JENNY BOULLY
The Art of Fiction: An Essay
PART I.
CHAPTER I.
When I first met Butch, he was counting spiders on his ceiling, which he said wasn’t the ceiling, but rather a metaphor for sky, which itself wasn’t a sky at all either, but rather, a metaphor for something else, and so it happened that I fell quite madly in love with Butch; however, Butch never really happened either or maybe he did, but his name was something other than Butch and the manner in which we made the other’s acquaintance didn’t happen with such significance—but given the way I am telling it makes it no different than the telling which occurs quite truthfully under the guise of fiction, which means, if it’s truly true fiction, which is to say, if it is true, then it really is fiction, and everything else is a failed mimicry. This takes me back to the ceiling and sky and metaphor and how the ceiling mimics sky and how sky mimics how I kept seeing the sacred or something like the sacred manifesting itself in various guises, and naturally, this led me to loving too completely all types of winged creatures, most specifically lunamoths, because they were the most poetic, which as you know derives from the Greek poesis, meaning "making," meaning one ought to consult Aristotle’s Poetics right about now and review the relation of poetry to mimicry.
CHAPTER II.
When I first met Butch, I was in bed alone, staring at my ceiling, counting eyes, which weren’t eyes at all, but someone who I felt was always with me, who wasn’t a person at all, but rather a metaphor. Butch was standing in a doorway, talking about driving too quickly, driving his truck over a cliff in Paraguay. But I understand that it isn’t a truck or a cliff or Paraguay, and the doorway means something I won’t understand just now.
What the great philosopher says in the span of two sentences, the maladroit novelist takes 800 pages to extrapolate. I’m not saying that Anna Karenina is a bad novel, I’m only saying that I didn’t orgasm in it. And by orgasm, I mean marginalia I couldn’t help but have, the characteristic mindful doodling that can only point to one conclusion: that I came across the one golden trail that the Steppenwolf seeks so sadly each night, the one passage in a book that Henry Miller says is worth the pages and pages of perfunctory plot and narrative.
I’m not saying that my affair with Butch was bad; I’m just saying that I didn’t orgasm in it, and by orgasm, I mean orgasm. In bed, he was quick and shy and eyeballs were eyeballs and spiders were spiders and the ceiling was a ceiling that never opened up to any heaven.
CHAPTER III.
When I first met Butch, I was not well-read and therefore, I confused my hermeneutics of suspicion with having brilliant thoughts.
Years later, I became better read: random affairs will do that to you. After a lonely while, I realized that reading smut novels just wasn’t my thing: those novels that litter airport terminals and vacation beaches, those novels that are easy to read and get your panties a bit wet, those novels that end up at some second-hand book shop that sells nothing but bad sci-fi and horror and romance novels. They are easy; they make the time go by and maybe you become a bit fond of certain reoccurring characters; however, you realize—after a lonely while—that you need a book that you want to spend the rest of life with, a book that you can read and reread time and time again and love more and more each time and realize, as the book changes, as books will do, that you change too and the book loves you back and is a winged thing.
PART II.
CHAPTER I.
When I first met the father of my daughter, he was not a book I wanted to read because the beginning was so slow and I think he thought I was a sloppy reader anyhow. I’d read a page and put the book away, read a page and put the book away again, each time reading a bit and bit more until I realized that I was in love with the book and didn’t want to read it so completely because I didn’t want it to end.
What does it mean that the man I am in love with knows more about the literary device of recognition than anyone I know, and looking through my copy of the Poetics, for a passage to quote here, I turn randomly to the section on recognition, which I didn’t even know was there?
[This was no accident: my copy of ARISTOTLE On the Art of Poetry With a Supplement ARISTOTLE ON MUSIC, was owned by Nancy Thorp, who attended Hollins College and who died in automobile accident; her parents set up several poetry awards at the college, one of which I won my sophomore and senior years; this book was found in the basement of West, a dormitory at the College, during asbestos removal; a friend of mine was involved in the clean up, she spotted it and thought I should like to have it; I open it up: on the front page, in faded blue ink, smudged slightly by a water stain reads: Nancy Thorp M. 224. (I can also guess that M. stands for Main, another dormitory on campus, and that perhaps Nancy lived in Main room 224.) For months, I thought that perhaps I should try to contact her parents and send it to them, or maybe donate it to the English Department or the Hollins Library, but then I realized that it was a winged creature that had somehow found its way to me for safekeeping.
