In the early pages of Téa Obreht’s 2011 novel The Tiger’s Wife, we come across a curious scene. It is an improbable sight on a late night in an empty city:
“No one will ever believe this,” I said.
My grandfather said: “What?”
“None of my friends will ever believe it.”
My grandfather looked at me like he’d never seen me before, like he couldn’t believe I was his. Even in our estrangement, he had never quite looked at me that way, and afterward he never did again.
Natalia and her grandfather are separated, we might say, by more than a mere generational divide.
“You must be joking,” he said. “Look around. Think for a moment. It’s the middle of the night, not a soul anywhere. In this city, at this time. Not a dog in the gutter. Empty. Except for this elephant—and you’re going to tell your idiot friends about it? Why? Do you think they’ll understand it? Do you think it will matter to them?”
Every day of your life, you do some things, and you don’t do some other things, without any narrative shape to all your garbled and disjointed and mysterious little acts—get coffee, sit down, spill coffee, stand, refill the coffee, sit down, stand, look out the window, remember the coffee. Yet there’s a threshold, on some days, on your most exciting days, on the days when you discover an elephant walking along the street in the middle of the night, when all of these muddled, discontinuous bits form themselves into what you might call a story, when all the discrete events in your day began to resemble a trajectory with a larger design, which somehow includes, most importantly, a sensation that’s inexpressible.
You very quickly realize that this sensation can’t be extracted from your experience. A takeaway or a summary just won’t do. Perhaps you might even say you had to be there when you struggle to articulate this story to others, and nearly everyone grasps your point. What happened to you, the story that you want to express, isn’t reducible to a list of key points or to a description of events, as those summaries fail to provide the thrust of the actual sensation that you feel. There’s something intrinsic to the whole that can’t be divided into pieces.
Once you start retelling your story, in fact, you notice aspects that are a tad spooky. The meaning in your story isn’t inherent or even present in the haphazard collection of events that you’ve shaped into a narrative—there’s a swelling, an expansion of meaning, which is larger than you intended, and which comes across as almost an emergent property within your story, even though there’s no place for you to look to and point at when you search for its origin.
This reminds you of ancient myths and parables and fairy tales, in how just a few lines of story somehow trigger centuries of meaning. And that’s when your language breaks down and the discussion becomes almost mystical, because you sense that there’s something external, something beyond the beginning, middle, and ending, that’s impossible to distill from the events in your story but that’s still undeniably present.
You do, however, want to tell people about the night when you saw an elephant strolling down the street. Of course it never seems to work. Of course you can’t quite express the ambience and emotion and shock of the moment, because you’re only able to articulate a few highlights, the memorable bits, but that’s not enough when you consider all the intangible aspects of your experience. And of course people want a summary, too, they want the facts, they want you to get to the point, as if you could possibly take all your sensations and concentrate them into the point.
After a little frustration, you might begin to realize that your best stories resemble dreams. They’re fragmentary, muddled, difficult to convey, and a retelling of events only provides the barest aspects—your listeners aren’t immersed in the sensations and drama of the dream. You can’t isolate one part of the dream and still expect to convey any semblance of truth.
Eventually, you just might realize that you can turn to our most truthful art form to express these sensations—the art form that comes closest in its power to inhabit other sensibilities. Much better than retelling your story through all the arts that provide fragmentary, half-truths, at best, this method gives you a way to inhabit all the nuance and emotion and passion of the actual moment. Telling your story aloud comes with too many flaws. Trying to recapture the moment in a picture or through a film offers only a narrow version of the experience. Even straining to write a truthful account is laughably incoherent—as it is sure to be filled with bias and oversight and constraint. So you decide, instead, to turn to the art form with the greatest potential for truth, the form that provides the greatest potential for intimacy with the artist, and you put your story into a novel.
Wow! Yes. And sometimes it takes a little time to really understand the intimacy, the whole meaning, doesn't it? How many times have I read a book saying "Nice story." Read it again a couple more times and said, "Oh. THAT was the message." I remember, for example, reading Hesse's Siddartha at age 17, and upon reading it again at 30, I found a completely different story within those covers. Then, too, when I write I often do not know what I am writing about until I am finished! I think I'm writing about one thing and am surprised that that was not it at all. Maybe others experience this? Words. I love words.
Well put Charles. A good story rings a bell deep within us, rings it so clearly that sometimes we can hear it for years afterwards. And not just a novel--your piece the other day about being viewed with horror in the subway rang that bell for me too.