A sensitive and nuanced exploration of a seldom-discussed subject by an acclaimed novelist
The fourteenth volume in the Art of series conjures an ethereal subject: the idea of mystery in fiction. Mystery is not often discussed—apart from the genre—because, as Maud Casey says, “It’s not easy to talk about something that is a whispered invitation, a siren song, a flickering light in the distance.” Casey, the author of several critically acclaimed novels, reaches beyond the usual tool kit of fictional elements to ask the question: Where does mystery reside in a work of fiction? She takes us into the Land of Un—a space of uncertainty and unknowing—to find out and looks at the variety of ways mystery is created through character, image, structure, and haunted texts, including the novels of Shirley Jackson, Paul Yoon, J. M. Coetzee, and more. Casey’s wide-ranging discussion encompasses spirit photography, the radical nature of empathy, and contradictory characters, as she searches for questions rather than answers. The Art of Mystery is a striking and vibrant addition to the much-loved Art of series.
A sensitive and nuanced exploration of a seldom-discussed subject by an acclaimed novelist
The fourteenth volume in the Art of series conjures an ethereal subject: the idea of mystery in fiction. Mystery is not often discussed—apart from the genre—because, as Maud Casey says, “It’s not easy to talk about something that is a whispered invitation, a siren song, a flickering light in the distance.” Casey, the author of several critically acclaimed novels, reaches beyond the usual tool kit of fictional elements to ask the question: Where does mystery reside in a work of fiction? She takes us into the Land of Un—a space of uncertainty and unknowing—to find out and looks at the variety of ways mystery is created through character, image, structure, and haunted texts, including the novels of Shirley Jackson, Paul Yoon, J. M. Coetzee, and more. Casey’s wide-ranging discussion encompasses spirit photography, the radical nature of empathy, and contradictory characters, as she searches for questions rather than answers. The Art of Mystery is a striking and vibrant addition to the much-loved Art of series.
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Overview
A sensitive and nuanced exploration of a seldom-discussed subject by an acclaimed novelist
The fourteenth volume in the Art of series conjures an ethereal subject: the idea of mystery in fiction. Mystery is not often discussed—apart from the genre—because, as Maud Casey says, “It’s not easy to talk about something that is a whispered invitation, a siren song, a flickering light in the distance.” Casey, the author of several critically acclaimed novels, reaches beyond the usual tool kit of fictional elements to ask the question: Where does mystery reside in a work of fiction? She takes us into the Land of Un—a space of uncertainty and unknowing—to find out and looks at the variety of ways mystery is created through character, image, structure, and haunted texts, including the novels of Shirley Jackson, Paul Yoon, J. M. Coetzee, and more. Casey’s wide-ranging discussion encompasses spirit photography, the radical nature of empathy, and contradictory characters, as she searches for questions rather than answers. The Art of Mystery is a striking and vibrant addition to the much-loved Art of series.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781555979850 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
| Publication date: | 01/02/2018 |
| Series: | Art of... |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Land of Un
A few summers ago, I found myself pushing through hot, thick New York City air on Twenty-Third Street in Chelsea. I was on my way to be hypnotized. It was a pivotal point in my life — a long relationship was ending; life was supposed to have gone one way and it was about to go somewhere else entirely; there was about to be sadness, anger, guilt, the sensation of teetering on the edge of the earth with the possibility of, at any time, spinning off into the ether. The usual fare.
I was on my way to be hypnotized, and photographed in that hypnotic state. A friend of a friend, a photographer whose work I admired, was working on a project that involved photographing people for whom imagination plays a central role — artist, dancer, writer types. My friend had offered my name; at the time, I was working on a novel inspired by a nineteenth-century French psychiatric case study, which involved hypnosis, the medical intervention du jour, and the birth of photography as, among other things, a forensic tool for reading illness and criminality on the body. The photographer asked me to bring an important moment from my life, something to help focus me while being hypnotized. What felt most lacking in my life right then was wonder, and so I brought with me, like an ice cube in danger of melting in my hand before I arrived at the photographer's studio, my first memory of wonder.