My digression betrays itself because I wanted to share something, but then realized that the significance behind the shared object would have to be explained, would take away life from whatever I was meaning to show and tell about before. And so, I had to tell of how I came upon the Poetics, and then I feel strongly the urge to tell so much more about my attendance at Hollins, but I realize it has nothing to do with what I was sharing before. I think I can save myself by digging into my Poetics, finding the exact quotation regarding mimicry.]
CHAPTER II.
When I first met Butch, he was a baby in a bulrush basket, and I held him to my breast to suckle; he didn’t especially want it, kept asking me to point the way to Charon. The river or the moon?, I ask before knowing that in these times, Pluto is still a god somewhere and not a planet. In this story, my womb is cold and old and my ovaries sag, deformed like the moons of Pluto. Butch is a baby, and he’s in a bulrush basket. I am the way, I say.
In fiction, digression means: promise. I promise this will fit in somehow; I’ll return to this in a way that will allow sense to be made; the diamond ring is the missing puzzle piece; the jack rabbit gnawing on our celery isn’t a diversion from (as Robert Kelly warns in his book Doctor of Silences: beware of animals when they appear in fictions, he says) what really eats us up when we’re in love. So when the novelist suddenly drops her coveted plot like an expensive vase, beware—love is in the air.
In love, it is easy to forget one’s promises to one’s self. To be in love means to sleepwalk when the lights are on—to lie wide awake when the lights are out, engaged in some other kind of dreaming. In his essay “Riddled,” David Weiss says that love is dangerous behavior. Jeannette Winterson says that those in the most need of change chose to fall in love and then blame it all on fate. To suffer Romeo’s woe, professed at the beginning of the play, of no love to bemoan, means simply that one has yet to invent a white rabbit.
CHAPTER III.
In my lying-awake-dreams, he has already left me. I don’t find out I’m pregnant until a week later. Picking up the phone to call him, I stop myself, think that because my heart hurts so much, I’d rather do this tragically and therefore alone. Years later, he calls me, only because he heard, through a mutual acquaintance, that I was dying and that I had a beautiful daughter that had his eyes. I confess that she is his and would you like to meet her? We set up a dinner meeting at my apartment. I dress Karena in red velvet and ballerina slippers. She eats her peas, plucking them off the china with her fork, which is silver, of course. She doesn’t speak much, but when she does, he looks at her as if she had wings. I send her to bed promptly after the bread pudding. She is confused by the word “copse” in Anna Karenina; he is impressed, as she is only four. I explain, and she goes back to her room, closing the door behind her. When he leaves, he can hear her footsteps approaching; he kisses her bye. Behind the closed door, he overhears her ask, “Mommy, was that man my daddy?” “No,” I say. “You were sent to me in a bulrush basket.” All night, she sleeps, and I eat celery in small bites, by the refrigerator door, to keep me slightly alive.
PART III.
CHAPTER I.
What the magicians know will hurt you, as it is they who possess the knowledge of from whence objects come and whither they go. The white rabbit never exists until summoned, and the place where the white rabbit existed before being summoned never existed—only in the spectator’s mind do these places exist. When the flock of doves flies forth from the magician’s breast pocket, they do not enter our world to perch on random branches of earthbound trees—we only see them briefly for the sake of the trick. When I meet whomever it is I meet, this person never existed before and exists then, at the meeting, simply for the sake of the trick. What the magicians know will hurt you, because when whoever it is I meet flies forth from my breast, as they will and as they must, these beings do not enter this world, but go only where the magicians know they belong. Into the black hat of disappearances so many loves go and reemerge as playing cards and the animal manifestations of the symbols of fecundity or hope.
[Digression for the sake of inclusion: One of ten persons aged 65 or over has some form of Alzheimer’s Disease. Nearly half of persons aged 85 or over is also infected. There exists chemical agents in these patients’ brains which trigger memory loss, and according to researchers, for the Alzheimer’s patient, there is no past or future, only the present.]
