imposition
But there are acts of a different kind to this when the outer crust gets broken by the inner self breaking through at a moment of tension and you get what may be called a free act. Such acts are of rare occurrence. It is only at moments of tension and crisis that we choose in defiance of what is generally called a motive. Thus understood our free acts are exceptional.
The path to the waterfall is short and well travelled. The areas around the path are also worn down, pressed by many feet in search of adventure, closer access to the river, or an escape from whatever people happen to be there. In most places, the usual layer of duff is completely absent, which gives the area a strangely well-groomed appearance. It is possible, however – without too much difficulty – to take pictures that seem to promise a remote and untrammeled nature, a true wilderness. Despite the occasional drainage pipes, the rough-hewn bridges worn smooth with their guide rails, and the small boulders maneuvered to support and mark the path, such pictures are not entirely false; they wander the precarious limen between tame and feral and wild. On a hot summer day, the cool of the river and the shade of the trees seem primordial, but they are one lightning strike, one careless match from conflagration and desolation – and of course renewal. Or perhaps it would be better to say the creation of something different.
As works of imagination, the historian’s work and the novelist’s do not differ. Where they do differ is that the historian’s picture is meant to be true. The novelist has a single task only: to construct a coherent picture, one that makes sense. The historian has a double task: he has both to do this, and to construct a picture of things as they really were of events that really happened.
This was on my mind as I considered two rather different books that I read lately – Ariane Koch’s peculiar novel Overstaying and Yiyun Li’s short memoir Things in Nature Merely Grow. They are very different books, with very different intentions, and it is perhaps unfair to compare them. Indeed, I have no real reason to compare them save for the hapless propinquity of the reading experiences and the fact that they both seemed to spark a desire to say or think something more than the usual brief note. In reading both books, it was impossible to ignore that they were written for effect; both were intended to bring about in the mind of the reader some perturbations of intellect that might, in turn, activate the emotions.1
One is a novel and one is a memoir; thus one could say that one is ‘history’ and thus aims to ‘true’ – but as Collingwood notes, the method is the same. Are they coherent? No. Neither is coherent, but for both that seems a matter of effect, because the only way to inhabit an incoherent situation properly is through incoherence. Overstaying is particularly incoherent, so much so that it is not clear why it is such a baggy mess for such a short book.2 The ‘visitor’, whether person, pet, psychosis, ambition, or monster, does not take a coherent shape, it remains a vague lurker from the realm of shadow, with its paintbrush fingers, shifting proportions, ability to wear the narrator’s clothing, and fascination with vacuum nozzles. Although it is, as a novel, something Koch has made, it seems strangely remote, inherited, passed through and occupied out of inattention (much like the house in the story). Koch’s narrator is seeking, it seems, an escape from stasis (‘I am dancing in a very small radius; in fact, the dancing is barely visible from the outside, one might just as well call it standing’, p. 104) and at the end seems to be on a bus to nowhere (or anywhere). My thoughts wavered at the end, too, caught between ‘better you than me’ and ‘jeez, grow up already’.
Li’s memoir is more successful, more effective and more affecting, and I cannot quite decide if that’s because the reader is led to believe (given the genre) that it is ‘true’, or if it is more artful. Certainly the subject is more awful (‘And yet life is still to be lived, inside tragedies, outside tragedies, and despite tragedies’, 13%), and it, too, seems written from anywhere (nowhere), a place Li calls ‘the abyss’. In writing from the abyss, however, Li builds a sense of someone holding themselves very, very still, because any motion at all brings awareness of pain. That stillness seems to vibrate, it radiates, is radiant, and becomes painful to the viewer, to the reader, while also illuminating. In a later chapter in which Li describes the inadequacies of self-interested consolation, the tension snaps and the words are angry and impatient. This does not, however, spark an answering impatience; rather, it conveys the senseless hurt of powerlessness, of burning oneself through inattention, of a lightning strike from a seemingly clear sky. ‘There is no real salvation from one’s own life; books however, offer the approximation of it’ (74%).
- Please forgive me, I have been reading Descartes and so am tempted to tear down all definitions and rebuild them from scratch. It seems to me that the wheel ought to be round, but further experimentation may be necessary.[↩]
- Goblin-mode prose.[↩]