Matthew Cheney

News & Views

What Do You Know?

A question I have come back to when providing feedback on a couple of very different manuscripts for friends recently: What is it important for the reader to know? With one of those manuscripts in particular, it was really a question of how much the writer wanted to leave the reader in confusion. It may sound perverse that a writer would ever want to leave any reader in confusion, but confusion is a useful tool as well as a sometimes powerful effect.

When I was writing my recently-published story “Rare Bindings”, I needed to gauge how well some potential confusion at the end was working. I spent more time writing and rewriting the ending than anything else in the story because it needed a particular and quite fragile balance: it would be clunky, I thought, to state exactly what’s happening … but the reader also needs to be able to put the pieces together. It’s not ambiguous, it’s oblique. The reader doesn’t need to know exactly what I was thinking of, but they need to be able to come into the vicinity. So I sent the story to couple of friends I typically send stories to and I asked a simple question: What do you think happens at the end? From their responses, I was able to calibrate the ending to try to increase the likelihood that an alert reader would have no trouble putting the puzzle together.

Sometimes we don’t want a puzzle at all, sometimes we want a pile of pieces from different puzzles that don’t fit together but make interesting, infinite patterns of their own. Early in my writing career, I experimented a lot with such open patterns, trying out radically unstable and uncertain narratives to see what would happen. A few even got published — you’ll find them in Blood: “Prague” is the most radical, but “Expositions”, “Art of Comedy”, “Walk in the Light…”, and “Map of the Everywhere” also are more about the experience of reading them than they are about knowing some sort of truth about the events. After “Expositions” (the most recent story of that group), I pretty much gave up this technique, mostly because I felt like I’d done what I could with it, but also because fewer and fewer editors seemed interested in such things. (In the first decade of the century, there were zines and small press anthologies that welcomed open narrative experiments like I was doing, but those mostly went away by the early 2010s.) An editor at a major publisher asked me for a story, I sent “Expositions”, and they rejected it, saying a reader needs to know what the ground-level reality of a story is for it to be effective. Of course, I disagree. I don’t even know the ground-level reality of my own life, never mind my stories!

(Thinking about it now, I realize my later story “After the End of the End of the World” builds on some of the open techniques I had played around with earlier, though I think in a more mature way: the purpose of the narrative instability is inseparable from the meaning of the story. I don’t mean mature as a judgment against the earlier stories, just that the use of it in “After the End…” was less whimsical, less freewheeling.)

I have been thinking about this because I just watched Jonathan Glazer’s remarkable film The Zone of Interest. It depicts the daily life of Rudolf Höss and his family. Höss was, as the English title of his autobiography stated, Commandant of Auschwitz. The film (loosely adapted from a Martin Amis novel I have not read) does not show the atrocities of the camps, but rather the placid and sometimes deluded life outside the camps. It is a film about absence. At the LA Review of Books, David Hering has written well about Glazer’s use of the literal ob-scene: what lurks off screen. (But brilliantly and disturbingly present via the most chilling sound design of any film I know. It was entirely appropriate that Tarn Willers and Johnnie Burn won the Oscar for Sound this year.)

I wondered, though, what a viewer who knew nothing about Auschwitz or concentration camps would make of the film, if anything. Granted, it’s unlikely anyone watching the movie would know nothing of the context, but it seemed worth wondering about as an aesthetic and philosophical thought experiment, since few locations and events are as widely known as the broad outlines and iconic imagery of the Holocaust.

In some ways, Glazer’s film is even more disturbing if you imagine knowing nothing about what is going on on the other side of the Höss family’s garden wall, having to guess and wonder, and soon enough coming to realize what the smoke from the chimneys is.

However, even if you were an alien creature watching the film with zero knowledge of the Holocaust, the FInal Solution, etc., you would not miss anything important to the film’s ultimate meaning and purpose. The absolute clarity of meaning and purpose actually opens up some space for Glazer’s experiments with confusion, because he trust that we are not confused about what most matters. The mysteries are grace notes. For someone with even rudimentary knowledge, the movie is clear from the beginning, because while it doesn’t show everything, it hides little. That’s part of its most general point — we live with atrocities every day around us and choose not to think about them because our lives are better if we go around in ignorant, oppressive bliss. (Don’t think about where the metals in your computer come from, don’t think about how many massacres your taxes fund, don’t think about the pain of the animal whose flesh you eat, don’t think about what your life does to the planet’s biosphere…) However, for all the clarity of its primary conceit, The Zone of Interest still contains plenty of mysteries, especially the things that are set in juxtaposition to the main story. But even these only take a bit of thought to figure out (I think Hering’s essay sees them pretty clearly).

One of those mysteries is of particular interest to me, though, because there is a larger context for it that few viewers are not likely to know unless they research it.

Here are two paragraphs from a Guardian interview with Glazer that describe the context:

The Zone of Interest’s single moments of hope occur at night and were shot on a thermal imaging camera of the kind used by the conceptual photographer Richard Mosse for his ambitious refugee film, Incoming. A young woman, rendered almost ghostlike by the camera, clandestinely moves through a construction site beneath a railway that runs into the camp. She places apples in the earth for the starving prisoners on work duty to find the following day. While doing so, she finds a scroll of music notation in a tin buried in the earth.