The need to write fictions arises from the desire to say one thing and mean another. Storytellers are just that—storytellers, and a lot of storytellers think they are writing fiction; however, the fiction writers, the true writers of fiction, branded with invisible wings, dare not crush the storytellers’ egos, dare not dispel their notion of sky as sky. Fiction writers are wearers of the magician’s top hat and like god, they can create ex nihilo; they spin cocoons around mere storytellers; they emerge as winged things; they begin in various ways; they all say: When I first met Butch, he was chopping chickens at the block.
CHAPTER II.
When I first met Butch, I was already aware that the sky was held together with pins and needles; I had already given up on watercolor, having progressed to charcoal. You speak in riddles, he says; no, the riddles sneak into objects, needing the manifestations of ideas. Then a boy blows his horn, hides behind a red wheel barrow and cries wolf. I mean, someone performed a sexual act; I mean, what the red wheel barrow means is so much more than everything that depends upon it; I mean, literature—I mean Nabokov1. I mean, give me a bag of bones and I will shake them and cast them in the dirt and make a fiction.
He said he was engaged; he asked, Do you want me to take her? She looked up at me and asked, Mommy, was that man my daddy? He overheard. She was confused by the word “copse.” A wooded area, I tell her—in this case, where the male characters go, for sport, to shoot birds. You speak in riddles, he says.
CONCLUSION
What I mean was, my body wasn’t taken with me. When the soul goes, the soul is a very spacious thing. What is amazing was that our dreams were right: we would come to, over time, discover independent yet certain truths. Discovery number one: it is lonely. Discovery number two: no matter what, you will never be privy to my diary. Three: even though the moon may be rising, there will be no Spartica and intervening ivy, no conscious oaks, no dowagers, no dowries, no contemplating orderlies, no oranges, no redeeming qualities. When you leave, you will leave incredibly softly.
______________________________
1 Nabokov: “Literature was born not the day when a boy crying ‘wolf, wolf’ came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying ‘wolf, wolf’ and there was no wolf behind him.”
When I first met Butch, he was counting spiders on his ceiling, which he said wasn’t the ceiling, but rather a metaphor for sky, which itself wasn’t a sky at all either, but rather, a metaphor for something else, and so it happened that I fell quite madly in love with Butch; however, Butch never really happened either or maybe he did, but his name was something other than Butch and the manner in which we made the other’s acquaintance didn’t happen with such significance—but given the way I am telling it makes it no different than the telling which occurs quite truthfully under the guise of fiction, which means, if it’s truly true fiction, which is to say, if it is true, then it really is fiction, and everything else is a failed mimicry. This takes me back to the ceiling and sky and metaphor and how the ceiling mimics sky and how sky mimics how I kept seeing the sacred or something like the sacred manifesting itself in various guises, and naturally, this led me to loving too completely all types of winged creatures, most specifically lunamoths, because they were the most poetic, which as you know derives from the Greek poesis, meaning "making," meaning one ought to consult Aristotle’s Poetics right about now and review the relation of poetry to mimicry.
CHAPTER II.
When I first met Butch, I was in bed alone, staring at my ceiling, counting eyes, which weren’t eyes at all, but someone who I felt was always with me, who wasn’t a person at all, but rather a metaphor. Butch was standing in a doorway, talking about driving too quickly, driving his truck over a cliff in Paraguay. But I understand that it isn’t a truck or a cliff or Paraguay, and the doorway means something I won’t understand just now.
What the great philosopher says in the span of two sentences, the maladroit novelist takes 800 pages to extrapolate. I’m not saying that Anna Karenina is a bad novel, I’m only saying that I didn’t orgasm in it. And by orgasm, I mean marginalia I couldn’t help but have, the characteristic mindful doodling that can only point to one conclusion: that I came across the one golden trail that the Steppenwolf seeks so sadly each night, the one passage in a book that Henry Miller says is worth the pages and pages of perfunctory plot and narrative.
