“I don’t know.”

I want to discuss the power of not knowing.
Not like Barthelme’s Not Knowing, about the power of writing fiction without
knowing where you’re going, but
the power of delivering the message of uncertainty. This is something that only
storytelling of the highest quality can deliver.

You can spot young-writer-nervousness in
our work’s occasional accidental didacticism or its desperation to reveal the
entirety of something or to right some wrong. In fact, it turns out the most
courageous and the truest and most human thing you can do as a writer is only
reveal what you don’t know and admit that you don’t know it: you reveal the
problem without solving it.

What is IDK? It’s giving a fair and
balanced account of all characters, discursive rather than persuasive fiction,
refusing to point the finger by instead showing how characters point fingers at
each other, empathising as far as is possible with all of them, refusing to
provide a victor or a loser and creating a world full of problems so complex
that they defy resolution. (Likely this has some literary term I’ve never heard
of.)

I have several examples of “IDK” and will
serialise them across “I Don’t Know Month” which starts with this post on
Hamlet today and continues for as long as an I Don’t Know Month does, because
it’s my thing. Any work mentioned contains spoilers. I hope you enjoy these
reflections and please feel free to submit your own, because “IDK” is my favourite
brand of storytelling :)

I
Don’t Know 1: Hamlet

I did begin my own analysis on this but
found the basic effect of Hamlet better summarised by Kurt Vonnegut, so much so
that it’s more or less all that remains! Ah, why say it twice though? :D

“[Hamlet’s]
father has just died. He’s despondent. And right away his mother went and married
his uncle, who’s a bastard.… So Hamlet goes up and talks to this fairly
substantial apparition there. And this thing says, ‘I’m your father, I was
murdered, you gotta avenge me, it was your uncle did it, here’s how.’ Madame
Blavatsky, who knew more about the spirit world than anybody else, said you are
a fool to take any apparition seriously, because they are often malicious and
they are frequently the souls of people who were murdered, were suicides, or
were terribly cheated in life in one way or another, and they are out for
revenge. So we don’t know whether this thing was really Hamlet’s father or if
it was good news or bad news. And neither does Hamlet. But he says okay, I got
a way to check this out. I’ll hire actors to act out the way the ghost said my
father was murdered by my uncle, and I’ll put on this show and see what my
uncle makes of it. So he puts on this show… His uncle doesn’t go crazy and say,
‘I-I-you got me, you got me, I did it, I did it.’ It flops. Neither good news
nor bad news. After this flop Hamlet ends up talking with his mother when the
drapes move, so he thinks his uncle is back there and he says, ‘All right, I am
so sick of being so damn indecisive,’ and he sticks his rapier through the
drapery. Well, who falls out? This windbag, Polonius.”

In attempting to kill his father’s
murderer, Hamlet murders Ophelia’s father: he becomes the thing he wishes to
avenge.

“Neither good news nor bad news. Hamlet
didn’t get arrested. He’s prince. He can kill anybody he wants. So he goes
along, and finally he gets in a duel, and he’s killed. Well, did he go to
heaven or did he go to hell?… I don’t think Shakespeare believed in a heaven
or hell any more than I do. And so we don’t know whether it’s good news or bad
news… There’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that
Shakespeare told us the truth…The truth is, we know so little about life, we
don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.”

This dense mixture of action, inaction,
reality, fantasy and whether or not we can with our reasoning divine the
correct action to take and whether or not this action will lead to the desired
beneficent consequences is the stuff of life!

For more info on the shapes of stories from
Kurt Vonnegut, check this out.

More “IDK” next week!