In the very hot heat of the moment, jostling and being jostled by a sidewalk full of people with their own concerns, I felt that my concerns had shrunk themselves to this question: What if I'm one of those people who can't be hypnotized? When I arrived at the photographer's studio, while the photographer set up her tripod and the hypnotist explained the logistics in his deep and deeply soothing voice and I grew suspiciously drowsy, my concern suddenly flipped: What if I was so suggestible that I might be hypnotized before we even began? What ultimately happened lay somewhere in between resistance and submission; what happened was something that to this day I am unable to explain entirely.
I might begin, however, by telling you that my first memory of wonder is an impromptu camping trip in a Rhode Island pine forest, not far from the ocean, not far from where my family was living at the time. That it was possible my parents had been fighting (they were divorced not long after) and that, indeed, there was something fraught about my mother taking just us kids to the woods. That when we arrived in the woods, there was the sweet smell of pine and the sharp smell of ocean salt and in the distance the sound of crashing waves. That I was a painfully shy kid who spent much of her time willing invisibility around her like a cloak in the midst of a raucous bohemian family that occasionally lit itself on highly visible, glorious fire. That once night fell, it became so dark that the waves seemed to crash out of the darkness itself. What I felt then was part innocence, part terror, part awe. Something was revealed; something laid bare. It was to this wondrous place that I went under hypnosis.
I might also explain that I never completely lost the awareness of the photographer's studio, of the hypnotist, the photographer and her assistant. Even with my eyes closed, I could feel the hot flash of the bulb on the vintage tripod camera. I was, at once, performing and being magically transported to that place in the woods, a place, I would realize later, to which I'm transported on good days when I write. I might explain that I felt like myself and utterly unlike myself. I might try to explain all of these things, and I still wouldn't have gotten to the bottom of the experience. An experience I think about still, one I could think about endlessly. What was that?
We fiction writers talk a lot — for good reason, and to good end — about character, point of view, dialogue, scene, and summary, but in my experience, we don't talk a lot about mystery. It's not easy to talk about something that is a whispered invitation, a siren song, a flickering light in the distance. It's not easy to talk about something that, even as it encourages us to seek it, resists explanation. Something that wafts like smoke around the edges of the page. Especially when there is, in our culture, an increasing intolerance for ambiguity, for Keats's famous "negative capability," in which, as he wrote, one is "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."
But if stories are one of the ways we make sense of the world, they are also how we experience whatever doesn't make sense, whatever cannot be fully understood. Stories are how we stand in the presence of mystery. If mystery, the genre, is about finding the answers, then mystery, that elusive yet essential element of fiction, is about finding the questions. In Chekhov's famous letter to a friend, he wrote, "You are right to demand that an author take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author." Mystery in fiction resides in those carefully articulated questions, and in the unparaphrasable content of a story or a novel, the experienced meaning.
I grew up in a home full of books — Howards End– style bookcases ready to kill us all, teetering stacks of books at the bottom of the stairs, a fan of books on the dining room table, piles of books on the back of toilets, books splayed open on the porch waiting patiently for someone to return. An embarrassment of riches — these portals to other worlds were everywhere. For a long time, subject to an eldest child's deference, I believed those other worlds belonged to my parents, whose books they were. They had, after all, walked through all of those portals long before me. But I was so wrong. Books are shape-shifting wild creatures no amount of reading can tame; so much depends on how we approach them, on what each of us, as readers, has to offer them. When I began to walk through those portals on my own, the endlessly expanding universe of mystery was there, waiting for me.
When one is, as one always is if one is paying any kind of attention, humbled by life, there's no getting out of this life without feeling an increasing sense of mystery. "Mystery isn't something that is gradually evaporating," Flannery O'Connor wrote in a letter. "It grows along with knowledge." This is true of the mystery we encounter in life, and it's true of the mystery we encounter in literature. I wouldn't have been able to articulate this quality at the beginning of my reading life, or the beginning of my writing life. Or even now. Not entirely. That's the thing about mystery: it remains just out of reach. Still, mystery has changed me and keeps changing me on a cellular level — among other things, it's made me a little less deferential, a little wilder. So here goes, my humble effort to sidle up to it.
Mystery in fiction has some things in common with the mystical experiences William James describes in the lectures he delivered in 1901 and 1902, which became The Varieties of Religious Experience. In them, he lays out four characteristics of the mystical experience: ineffability, a noetic quality, transiency, and what he describes as passivity (an initial effort must be made but then "the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance"), which is what readers do when they enter into a fictional world. In the end, James's project is not to minimize or dismiss conceptual processes or rational ones but to give value and credence to affective and visceral experience, which is what writers do when they fashion a fictional world out of words.