The scene came about as a result of Glazer meeting a 90-year-old woman called Alexandria, who had worked for the Polish resistance when she was just 12. She recounted how she had cycled to the camp to leave apples, and how she had found the mysterious piece of written music, which, it turned out, had been composed by an Auschwitz prisoner called Joseph Wulf, who survived the war. “She lived in the house we shot in,” says Glazer. “It was her bike we used, and the dress the actor wears was her dress. Sadly, she died a few weeks after we spoke.”

This is astonishing for all sorts of reasons. Certainly, the film does not need viewers to know anything about Aleksandra Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk in order to appreciate and understand the scenes with the girl. Other directors, though, might have been tempted to add some sort of note to the end credits to explain, but Glazer lets the scenes do what they will in the film without necessarily confining them to their historical veracity — our not knowing more about her forces us to have to speculate, to come to our own conclusions, to search our own consciences. (Outside the film, at the Oscars, in his controversial acceptance speech, Glazer pointed to Bystroń-Kołodziejczyk as an example of resistance.)

My aesthetic comfort zone is primarily modernism, especially the more traditional idea of modernism as represented by the narrative innovations of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and William Faulkner (among others). One of the clearest explorations of these techniques I know is Daniel J. Singal’s book William Faulkner: The Making of a Modernist. Here is what Singal says about Faulkner’s most difficult (and, for my money, best) novel, Absalom, Absalom!:

His overriding goal, writes Daniel Hoffman, was to “replicate in the experience of the reader the experience of the character in all its complexity and confusion.” That is why we learn about the House of Sutpen not through conventional literary techniques that have become so familiar that we can virtually disengage our minds as we read, but rather through a narrative format that forces us to stay alert at every moment. … That is not to say, however, that the reader is free to arrive at any narrative that he or she might wish … Although Faulkner, in his effort to augment the sense of actuality, left a number of loose ends and ambiguities in his text … by the final chapter the puzzle does roughly fit together in a predesigned way. One is reminded of the teacher in John Dewey’s ideal progressive school who permits students to grope, fumble, and experiment as they try to solve a problem, all while gently guiding them to a satisfactory solution. Faulkner, too, gives the reader much scope but ultimately employs his skillfully hidden artistic hand to convey his own vision of the Sutpen saga. (214-215)

Singal notes that some readers, including some experienced Faulknerians, consider Absalom, Absalom! an open text, one that can be assembled in whatever way the reader chooses, but he makes a case for otherwise, and I agree. I’ve never seen any evidence that Faulkner was interested in leaving everything up to the reader. There may be multiple right ways of reading Absalom, Absalom! (indeed, that’s part of what makes it such a rich novel), but there are also countless wrong ways of putting the story together. This is partly because the book is about history and how the story of the past is told. Faulkner did not believe the past was a blank slate, indetermined, undeterminable. The stories of the past may contradict each other, may flatter certain perspectives and hide certain other perspectives, may be warped by the gravity of the present, but truths can be sifted from the dustbins of history. In that belief, Faulkner was a prototypical modernist. The past is fractured, fragmented, diffused, confused … but real.

What Absalom, Absalom! and other great modernist texts provide is what Singal quotes from Hoffman: they “replicate in the experience of the reader the experience of the character in all its complexity and confusion.” This is a central idea of classical modernism (a useful oxymoron), and points to why such fiction, at least, was not anti-realism, but in fact seeking a more accurate type of realism than the supposedly realistic fiction of writers who rejected modernist experiments. When Virginia Woolf criticized Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, and John Galsworthy, she didn’t do so because she scorned the realism they cherished but because she thought the realism they strove to represent was superficial — was, in fact, not real enough. It described reality without evoking the experience of reality. For the modernists, the effect created by standard realist novels was like looking at life in a display case. The modernists instead wanted to get as close as language would allow to the experience of life itself.

And life itself is fractured, fragmented, impermanent, disturbing, misleading, confusing. Wholeness is a goal that can only torment us and increase suffering. (The self is an illusion.) Wholeness is what fascists fetishize, the eradication of difference and dissent, the paving over of cracks in perception, the elimination of multiple voices singing varied songs, the denial of rhizomatic interconnection and interbeing (the only healthy wholeness). If fiction is to have any reality, it must admit this, even perhaps embody it.

For some years now, I’ve been arguing that it is the reader that unifies meaning for a text. It’s an argument inspired by modernist writing, but also by Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model of communication. It occurs to me now that this is also a model of impermanence: the meaning of a text exists only as long as the interpreter performs the act of making that meaning. We are drawn to reading and rereading, interpreting and re-interpreting, translating and re-translating because it extends the flow of meaning and the ephemeral experience of knowing.

It is no surprise that the genius Guy Davenport, an avowed modernist, was a smart translator of Heraclitus (Herakleitos), patron saint of flow and change and fragment. (“Everything flows; nothing remains.”) Let us leave these thoughts of readers and knowledge with a shard from the old Greek philosopher via Davenport, a description, I think, of knowledge and reading and writing and living: