Murnane Gerald - A Million Windows

The mother’s pretend-answer to the son’s pretend-letter was all the excuse that the son needed for ceasing to consult the medical specialist. Yet another of his seeming or actual nervous breakdowns had seemingly or had actually come to an end before he had met up with a certain sort of female person or had read a certain work of fiction with a trustworthy narrator. In fact, the son, so to call him, only a few months after the exchange of pretend-letters with his mother, read for the first time a work of fiction that he later credited with having turned him not only into a person unlikely to break down or to seem to break down but into a person able himself to plan and to write a work of fiction. Several more years were to pass before he met up with her who seemed to be the female person he had sought to meet up with, but by then he had already written part of a work of fiction that was published some years later.

When he read for the first time the work of fiction mentioned in the sentence before the previous sentence, he was still an ignorant and gullible reader. The work was of a kind that he would have declined to read twenty years later, after he had become a discerning reader. Twenty years later he would have decided, after having read the first pages of the work, that the implied author of the work had abdicated his responsibility and had hidden himself, so to speak, behind a narrator who was self-evidently incapable of having brought the text into being. The first words of the work, which words the son mentioned above is still able to recall after not having read them for fifty years — the first words of the English translation of the original text are ‘Granted that I am an inmate of a lunatic asylum…’ Nowadays, he would decline to go on reading a work of fiction beginning thus, but fifty years ago he read the whole of the work mentioned and even believed himself to have learned from the work, and for the first time, that every event reported in a work of fiction is a pretend-event whether the event is reported to have taken place in the mind of a fictional personage such as Oskar Matzerath or in fictional places such as those in and around the fictional Danzig where he has his fictional existence, according to the text of The Tin Drum , by Günter Grass.

The word plot is seldom heard in the sporadic discussions that take place in this upper corridor of this remote wing of this building that remains largely unfamiliar to most of us. Many of us claim to find the word not only irrelevant but scarcely comprehensible. And yet, none of us commented derisively on the evening recently when someone reported that Charles Dickens was supposed to have laboured for days over detailed charts illustrating the sequences of fictional events in some or another work, as yet unwritten, together with the names of the characters, so to call them, who were to take part in the events and the sites where the events were to take place. In the brief silence that followed, I surmised that many of us felt a certain admiration for Charles Dickens, even though none of us would care to do what he is supposed to have done. We who avoid using the words plot and character have too much respect for those we call fictional personages to do more than take note of their moods and caprices, but we could hardly not admire a writer of fiction or, I should say, an implied author of fiction, who could so assert himself as to prescribe in advance what should seem to be said and done by those he might have called his characters and where and when it should thus seem. Was the implied author of the novels, so to call them, by Charles Dickens able, as none of us has ever been able, to direct the fictional behaviour of fictional personages? Or, do the so-called characters in Dickens’s so-called novels have a different sort of existence from that of our personages, as we call them? Did Dickens’s beings, perhaps, even lack for existence until certain words had been written with ink on paper?

On the rare occasions when we discuss authors such as Charles Dickens, we seem to agree that we lack for something that writers of fiction seemed formerly to possess. And yet, if we have lost something, so to speak, we have also gained something. We may be unable to exercise over our fictional personages the sort of control that Dickens and others exercised over their characters, but we are able to turn that same lack of control to our advantage and to learn from our own subject-matter, so to call it, in somewhat the same way that our readers are presumed to learn from our writing.

Subject-matter and writing …if any of us, long ago, believed that these two are identical or that one cannot be claimed to exist without the other, then he would have owned to his error soon after he had begun those simple-seeming exercises in introspection devised at our first meetings by those of us hoping to learn, for example, why most fictional personages seem to behave unpredictably and not even as foreseen by those called, for convenience, their authors. Perhaps because I had never observed myself to do anything that might be called thinking , I was at once absorbed by the exercises and learned much from them. That which taught me most required each of us, while writing a suitable passage in his current work, to scrutinise the behaviour, so to call it, of some or another personage, so to call him or her, at some or another moment, so to call it, about to be recorded in writing. The matters at issue were as follows: could the writer predict with certainty how the personage was about to behave? and, if not, could the personage be said to stand, in relation to the writer, in any way differently from some or another man or woman in the building where the writer sat writing or in the mostly level grassy countryside visible from his upper window in the building?

As I reported above, I have never seemed able to do whatever it is that other persons seem to do whenever they think or claim to be thinking. I am capable only of seeing and feeling, although I can see and feel, of course, in both the visible and the invisible worlds. Being thus disabled, I was obliged to try to answer the two questions mentioned above only by the most painstaking observation and certainly not by any rational means, whatever that phrase might denote. The sort of observation needed came easily to me. I had always considered myself the least observant of persons in the visible world, but the invisible parts of me proved able to see with acuity in the invisible world, or so I might put the matter. In summary, I learned that I have no apparent control over what sort of fictional personage might appear to me while I try to compose some or another piece of fiction. Nor am I able to decide what such a personage might do or might want to do in the invisible space surrounding him or her. All I can do is to select. This is no easy task, but I am mostly able, while struggling to keep in mind what I can only call an instinctive desire on my part to arrange the densest possible concentration of meaning on the fewest possible pages — I am mostly able to confine myself to reporting what I, whether as implied author or narrator, see fit to report.

My research, so to call it, taught me also something that Charles Dickens and his like may not have been aware of while they planned the behaviour of those they probably called their characters. I learned how little is ever reported in fiction of all that a fictional personage is able to do or say. After having compared notes with a few like-minded residents hereabouts, I decided that I had been justified on the many occasions from as long ago as my childhood when I had wanted to read or to write — if not on paper then in my mind — the hitherto unread and unwritten reports of all that took place during the many days, weeks, or even years when certain fictional personages maintained their fictional existence although no writer had reported any detail of it.