I find the most moving parts of James's Varieties of Religious Experience to be the personal testimony of people struggling to give voice to rare instances in which they were shaken free from the cage of self. Here are a few snippets: "But the more I seek words to express this intimate intercourse, the more I feel the impossibility of describing the thing by any of our usual images"; "As I sat there thinking, I seemed to feel some great and mighty presence"; "I only felt myself changed and believed myself another me; I looked for myself in myself and did not find myself." And my favorite: "I am undone." Slippery as religious experience, mystery involves an undoing that yields wonder.
Months later, when I returned to the photographer's studio to look at the proofs, I worried there would be no evidence of all those strange feelings. In the photographs, there I was, the fact of me, eyes closed. There was the fact of me, and then there was something else. Something enigmatic, suggestive of the innocence, terror, and awe, all those things I worried I'd only imagined. The photographer captured these layers. She captured the mystery of it all.
Under hypnosis, it's safe to say, I was undone. The photograph that resulted from the intersection of that experience and the photographer's eye undid me too.
Volunteering to be undone is not, perhaps, for everyone. But the question is — and it's a question every writer spends a lifetime thinking about — What do we want art to be? What do we want it to do? We don't, for example, usually ascribe the status of art to something that does one thing. To something that is, say, purely functional. Or that is only a morality tale. Or that only gets you off. Nor, I'm guessing, do we want art only to offer guidance or comfort. Art requires mystery. Mystery — often unclear, often involving unlikable characters, always involving unanswered questions, and often seriously weird and unsettling — requires plunging the reader into that Keatsian state of uncertainty and doubt. No irritable reaching after fact and reason. The reader should, in other words, be undone.
There's a lot that needs making in fiction but creating space for mystery requires a certain amount of unmaking. Un, that handy little prefix, is, as firefighters say about really big fires, fully involved. The good news is that un doesn't merely undo a word and turn it into its opposite; un is a release from, a freeing, a bringing out of, all of which are effects of mystery and part of its purpose. Mystery in fiction means taking the reader to that land of Un — uncertainty, unfathomability, unknowing. It's Kafka's axe to the frozen seas of our soul. In other words, it will — and it should — mess you up.
Admittedly, when we speak about mystery in fiction things can get a little, well, mysterious. "One can't write directly about the soul," Virginia Woolf wrote. "Looked at, it vanishes." I mean, how exactly does one paraphrase the unparaphrasable? How does one articulate experienced meaning, the kind that axes the frozen seas of our souls? Where is this ghostly electricity located, and how do you conjure it? It's a careful calibration, the cultivation of useful, inclusive mystery. It's the eternal authorial tightrope walk. How do we create inclusive, compelling mystery and avoid the kind that leaves a reader confounded to the point of throwing her out of the dream of the story? Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog? Yes, there's a bit of that, but there are other, less fanciful ways of coaxing mystery onto the page.
What follows is an investigation into some of those ways: the construction of innocence; character — two varieties in particular, those who keep secrets and those who are contradictory and/or absurd; imagery; embedding mystery in structure; through ghosts and other spectral presences. This book will include close readings of high-wire acts by a number of authors, some of whom are well known and some less well known, whose fiction undoes me. My consideration of this rich subject is by no means comprehensive. Mystery in literature, as in life, expresses itself in infinite ways.
CHAPTER 2
Unknowing, or The Construction of Innocence
In 1873, the spirit photographer Édouard Buguet made a name for himself among the Spiritualist crowd. He did this by taking photographs of, among others, the Spiritualist Lady Caithness and her son Count de Medina Pomar, to whom thirteen distinct spirits appeared, including Lady Caithness's late husband, who brought with him from the other world an apple, part of the family crest, as proof of his identity and his realness. In 1875, police raided Buguet's studio on the boulevard Montmartre in Paris. They confiscated two dummies, shrouds, fake beards, and hundreds of pictures of life-sized heads glued onto cards. At his trial, Buguet caved completely and confessed to double-exposing his plates with these props. As he explained to the court, he would construct an approximation of the dead person with whom his client wished to be photographed and then, while his receptionist chatted up the client, he would photograph the dummy dead person set against a dark background and obscured by a "fluidic veil" to disguise the rough edges. He showed the court how he used the same portrait to serve as this person's dead mother and that person's dead sister and this other person's dead friend. The prosecution brought in as many former Buguet clients as they could find as witnesses against him, including a journalist, a professor of history, a colonel of artillery, an optician, and, most notably, a photographic expert. Each of them listened to Buguet explain the deception, and every one of them, in the face of Buguet's confession of guilt, testified in his defense.
