see what’s in front of them.) The serious stories are illustrative. They show us something about ourselves. They illuminate experience and the really good stories illuminate most brilliantly. Sometimes stories entertain, and entertain only, and the best of those are excellent achievements: It’s no mean feat to keep one’s audience rapt. But I’m talking about stories that illuminate as well as entertain.
So, you might start out more or less groping blindly, the first lines, the first few chapters pointing you in a direction that, often, you can’t see. At this point it’s tempting to quit, to give up the enterprise as a foolish waste of time. But if you keep at it, if you have faith in the muse, slowly the “hidden meaning” starts to come clear. Like an image appearing on photographic paper in an old fashioned darkroom, the pattern starts to emerge and, at last, you’ve discovered what it is you want to say and that initial emergent pattern serves as a guide that takes you right to the end. Next you revise in light of your discovered intention. You patch the narrative so that the early sections are consistent with the later ones. English teachers call this, confusingly, foreshadowing, a term suggestive of immensely clever craftsmanship, when it’s simply recalling that it’s helpful to have Ann lose the bracelet in Chapter 2 since it’s something she finds in Chapter 28. And once the patching is complete, there you have it, the finished work, maybe even a piece of art, complete with authorial intention.
Into the world it goes and after a while, with luck, people read it and, with even more luck, tell you what they thought. Sometimes the pattern you discerned in the act of composition comes through; sometimes it does not. More: What does come through differs with readers. Annabelle likes your character Edward because he reminds her of a kind uncle; Simon finds Edward flat and boring. For you, the bewildered author, Edward was clearly a character beset by satanic pride, someone who could have stepped directly out of Milton’s Paradise Lost.
What’s to be made of this? I think novels are like children. You conceive them, nurture them, shape them as best you can, watch them grow and mature and then you send them out into the world and they are no longer yours. Children, of course, belong to themselves; novels belong to readers. Annabelle is right about Edward and so is Simon. And this is to say that readers are co-creators in making a work of fiction. There is no true and definitive Ashley, no true and definitive Goldengrove. There is text, an object, inert, a bunch of black marks on white pages. Text comes to life in the minds of readers and the life it becomes is gloriously variable. What fun!
A former high school teacher, I used to impose Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome on my susceptible students. The story is usually understood to be a tale of thwarted romance. The old ugly, whining, sickly wife, Zenobia (the name itself is enough to make you want to send her to rehab) does all she can to make the life of Ethan, her poor long-suffering idiot husband a misery and chief among her crimes is her insistence that the dewy eyed, luscious love interest Mattie Silver be sent away so as to keep the marriage between Zenobia and Ethan intact. There is nothing Ethan and Mattie can do; they must obey the horrid witch and so they attempt suicide by crashing their sled into a tree. It’s an idiotic response, especially since the crash turns Mattie into Zenobia Two: querulous, disabled, a mess. Read as romance, Ethan Frome is an irritating, silly story, and one utterly unworthy of the usually competent Wharton. Consequently, I taught the novel as a parody of the standard fairly tale. You know the pattern. The lovelies—Snow White, Cinderella, Ariel, all interchangeable—are kept from Prince Charming (another cipher) by the wicked older woman. In the fairy tales the ditz and the wooden soldier marry and live happily ever after. In Ethan Frome, the crone holds sway. In Ethan Frome we see what happens after “happily ever after.”
I am certain that Wharton’s intention is satire, but others, most others, would disagree. And so, whose Ethan Frome is the correct one? There are, one supposes, as many versions as there are readers. You can make what you will of my novels.
They can be found at:
https://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Store-D...
No comments have been added yet.
