like the spider

Trying to move this novel “forward,” but in this long middle, I feel both stuck (things outside of my control blocking me) and resistant (I just don’t want to). So, I read “Networks and Cells,” a chapter from Jane Alison’s Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative.

Among the many delights of this chapter is Alison’s discussion of Susan Minot’s Lust, which I inhaled in the 90s (who could possibly resist such a title?) as if it were air itself. (“Leo was from a long time ago, the first one I ever saw nude. In the spring before the Hellmans filled their pool, we’d go down there in the deep end, with baby oil, and like that. I met him the first month away at boarding school. He had a halo from the campus light behind him. I flipped.”)

Through a series of fragments like this, we get the accumulated experience of this narrator as the images gradually shift from light and buoyant to hollow and dark. The transformation, the change comes from the imagery, not the action. The sense of self the narrator possesses at the start grows fainter, shadowed, even vanished. (“Then comes after. After when they don’t look at you…. You seem to have disappeared.”)

In discussing Sherman Alexie’s “Captivity,” she includes this, from Alexie in speaking on paragraphs:

I still remember the exact moment when I first understood, with a sudden clarity, the purpose of a paragraph. I din’t have the vocabulary to say “paragraph,” but I realized that a paragraph was a fence that held words. The words inside a paragraph worked together for a common purpose. They had some specific reason for being inside the same fence. This knowledge delighted me. I began to think of everything in terms of paragraphs. Our reservation was a small paragraph within the United States. My father’s house was a paragraph, distinct from the other paragraphs….”

This idea delights me too! The paragraph as a little unit, every part of it, purposeful.

And if all that wasn’t enough, she concludes the chapter with an extended discussion of the four sections that comprise Sebald’s The Emigrants: “Each piece stands along, but many threads knot them together.”

The questions a spatial narrative asks, Alison says, “are not ‘what happens next?’ but ‘why did this happen?’ and more complexly, ‘what grows in my mind as I read?’”

What grows in my mind as I read?

I often read such observations and analyses (what is a paragraph? what does a sentence do? what grows in the mind as we read?) now with an eye toward how to convey these insights to my students. It helps me, too, to try to imagine how I might best illustrate these ideas, enact them in material with which we are already familiar. I take a deepening pleasure in the way these processes sustain and support each other, the reading, deconstructing, teaching, discussing. Which is not to say that the teaching makes the writing any easier. Particularly not this novel, which as it grows, spreads unwieldy and diffuse and at moments, even baffling, as if I had not myself created it. But, it is grounding to recognize, to allow that the skills I am building are useful, that the time reading and thinking is not wasted.

Here is more Sebald, from The Emigrants:

“It was arduous. Often I could not get on for days at a time, and frequently I unravelled what I had done, tormented by scruples that were taking tighter hold and steadily paralysing me. These scruples concerned not only the subject of my narrative…but the entire questionable business of writing.”

Yes, as the twitterverse is inclined to say. “This.”

And why not give Sebald the last words this morning? Here he is, on novels:

There is so often about the standard novel something terribly contrived, which somewhere along the line tends to falter…The business of having to have bits of dialogue to move the plot along, that’s fine for an 18th- or 19th-century novel, but that becomes in our day a bit trying, where you always see the wheels of the novel grinding on an going on.”

Rather, Alison gives us Sebald’s own vision:

If you grow up not with toys bought in the shop but things that are found around the farmyard, you do a sort of bricolage… Bits of string and bits of wood. Making all sorts of things, like webs across the legs of a chair. And then you sit there, like the spider.