Remembering Intent
Patrick Somerville is an instructor in the MA/MFA program at Northwestern. His latest book, The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, was released today.
The Universe in Miniature in Miniature
By Patrick Somerville
Featherproof Books
Intent in stories is an elusive thing. Not only has it become a radioactive, perhaps even non-existent property in the eyes of literary criticism, but authors themselves can rarely be trusted to either accurately recall or articulate their reasons for making the choices they made along the way. And that’s no big surprise; more often than not, authors are not even consciously aware of the larger apparatuses they are building, or if they are, they’re working with hazy tools and ephemeral schematics that are accessible only in fits and starts.
Not that that’s a complaint, nor is it a problem. I would argue that most books are better for it if their authors aren’t totally clued in as to what’s going on. There’s some line you can cross, some line of overdetermination, when you’ve thought and planned the life out of a story. If you’ve reached that point, you may as well not even start.
Everybody’s different. Richard Ford won’t start a book until he knows every scene, but Stephen King worries that if he knows the ending of his book, then his reader will then be able to guess it too early, thus making it unsatisfying. E.L. Doctorow is somewhere in between, and thinks of writing a novel in terms of a long drive at night: he wants the headlights but he doesn’t want the map. But whatever an author’s approach, a modicum of planning, or at least a strategy, is necessarily there, and planning implies intent.
The notion of the “Death of the Author” outlined by Roland Barthes has always disturbed me for its intentionally audacious denial of common sense. Barthes is getting at something more elusive than an actual claim about authors not existing and clearing the air of the somewhat tyrannical reliance on intent championed by New Criticism, but still, whenever I think about that essay, I can’t keep the most straightforward part of myself from objecting—raising a somewhat indignant hand and saying something like, “Dude. I’m right here.” I don’t have the training or the intellectual prowess to engage Barthe’s ideas on their own terms or at the level far smarter people already have, but of late I’ve been thinking about the long chain of exceptionally disorganized choices, thoughts, and decisions that went into the writing of The Universe in Miniature in Miniature, a collection of linked stories I wrote over the past few years, and I thought it might be interesting to try to track, while I can still remember them, a few steps in the evolution of one of the more important objects in the book, something called The Machine of Understanding Other People. This is not at all meant to be some kind of challenge to the idea of intent not mattering in how we talk about books, as it would be horrifying to me if authors were allowed too much airtime in reviewing and discussing their own creations, or if the discussion of a book ended the moment its creator said what it was supposed to mean. In the end, the book’s meaning is the book, not what the author says it is. But let’s be honest: intent is there; books are made by humans. Maybe it’s not a knowable or quantifiable thing, and maybe it’s more convenient to think about books as social or political objects by denying the participation of the individual responsible for their existence, but it’s there. And it occurs to me that I don’t see too many documents out there written by authors trying to dig into the question of where a specific aspect of something they wrote even came from, especially when it’s still relatively fresh in their minds, so I thought I’d give it a go. Call it a log—call it the brief journal of a thread.
I can’t hit every part of the process, but I’ll try to touch upon a few moments along the way—four steps, actually—that played a role in something I definitely had no clear idea I was doing. It’s what I remember and feel sure about. I say this knowing there are plenty of things I don’t, and don’t.
Step One: Reading Something a Long Time Ago
Somewhere around 1992 or 1993, when I was 13 or 14, I learned that two of my favorite authors at the time, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, had published a new fantasy novel they’d written together. They’d already found great success as the authors of the first six novels set in the Dragonlance world of Krynn, a franchise that has produced more than 100 novels that have sold, collectively, millions of copies. This new book, though, was not set on Krynn, and was the first in a new series called The Death Gate Cycle. Needless to say, I immediately forced my mother to drive me to Waldenbooks.
I remember Dragon Wing being all I’d hoped it would be. It was a little grittier than the Dragonlance stories, but more importantly, the world’s mythology was completely different. The details of what magic is and how it works is a major element of every fantasy franchise, and the Death Gate world dealt with these questions in new, pretty exciting ways.
Without burdening you with the details of Haplo’s runes and their complementary spells, I’ll get to the point. In the Death Gate world, there are multiple realms; four of them are dominated by a classical element—there’s a fiery world, a water world, etc.—and the fifth is a kind of hellish labyrinth that acts as a prison for a race of beings called the Patryns. Moving between these realms requires characters to pass through a turbulent, vaguely psychedelic gateway that causes their minds to go haywire for brief periods. Haywire how? Well, if I’m remembering correctly, the characters are afforded brief, powerful glimpses into one another’s psyches. So powerful, in fact, that they experience, for a few moments, what it’s like to be whomever they’re traveling with through the gate. It’s a side effect of the gate, and nobody likes it. It dumps your secrets into the laps of your enemies. It’s a big problem and causes many travel annoyances.