I’m not saying that my affair with Butch was bad; I’m just saying that I didn’t orgasm in it, and by orgasm, I mean orgasm. In bed, he was quick and shy and eyeballs were eyeballs and spiders were spiders and the ceiling was a ceiling that never opened up to any heaven.
CHAPTER III.
When I first met Butch, I was not well-read and therefore, I confused my hermeneutics of suspicion with having brilliant thoughts.
Years later, I became better read: random affairs will do that to you. After a lonely while, I realized that reading smut novels just wasn’t my thing: those novels that litter airport terminals and vacation beaches, those novels that are easy to read and get your panties a bit wet, those novels that end up at some second-hand book shop that sells nothing but bad sci-fi and horror and romance novels. They are easy; they make the time go by and maybe you become a bit fond of certain reoccurring characters; however, you realize—after a lonely while—that you need a book that you want to spend the rest of life with, a book that you can read and reread time and time again and love more and more each time and realize, as the book changes, as books will do, that you change too and the book loves you back and is a winged thing.
PART II.
CHAPTER I.
When I first met the father of my daughter, he was not a book I wanted to read because the beginning was so slow and I think he thought I was a sloppy reader anyhow. I’d read a page and put the book away, read a page and put the book away again, each time reading a bit and bit more until I realized that I was in love with the book and didn’t want to read it so completely because I didn’t want it to end.
What does it mean that the man I am in love with knows more about the literary device of recognition than anyone I know, and looking through my copy of the Poetics, for a passage to quote here, I turn randomly to the section on recognition, which I didn’t even know was there?
[This was no accident: my copy of ARISTOTLE On the Art of Poetry With a Supplement ARISTOTLE ON MUSIC, was owned by Nancy Thorp, who attended Hollins College and who died in automobile accident; her parents set up several poetry awards at the college, one of which I won my sophomore and senior years; this book was found in the basement of West, a dormitory at the College, during asbestos removal; a friend of mine was involved in the clean up, she spotted it and thought I should like to have it; I open it up: on the front page, in faded blue ink, smudged slightly by a water stain reads: Nancy Thorp M. 224. (I can also guess that M. stands for Main, another dormitory on campus, and that perhaps Nancy lived in Main room 224.) For months, I thought that perhaps I should try to contact her parents and send it to them, or maybe donate it to the English Department or the Hollins Library, but then I realized that it was a winged creature that had somehow found its way to me for safekeeping.
My digression betrays itself because I wanted to share something, but then realized that the significance behind the shared object would have to be explained, would take away life from whatever I was meaning to show and tell about before. And so, I had to tell of how I came upon the Poetics, and then I feel strongly the urge to tell so much more about my attendance at Hollins, but I realize it has nothing to do with what I was sharing before. I think I can save myself by digging into my Poetics, finding the exact quotation regarding mimicry.]
CHAPTER II.
When I first met Butch, he was a baby in a bulrush basket, and I held him to my breast to suckle; he didn’t especially want it, kept asking me to point the way to Charon. The river or the moon?, I ask before knowing that in these times, Pluto is still a god somewhere and not a planet. In this story, my womb is cold and old and my ovaries sag, deformed like the moons of Pluto. Butch is a baby, and he’s in a bulrush basket. I am the way, I say.
In fiction, digression means: promise. I promise this will fit in somehow; I’ll return to this in a way that will allow sense to be made; the diamond ring is the missing puzzle piece; the jack rabbit gnawing on our celery isn’t a diversion from (as Robert Kelly warns in his book Doctor of Silences: beware of animals when they appear in fictions, he says) what really eats us up when we’re in love. So when the novelist suddenly drops her coveted plot like an expensive vase, beware—love is in the air.
In love, it is easy to forget one’s promises to one’s self. To be in love means to sleepwalk when the lights are on—to lie wide awake when the lights are out, engaged in some other kind of dreaming. In his essay “Riddled,” David Weiss says that love is dangerous behavior. Jeannette Winterson says that those in the most need of change chose to fall in love and then blame it all on fate. To suffer Romeo’s woe, professed at the beginning of the play, of no love to bemoan, means simply that one has yet to invent a white rabbit.
CHAPTER III.
