In The Living Mountain, excerpted in Ali Smith’s fascinating anthology The Book Lover, Nan Shepherd describes the moment when flowing water becomes frozen: “…the struggle between frost and the force in running water is not quickly over. The battle fluctuates, and at the point of fluctuation between the motion in water and the immobility of frost, strange and beautiful forms are evolved.” She could have been describing the process of writing. In the process of evoking a particular truth, new truths emerge, in the capturing of “the moment of equilibrium between two elemental forces,” the writer and the world. The moment of fluctuation becomes the moment of equilibrium as the writer makes the choices, transforming the endless torrent of beautiful possibilities into something new and unusual; finding its one true form; or at least, the form that is true in that moment. It’s tempting to say the process is never truly over. As writers we observe our chosen world flowing around us while we stay still; when the moment is right, we reach out to feel, and to bring something of that world back to the page. The wild rush of life in motion is given permanence, a lasting shape in words. It’s a process that we return to, that we obsess over, giving form to dreams. As Neil Davidge, one of the fundamental figures behind the group Massive Attack, has said, “I’ve locked myself away for days to stay in the same emotional place, capture something, and see a piece of music through to the end. You’re always chasing what you imagine in your head, so you just keep going.” The elemental forces: reality and creation. In the song Life Itself from his recent album Working On A Dream, Bruce Springsteen evokes the first of those forces: “You were life itself, rushing over me, life itself, the wind in black elms…” He wants us to feel the reality of the character, and so he takes that wildness and gives it a smooth form, choosing just one of the infinite ways he could have used; taking one path through the wilderness.
Month February 2009
"…[the novel’s form] arises in a freedom that no-one can delimit and whose evolution will be a perpetual surprise."
Milan Kundera speaks in concise philosophical truths. His recent essay in seven parts, The Curtain, is a characteristically precise analysis of the art of the novel, and the art of being a novelist. He wields a critical scalpel like a master conceptual surgeon, with complete steadiness of hand and purpose. The text is studded with hard gems of insight. “Description: compassion for the ephemeral.” His cultural world-view can be rigid, and he admits as much, although he follows this by letting us know that it’s the correct view. We can allow this; he’s earned it. “The unbearable lightness of being,” “the beauty of a sudden density of life.” Even in translation, his aphoristic tendencies survive with clarity. He marshals a global coterie of authors, and culls their writings (novels, stories, letters) to weave a tapestry of thought and novelistic philosophy. In the process, he generates a steady stream of ideas, any one of which could fill a chapter, or even a book. It would be breathless were it not for Kundera’s utter control of the material, his iron grip on the evolution of the novel across societies, cultures, nations and moments in history. Naturally, any writer reading The Curtain will find resonance with those ideas that most closely dovetail with their own, but there is much to learn in this book, from the many writers included within. Kundera calls on Flaubert for assistance on multiple occasions, most deeply when he quotes the author of Madame Bovary talking about his mission as a novelist: “I have always done my utmost to get into the soul of things.” What more could we ask for from a novelist? By truthfully, genuinely getting into the soul of your story, your characters, everything else will follow. As Kundera says, “in the art of the novel, existential discoveries are inseparable from the transformation of form.” It’s the one and only real rule of writing: be true to the story. Get into the soul of it, and it will take the shape it needs. The characters will inhabit their organic world, truthfully. Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth, a brilliantly composed contemporary noir thriller about werewolves and dogcatchers in LA, is written in brutally spare, beautifully simple blank verse. When asked why, Barlow described how, once he started writing it, starting deep in the heart of the story, the form it had to take became apparent. From Flaubert’s cinematic journeys into the modern consciousness, through Kundera’s conceptual renderings, to Barlow’s lovelorn wolves howling up at the dying skies of LA, one thing is always necessary: get into the soul of it; or, as Oasis put it in their most recent album title, dig out your soul. The truth will be there.
dreaming between the lines 