I thought that was a really, really cool idea.
Step Two: Writing About the Machine for the First Time
Fast-forward about sixteen years, to somewhere in 2008, when I was onboard a flight carrying myself and my fiancé from San Francisco to Chicago. During that flight, I wrote a draft of a story called “The Universe in Miniature in Miniature.” The story would ultimately become the title story of a new book, but right then I had no such hopes for it, and I was only really writing (or so I told myself) to pass the time on the plane and try out something a little different. It was about young art students who were observing a family and making a kind of art project out of their observations, but I found myself drawn to the relationships between the three main characters, not the somewhat weird conceit. All three characters had problems connecting, and as I moved further along with the story, I felt more and more at peace with the idea that empathy would be the story’s central preoccupation, then consequently started writing toward moments that could dramatize the characters’ conflicts in that regard. It was this growing certainty in the story’s thematics that led me, sort of out of left field, sort of as a meaningless little joke, to have the story’s narrator, Rose, offhandedly mention her desire to have some kind of machine—The Machine of Understanding Other People, she called it—that would, well, help people understand other people.
How? It would let you momentarily inhabit someone else’s mind.
Step Three: Taking Things Much Further
Like I said: when I wrote that story I had no plans to make it a major part of a book, and when I had Rose mention the machine, I thought that was where it would end—a little comment a character makes that vaguely echoes what’s going on in a story. I’m not sure if I knew, on the plane, how Rose’s idea about the machine had its roots way back in the Death Gate portals, but if I didn’t know it right away, it didn’t take me a long time to remember where I’d first run across the notion. And I liked that, once I remembered it—I liked the idea of paying my respects to the writers who’d so engaged me all those years before.
As the months passed and I started to think more about a new book of stories, the question of linking them together kept bothering me. In graduate school, I’d taught a class called “Linked Stories” that looked at the sub-genre and at the different ways writers like James Joyce, Louise Erdrich, Tim O’Brien, and Denis Johnson found to bind short stories into a larger bundle whose sum (in the best cases) added up to more than the delicately crafted parts. I wanted to write a book like this, but I wanted to find my own way to link the stories—something that organically emerged from within the book and was not necessarily beholden to time or place, but something more concrete than just themes or ideas.
Looking at the stories I had—maybe five at that point—I found that I seemed to be exceptionally preoccupied with the problem of individuals connecting, communicating, and acknowledging the perspectives of others. Looking back on that time, the preoccupation makes sense. I had just gotten engaged, my fiancé and I were moving further and further toward adult lives with actual careers and real responsibilities, and I think I was working my way through the implications of marriage and adulthood, trying to think—with stories—about what it meant to actually listen, what it meant to actually know another person. What it meant to actually give.
Then I remembered Rose’s comment about the machine and I thought something like: I’ll just write a long story at the end that really does have that machine.
Which I did.
Step 4: Backtrack
I don’t want to give too much away about how the machine—which I ended up making into a big helmet—actually does link the stories or do its magic, as my hope is that there’s a certain unusual drama to how it all works when you read the stories together. But it’s not really giving anything away to say that once I’d written the final novella, I had to go back through the stories and make a few additions here and there in order to make sure the right seeds were planted in the right places. It’s tricky doing this, though, with what are supposed to be self-contained stories. Add too much, they’ll lose their autonomy. Add too little, though, and the reader will inevitably come to the end of the book feeling hosed.
I therefore looked for spots in the stories where I could attach these various rivets without drawing too much attention. I think people reading closely might come to those spots—especially as the book goes on—and think that something fishy might be going on, but it’s not until the end of the book—I hope, anyway—that the bigger picture makes sense and the storyline of the helmet comes to a close.
And I can’t believe I just wrote, “And the storyline of the helmet comes to a close.”
But it does!
There. Not at all complete, but I hope it’s a little interesting, at least, to read about how a tiny moment of finding something cool when you’re a teenager can turn into a monstrous and somewhat ridiculous mechanism for linking a collection of short stories together.
It’s unclear to me whether or not “intent” has even been a part of this, actually—maybe “Remembering Decisions” or “Remembering Haplo” might have been a better title. Intent is one of those things that is, like the Labyrinth in Death Gate, perhaps best not messed with. You can’t really know—all you can do, in the end, is try to recall.