In my lying-awake-dreams, he has already left me. I don’t find out I’m pregnant until a week later. Picking up the phone to call him, I stop myself, think that because my heart hurts so much, I’d rather do this tragically and therefore alone. Years later, he calls me, only because he heard, through a mutual acquaintance, that I was dying and that I had a beautiful daughter that had his eyes. I confess that she is his and would you like to meet her? We set up a dinner meeting at my apartment. I dress Karena in red velvet and ballerina slippers. She eats her peas, plucking them off the china with her fork, which is silver, of course. She doesn’t speak much, but when she does, he looks at her as if she had wings. I send her to bed promptly after the bread pudding. She is confused by the word “copse” in Anna Karenina; he is impressed, as she is only four. I explain, and she goes back to her room, closing the door behind her. When he leaves, he can hear her footsteps approaching; he kisses her bye. Behind the closed door, he overhears her ask, “Mommy, was that man my daddy?” “No,” I say. “You were sent to me in a bulrush basket.” All night, she sleeps, and I eat celery in small bites, by the refrigerator door, to keep me slightly alive.
PART III.
CHAPTER I.
What the magicians know will hurt you, as it is they who possess the knowledge of from whence objects come and whither they go. The white rabbit never exists until summoned, and the place where the white rabbit existed before being summoned never existed—only in the spectator’s mind do these places exist. When the flock of doves flies forth from the magician’s breast pocket, they do not enter our world to perch on random branches of earthbound trees—we only see them briefly for the sake of the trick. When I meet whomever it is I meet, this person never existed before and exists then, at the meeting, simply for the sake of the trick. What the magicians know will hurt you, because when whoever it is I meet flies forth from my breast, as they will and as they must, these beings do not enter this world, but go only where the magicians know they belong. Into the black hat of disappearances so many loves go and reemerge as playing cards and the animal manifestations of the symbols of fecundity or hope.
[Digression for the sake of inclusion: One of ten persons aged 65 or over has some form of Alzheimer’s Disease. Nearly half of persons aged 85 or over is also infected. There exists chemical agents in these patients’ brains which trigger memory loss, and according to researchers, for the Alzheimer’s patient, there is no past or future, only the present.]
The need to write fictions arises from the desire to say one thing and mean another. Storytellers are just that—storytellers, and a lot of storytellers think they are writing fiction; however, the fiction writers, the true writers of fiction, branded with invisible wings, dare not crush the storytellers’ egos, dare not dispel their notion of sky as sky. Fiction writers are wearers of the magician’s top hat and like god, they can create ex nihilo; they spin cocoons around mere storytellers; they emerge as winged things; they begin in various ways; they all say: When I first met Butch, he was chopping chickens at the block.
CHAPTER II.
When I first met Butch, I was already aware that the sky was held together with pins and needles; I had already given up on watercolor, having progressed to charcoal. You speak in riddles, he says; no, the riddles sneak into objects, needing the manifestations of ideas. Then a boy blows his horn, hides behind a red wheel barrow and cries wolf. I mean, someone performed a sexual act; I mean, what the red wheel barrow means is so much more than everything that depends upon it; I mean, literature—I mean Nabokov1. I mean, give me a bag of bones and I will shake them and cast them in the dirt and make a fiction.
He said he was engaged; he asked, Do you want me to take her? She looked up at me and asked, Mommy, was that man my daddy? He overheard. She was confused by the word “copse.” A wooded area, I tell her—in this case, where the male characters go, for sport, to shoot birds. You speak in riddles, he says.
CONCLUSION
What I mean was, my body wasn’t taken with me. When the soul goes, the soul is a very spacious thing. What is amazing was that our dreams were right: we would come to, over time, discover independent yet certain truths. Discovery number one: it is lonely. Discovery number two: no matter what, you will never be privy to my diary. Three: even though the moon may be rising, there will be no Spartica and intervening ivy, no conscious oaks, no dowagers, no dowries, no contemplating orderlies, no oranges, no redeeming qualities. When you leave, you will leave incredibly softly.
______________________________
1 Nabokov: “Literature was born not the day when a boy crying ‘wolf, wolf’ came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels: literature was born on the day when a boy came crying ‘wolf, wolf’ and there was no wolf behind him.”