This is part three of a three-part series, originally a talk I delivered at the University of Nebraska MFA. You can find installments one and two here and here.
Also: a favorite story from my forthcoming collection Ghost Pains (March 5) appears in Electric Literature’s “Recommended Reading.” It comes with a superlative intro from my longtime & superlative editor Jeremy M. Davies. Read it here.
Also also: US & UK tour dates for Ghost Pains below —
HOW TO KEEP A DIARY: SECRETS OF THE SELF (Part 3/3)
Now that we’ve established that literature often boils down to eavesdropping—to exposing secrets that want to remain private—we can return to actual diaries and the novels that act like them. (<That was part 2.)
In the Hitchcock-Dickens-Dostoevsky-thriller storytelling paradigm (again, see part two), the method of involving the audience is suspense, produced through the exposure of secrets that want to remain private. That’s basically our definition of plot. We saw that the techniques associated with this style are oriented toward the strategic withholding and revealing of hidden information—of making the private public by triangulating the reader (or viewer), the text, and the private lives in question.
This is obviously not the only mode or set of techniques for telling a story or writing a novel. In the found diary or first-person confession, for example, there’s little formal need for triangulation; the formal access to private thought, secrets, interiority, and personal events is uninhibited, even granted voluntarily.
This state of open access to the speaker or narrator’s private life confuses our (admittedly crude) suspense/plot paradigm in interesting ways. On the one hand, the diaristic or confessional narrative is by definition forthcoming, welcoming the audience to listen in on private events; on the other hand, that luxury of access would seem to remove all possible source of suspense, usually generated through exposing secrets would rather remain private, and which are in other storytelling paradigms therefore voyeuristically exposed (e.g., Hitchcock’s example of the eavesdropping switchboard operator.)
In the confessional narrative, all the plot potential generated through wrestling private secrets out into the open dissipates.
And so how does one involve the audience – that is, generate any suspense -- at all?
Freud is handy here. To a writer, the most important legacy of the Freudian revolution is that the self is actually private to the self. Like psychoanalysis or dream interpretation, novels of self-investigation, confession, and interiority might be said to “make public” the secrets that narrators or characters keep from, well, themselves, buried in the subconscious.
This paves the way for a new kind of eavesdropping, then—a kind of spying one’s own interiority. The first-person novels that emerge in the wake of this discovery are novels that sift through memory, experience, and other deeply private and personal “evidence” in the same way that Freud once sifted through dreams, seeking always to make connections and find patterns that transform nonsense into self-knowledge—that reveal what we’ve repressed (or never recognized). The meaning created from this interpretative exercise promises to be greater than the sum of the parts. It promises to reveal something secret.
20th- and 21st-century readers can all easily name novels of this genre—novels of interiority and private life that sustain reader interest and involve our emotions even when it would appear, on a plot level, that “nothing happens,” or at least nothing that could properly be called “suspenseful” á la Hitchcock. Contemporary writers popularly associated with this school of apparent plotless-ness include Teju Cole, Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Gerald Murnane, Elizabeth Hardwick, Renata Adler, Karl Ove Knausgaard, or the (to my mind highly over-indexed) novels of WG Sebald. More canonical—and more useful for our purposes here—are the novels of Proust or Beckett. That all these writers are (whether erroneously or not) associated with autobiographical writing (Beckett being the major exception) makes it tempting to refer to their works as “autofictional” or “postfictional” paradigms. If we’re are seeking, however, to categorize them according to their formal as opposed to their content-driven qualities, then we might say that what writers like Beckett, Proust, or even Freud himself (who analyzes his own hidden labyrinths of desire in Interpretation of Dreams) all have in common is that they are masters of digression.
The beginning of this very talk (again, note to Substack ppl, first and second installment here and here) offers an example of a digressive narrative structure: The narrator (me) is an interpreter and detective, drawing relationships between pieces of evidence gathered on the diary through conversations with friends. These clues, my diary-survey gossip, were not necessarily connected through chronology or cause-and-consequence. Instead, they were simply arranged so that the vignettes might begin to echo each other and form patterns. If I did my job, you began to expect that I organized them (that is, fictionalized them) in just such a way so that, as a whole, they would yield some revelation. This should have created some kind of intrigue.
