By Senior Fellow at the Attic Institute
On most Saturdays I ordinarily give a drash to my community at the synagogue Neveh Shalom in Southwest Portland. Instead, here we are, you and me, dear reader, and I have decided to give you a drash on fiction. Of course it isn’t only about fiction but some of the problems writers in all genres face.
So, let’s look at you: There you are at your desk, facing the page and the idea that what you are bringing forth is not perfect, or in fact anything like what you intended to bring forth. And that is hard to stomach. The task is daunting. Because the task is daunting, there is help. We never suffer from a dearth of useful advice these days. But is it useful? Your writing problems themselves are so disorganized. So let’s place the text before us—the poem, the story, the novel section, the memoir—and try to read it in ways that help us arrive at what we intended.
In a traditional drash, all text is read on four levels:
Peshat: The plain (simple) or literal reading.
Remez: The allegorical reading.
Derash: The metaphorical reading.
Sod: The hidden mysterious meaning.
Peshat
On a literal level the act of writing is an act of invention. We expect this from poetry and fiction, but even memoir or the so-called “true” story demands a viewpoint on the part of the creator. I know there are far more sophisticated definitions of what constitutes creative writing but this is a good one for working writers. So, let’s get it to work. Is all writing an inventive act? Of course not.
If I write, “I woke up,” that’s a journal entry. If I write, “Greg woke up,” that’s a journal entry where I changed my name to Greg. How about this next one? “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” Now, that’s fiction.
It’s interesting to note Kafka’s use of the fantastical as an entry into fictional worlds. It’s a common strategy for us to signal to the reader, as well as ourselves, that we are primarily interested in invention.
But if this constitutes the literal definition of fiction—that we are inventing—it also constitutes the problem. If we have invented our experiences than where does the authority for the experience lie? This anxiety interferes with the ability of the writer to go forward in confidence. A lack of confidence is hard on the writer, but far worse for the reader who regrets placing themselves in the hands of the uncertain.
One solution for writers is to take the literal to task and ask “what if” of their own life experiences, their private mirepoix. I’ve applied the “what if” question to four of my recent Atheneum students. Adrienna Ogin might ask: “What if I stayed in Europe?” My Michael Royce might think: “What if I was not the lawyer walking by the homeless guy I often pass on my way to work, but that homeless guy himself?” Rajesh Varma might say to himself: “What if of the thousand prostitutes in India, I had to be their child?” Wayne Gregory might wonder: “What if we could unravel the mystery of homophobia as if it were a gothic crime?”
What if-ing allows an empathetic space from which a writer may safely launch a literary creation. This does not mean that all is nice or considerate—on the contrary, widening, our sphere of empathy (different than sympathy) means that we have creative license for acts we ourselves might never commit, as well as thoughts, notions, and realities far outside our limited realm of experience. It offers authority for our inventions posited in our own experience, made wider by empathy and broader by imagination. That’s Peshat, the literary reading. But if we only stop here as writers, however, we miss a certain kind of depth.
Remez
The level here is about allegory. One working definition of allegory is that it is a one to one correspondence of signs. This is subtly different from a symbol, as we shall see. Allegory is endemic to fiction, meaning it always exists in the natural state of fiction. Everything, glanced at in a certain way, is an allegory. But like endemic diseases that exist everywhere we turn (I’m making an allegory here), allegory can become pernicious when it arises out of the general population, and infects the story.
That is, unless you are writing an allegory.
How does Remez help us define another problem of fiction? It does so by noting that to pinpoint the allegorical element in our invented story is to open a channel for our opinions and judgments to enter the work. This act causes a chasm to appear between the writer and the reader. For that’s what judgment does, it separates the judger and the judged. And remember, in trying to create an invented world as rich as the so-called real world our goal is the reverse, to bring the reader and the writer closer.
So if you, the writer, are drawing a one to one correspondence and saying this means exactly that and that means exactly this, than you are not going to be able to place Adela to hear all by herself what she hears in the Marabar Caves, or have its echoes, placed there by E.M. Forster, rattling down the decades into our own time.
All writers have an agenda. We have ideas that we are conveying. We may even have themes, a word my students know I hate. Yet it is not the themes that I find problematic, but rather the belief that they need to be presented!
Instead, I think we should face head on the idea that allegory lives in all fiction. We are better off to accept that Adrienna Ogin, like all of us, has had occasion to rewrite her personal history. That Michael Royce, like many of us, has at one time or another discovered he is the oppressor. That Rajesh Varma, as with many of us, has whole heartedly enjoyed illusion. That Wayne Gregory, like many of us, has had to deal with his family over difficult issues concerning sexuality and maleness.