This is a story of many things. Gullibility, sure. Pride, coupled with a bit of the customer is always right, or the customer always wants to be right. No one wants to be a sucker, and these people had paid good money for a picture of themselves with their dead beloveds. But there is something else going on here too: often we humans, out of love, out of loss, sometimes for no reason at all, want to believe. As a story about the desire for story itself, I find it not only moving but also quite resonant for us human writers.
Modern Spiritualism, as it happens, began a few years after Morse invented the telegraph, a system in which messages were transmitted, as if by ghostly magic, over great distances. It was a time when new technology — X-rays, for example — allowed people to see invisible things. The very structure of Spiritualism, which believed in the materialization of the dead, was deeply aligned with, constructed out of, the technology and science of the era. It was, in its way, the poetry of that era's technology and science.
We don't turn to fiction for the facts. Fiction offers relief from the facts and from that terrible word — closure. In her essay "You Need Not Doubt What I Say Because It Is Not True," Marilynne Robinson describes the way, in regular life, we are usually vigilant about the existence of reality. After all, it's what divides the sane from the insane. But, she writes, "Fiction relieves us of this defensiveness — in fiction we expect surprise, irony, reversal. In effect, we expect to be fooled." And, sometimes, like the people who wanted nothing more than to believe the trickster spirit photographer, we yearn to be fooled.
Spirit photography offers an apt analogy for the seductive quality of literary mystery; each is highly crafted and succeeds only if a certain amount of mystery is conjured and maintained. One of the ways this happens in fiction is by the author's creating a sophisticated structure that evokes, even encourages, innocence. (That is the ghost of my beloved!)
Writing within the same relentlessly guilty historical moment in Eastern Europe in the 1920s, Isaac Babel and Dezs? Kosztolányi each construct a variety of defiant innocence. Babel, in his short story "Awakening," from his self-proclaimed Autobiographical Stories (1923–25), and Kosztolányi, in his novel Skylark (1924), invite readers into possibility spaces to engage with things that cannot be grasped by reason. Fiction, after all, is a democratic art, reliant on the participation of its citizen readers, and in the best circumstances, readers are contemporaneously sent back into themselves and out into the larger universe.
This is certainly what happened to me when as a kid I picked up Babel's Autobiographical Stories off the top of a teetering stack of books in my parents' house and walked through its portal. What I encountered in these stories was the mystery one must evoke to become a writer. Uncertainty is not just a by-product of the vocation, these stories suggest; it should be courted. Babel's ars poetica is based not on the logic of what we can know, but on the logic, if you will, of uncertainty, of what we can feel. Babel himself was a mystery. In the introduction to the 1955 edition of Isaac Babel's Collected Stories, the first edition published in English, long after his murder by Stalin, Lionel Trilling described Babel's approach to fiction: The reader "ought not be given what he can easily recognize as 'a certified true copy' of life" because "the human fact does not dominate the scene of our existence — for something to 'show forth' it must first be hidden, and the human fact is submerged in and subordinated to a world of circumstance." Babel was his own hidden human fact. So much about Babel was a puzzle, a question. Part of this was political — he was a writer living in the midst of a fascist regime, serving, and being censored, at the pleasure of Stalin, protected only because of his connection to the writer Maksim Gorky. There was the mystery of his death, only resolved in the 1990s when it was possible to gain access to the KGB archives that said, yes, Stalin had Babel executed soon after his arrest in 1939. Perhaps Babel's own cuspy state lent itself to the production of mystery in his writing.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Art Of Mystery"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Maud Casey.
Excerpted by permission of Graywolf Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
The Land of Un,
Unknowing, or The Construction of Innocence,
Mystery in Character: A Secret Life with a Secret,
Mystery in Character (Continued): The Uses of Discomfort,
The Mystery in Imagery,
Looking Out, Looking In,
Hauntings,
Living in the Land of Un,