Yet even if I succeeded, existential ersatz-detective narratives like these—narratives that operate by discovering hidden patterns or secrets lying in plain sight—cannot end in major, anticipation-resolving reveals that could properly said to have generated “suspense” in the Dickensian or Hitchcockian sense. In fact, digressions and meanderings are more or less the opposite of Hitchcock’s precondition for suspense, that it is “indispensable that the public be made perfectly aware of all the facts involved.” A digressive investigation presents itself, by contrast, as a series of apparently unrelated tangents of whose narrative importance and connectedness the speaker herself may be unsure.
Why listen? Why read on?
In successful plots of memory and digression and evidence-mining, what appears as a digression is always a path to greater meaning. It creates, therefore, a pseudo-suspense, insofar as the reader is: a) anxious and invested in returning to the original point of departure and/or; b) anxious and invested in the emergence of a pattern.
In the paradigmatic example of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, the digressive structure manifests quite literally as diverted traffic on Memory Lane: Swann’s v. the Guermantes way. We follow Marcel down the one before ambling down the other. Only at the very end is the significance of these two “paths” (literal and figurative), taken together, revealed.
For another example, Becket’s Molloy takes the idea of digression and return to another extreme—one where the obsessive search for meaning and purpose leaves the narrator not at the doorstep of revelation, but mired in meaningless. In a Beckettian world, every path is a cul-de-sac; every action is immediately undone. In the famous scene of the sucking-stones, for example, Molloy attempts to organize a collection of sixteen pebbles in his four coat pockets, in varying permutations, in order to make sure he is always selecting a new pebble with each draw—a compulsive habit of his.
Here he is on the beach, struggling to organize:
I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones….I distributed them equally between my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it….But this was only a makeshift solution that could not long content a man like me. So I began to look for something else ... And the solution to which I rallied in the end was to throw away all the stones but one, which I kept now in one pocket, now in another, and which of course I soon lost, or threw away, or gave away, or swallowed [...]
This is a famous example of narrative stasis. And yet while “nothing happens,” something does, for the reader if not for Molloy. The passage is filed away as evidence for our own investigation of an existential mystery whose nonsolution culminates the final line of the trilogy: “I can’t go on, I must go on, I’ll go on.”
These are novels with a profound memory of themselves; every digression serves to echo and connect with everything that came before. The text mimics the structure of the mind and the secrets it keeps even from itself.
THE END
I’ve set up these modes of involving the audience or creating readerly interest – suspense v. pattern recognition; exposure v. confession; voyeurism v. exhibitionism – as a series of apparent binaries. In the Beckettian spirit of cul-de-sacs and undoing everything that came before, I should mention that they are obviously false binaries. Of course we frequently employ multiple modes of involving the audience at once.
What may be useful to keep in mind, however, is the importance of being intentional about when you mean to appeal, formally, to the suspense model, and when it makes sense to appeal to the pseudo-suspense model; when to voyeurism and when to exhibitionism; and so on and so forth. Are you writing a plot in which the reader anticipates a major event (e.g., to return to Hitchcock’s examples, a hidden bomb going off; a marriage proposal accepted or rejected over the telephone) or a major illumination or moment of recognition (e.g., the meaning of the madeleine, the stones, the diary, the nature of memory and time)? It’s maybe worth adding that, in a digital moment that so emphasizes exposure, confession, and the deeply personal, it’s easy to forget that (successful) fiction is in fact two-faced: no matter how private and self-absorbed or self-exposing it appears, it always has a public orientation toward involving its audience.
The diary I mentioned at the beginning of this [“craft talk” / Substack] inevitably turned into the suggestion of a novel. The premise: [REDACTED]. I like it very much when I’m alone, rereading it by myself. Yet the thought of others reading what I have written—of reading even this story of its inception—gives me pause. I am reminded that I sent those “diary entries” to the Australian editor from part one only because I was promised they would not be published online—which is to say, I was promised the audience would remain anonymous (to me) and small. While writing them, then, I could almost pretend there was no audience at all.
This series started with the query, Who are diaries written for? In my newfound role of exhibitionist, a fresh question: How much can you expose without destroying yourself…? Anyway, I hope at the very least (and like Dostoevsky) to have been entertaining.
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FRESH OUT OF SECRETS
Ghost Pains-related US&UK events 🎉 below in wallet-sized graphics you can save on your phone.
I’ll also be at NYU’s Remarque Institute on March 1st presenting on left melancholia as part of a panel titled “Emotional Histories of the Left.” RSVP or Zoom in here.