The problem of the enforced allegory is that it interferes with our experience of the story. We see the difficulty in Remez get resolved when allegory is not all tricked out in neon pointers, but instead, acknowledged to be a material that we allow to roam free in the natural landscape of invention.
Derash
Now we have every writer’s favorite child (mine, too) which is Symbolism. Allegory is a one to one correspondence of signs, but symbolism can attach itself to anything. Anything can be a symbol for this, that, or the other. Often our happiest reading is on the level of Derash. We read the work like teenagers or crazy people, like prophets and poets, where everything means something else. If allegory is endemic to fiction, symbolism is endemic to human beings. It is our evolutionary fate to draw connections, and this is strongly related to our ability to use language. We writers mine the semiotic nature of literate man whose understanding of the world is expressed entirely in symbols.
How does the problem of fiction then meet Derash, the symbolism that we love? Well, let’s say, I’m going to invent a cup. I am an inventor after all! This cup is plain white porcelain, well-made with no markings. It is useful, practical, and anyone can use it, rich or poor, to get water, the stuff of life. This cup is, in fact, my symbol for Communism. I put it in the hands of my most attractive character Belle (which means beauty) and she raises it defiantly to Mal (which means bad), the evil overseer in the house of detention where Belle is detained due to being wrongfully accused of helping a small orphan. Mal throws my cup against the cement floor. He is breaking Communism! Perfect! All my symbolism is working beautifully.
But now I have a secret problem. I don’t like Belle. She’s an inert prune who talks like a pamphlet. And this feels horrible, because I genuinely want to help the oppressed. I have a worse secret. I like Mal. He’s full of passion and always breaking crockery. So I make Mal worse and worse and I make Belle better and better as symbols and pretty soon I am fully sick of both of them.
Now a great temptation looms to do away with symbolism and all my passions, my ideas about the world. I think I will resolve this problem of symbolism by acting like a nerveless reporter. Because the problem with writing symbolically is that the symbols may eat up all the available space in our story, the story that is our invention, we have mined from our own experience and in which we recognized a rich, gold vein of allegory. Now our symbolism is wrecking that story and inserting the clichés that work against our project of a whole, invented world. This temptation constitutes a great degeneracy.
The problem of the symbolic can be addressed by the writer’s understanding that invention is specific. The generic symbol is the death of invention. Let symbols belong to you. Symbolism is strongest when it is the writers own.
In my life I have a thousand rules, but in writing I try to allow everything. My short story “Story Without a Hero” (note the symbolic title, taken from a famous poem!) is about an American man, married to a Russian woman who physically abuses him. We learn about the abuse and also his history, for example his abandonment by his parents and being raised by his Russian grandmother. He and his wife return to Los Angeles so he can pitch a TV pilot. He comes out of the pitch and they watch a jogger on Venice Beach. He tells her about the story he’s just pitched, which strongly suggests that her forebears may have been in charge of the anti-Semitic attacks against his grandmother a hundred years ago.
So what do we have and what do not have. I have never to my knowledge been a man, but I do know a few. I have never pitched a movie but I have watched someone else do so. I have never been beaten by my spouse but I’ve read accounts of those who have. I wasn’t raised by my grandmother. My parents did not abandon me, though sometimes I felt abandoned, etc., etc. I made up the story.
But I did so in order that my character, who was not me, could feel this space running between the old world and the new one. That’s Derash, the idea that the symbolic can be attached to anything, especially anything that you are determined to invent everything about.
Sod
Mystery is at the end of my talk, though it may be challenging to see what light mysticism could possibly shine on our invented, allegorically-correct, symbolically-rich experiential world.
But mystery is not going to announce itself, is it? That is not in the nature of Sod. One scourge of invention in writing is that it must complete or resolve. And yet how can invention ever be finished? The nature of invention is to flourish. Yet finish our writing all the time. How this happens is deeply mysterious. I cannot describe it except to say that we writers sit down every day and write. The vessel that holds the mystery of how invention comes from our minds and out into the world and makes a complete circuit is work.
With the daily creation of pieces of writing, with the daily destruction and subsequent recreation of our writing, we are like the ancient Penelope taking the threads out of her work by night to deceive the suitors—perhaps also us. That we are able to turn this process into whole cloth, and actually finish our invention, this is the secret of sod.
All writers should take heart from this mystery, this Sod in which the creation learns to grow. You, at your desk, facing the page, concerned that what you are bringing forth is not perfect, or in fact anything like what you intended to bring forth should learn to love the problems of fiction. They are not really what we wish would disappear so we could get on with the work, but they are the work itself. As you write, they resolve, devolve, evolve into art, the real invention of the self.
~ September 12, 2011