Thanks for such a lovely message, MVM (and throwing out messages in bottles is my kind of style :)). Your line about struggling 'in the beauty and nightmare of American dreams' is beautiful. I think that's what good framing does - it shifts attention from the overt/obvious/surface-level impacts of the story event, and pulls us towards th…
Thanks for such a lovely message, MVM (and throwing out messages in bottles is my kind of style :)). Your line about struggling 'in the beauty and nightmare of American dreams' is beautiful. I think that's what good framing does - it shifts attention from the overt/obvious/surface-level impacts of the story event, and pulls us towards the subtle/intense/complex impacts that come with distance (either physical, like in Gatsby, or temporal, like in An Incident).
Reading your message made me think about the two stories twined (or 'braided' as George says) as a tree - the prominent story is the trunk and branches living above the earth and on display, but the 'other' story is the roots pushing below the soil into dark and hidden crevices. They are connected at small and finite points in terms of the text, but fundamentally interconnected in the soul of the story; they almost seem to form an imperfect reflection of the other (and in that imperfect reflection we can better observe what is different/has changed). As readers, we see the surface level of the prominent story and judge it as a distant observer, but it's the 'other' story that worms its way into the darker/unexplored parts of our minds...
Maybe that's why, without the framing, it would be easy to sit back and judge the rickshaw customer as a jerk, but with the framing we are not just confronted with his humanity but our own? And maybe that's the same with Gatsby - without hitching our ride with Nick, it would be easier to judge Jay and Daisy at a distance; but with Nick, we're pulled in and pushed out of that orbit, that 'struggle in the beauty and nightmare'...
Hi Mikhaelya: Wow - your beautiful descriptions, comparisons and ideas! I see them so vividly. You are bringing them to life. There is entirely something else that happens with the narrator in "An Incident" that has its own moments of escalation, urgency, and ultimately change - in the narrator, and I hope in the reader. And yes!!!! That worming and winding into our minds; there is a soul in this story, and I think if we sit with the story, really read it, the soul shows itself. If we are lucky enough, we find our own souls in it. (There is a madly beautiful appreciation of Virginia Woolf written by WH Auden, and in it he quotes her statement that: "'One can’t,' she observes, 'write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes; but look at the ceiling, at Grizzle, at the cheaper beasts in the Zoo which are exposed to walkers in Regent’s Park, and the soul slips in.' ") And so I really love how you are exploring this: that this story, a well told story, reaches another level of awareness "even" if it talks about the seemingly ordinary "incident."
One of my favorite photographs in the world is Edward Steichen's "Moonrise" (1904; https://www.moma.org/collection/works/51812). It is that "imperfect reflection" you describe: it is a still moment and yet shimmering in the sky, and (I'd like to believe) even below, in the seemingly dark and sleepy water. Maybe your post has also helped me to understand why I so love to look at this photo.
That quote by Virginia Woolf is beautiful! As is the photograph. When I looked at it, I was arrested by the image of these story frames as reflections, reflecting back, imperfectly, our core story. And of course, the word 'reflection' made me think of the rickshaw's driver 'reflection' on the incident, which made me rush to explore the etymology of the world: "flecto" - (Latin (figuratively)) I persuade, prevail upon, or soften. I bend, curve or bow. I turn or curl + "re-" (Latin ) again; prefix added to various words to indicate an action being done again, or back, backwards = "reflecto" (Latin) I reflect. I turn back or away.
How beautiful is that? For me, it holds the essence of both the Incident's narrator and Nick Carraway.
There should be a "love" option on Substack. "I reflect. I turn back or away." Oh, Mikhaelya - what a wonderous post.
"I turn back or away."
Maybe this raises a point about the ending in at least the two stories mentioned ("An Incident" and "TGG"): there are shown endings (scene/image with little commentary); told endings (voice-based scenes but perhaps little reflecto), and reflecto endings (some combination of the told or shown with reflecto). And combinations of these. And endings are sometimes a mix: a paragraph or line of reflecto; a paragraph or line of shown or told endings.
Maybe narrative is really about finding the balance and "pattern" (however irregular) we want of show, tell and reflect. Sometimes the edges blur; sometimes the edges are sharp(er). Here is the famous opening of Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Pale Fire":
"Two leaves, two triskelions, like two shuddering three-legged bathers coming at a run for a swim, are borne by their impetus right into the middle where with a sudden slowdown they float quite flat. Twenty minutes past four.
View from a hospital window.
November trees, poplars, I imagine, two of them growing straight out of the asphalt: all of them in the cold bright sun, bright richly furrowed bark and an intricate sweep of numberless burnished bare twigs, old gold—because getting more of the falsely mellow sun in the higher air. Their immobility is in contrast with the spasmodic ruffling of the inset reflection—for the visible motion of a tree is in the mass of its leaves, and there remain hardly more than thirty-seven or so here and there on one side of the tree. They just flicker a little, of a neutral tint, but burnished by the sun to the same ikontinct as the intricate trillions of twigs. Swooning blue of the sky crossed by pale motionless superimposed cloud wisps.
The operation has not been successful and my wife will die."
This weave ("braid") of show, tell, and reflecto creates urgency and beauty. (And it blurs even within the sentences.)
I don't know how much of this should be thought of consciously in early drafting, but it can certainly be considered in revising. Maybe even a reflecto can be used as a writer's mental note as to why the character/narrator is telling the tale (what's at stake), and maybe the reflecto can be ultimately included or discarded. Nothing has to remain in the final draft. But the writer/reader can feel it.
Can you imagine - at the risk of spoilers - collecting "reflectos"? Perhaps another literary non sequitur, but here is an ending reflecto that haunts me from a novel, Iris Murdoch's "The Sea, The Sea" (do not read if you do want want a reflecto spolier):
"She came to me, she ran to me, that was no dream. That was no phantom I embraced that night. And on that night she said she loved me. My idea of her return to an 'original resentment' was too ingenious. One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story. She was not able to be my Beatrice nor was I able to be saved by her, but the idea was not senseless nor unworthy... The past buries the past and must end in silence, but it can be a conscious silences that rests open-eyed. Perhaps this is final forgiveness that James spoke of."
Mikhaelya (and George!), thank you for guiding me/us through this process of reflection on so many levels.
Nabokov - word artist extraordinaire. And I love the idea of frames within a work, bracketing individual microcosms of story and providing a lens we take with us until the next one is provided. Have you ever been to those science museums where you enter a room that's lit with a colour-filtered light and everything appears yellow or olive green or brown, and then you shine a white light torch around and suddenly everything is cerulean, and magenta, and emerald? That's what this framing feels like, except you sometimes forget you have that white-light torch and just let the author guide you through the rooms with their differently filtered lights...
Thanks for such a lovely message, MVM (and throwing out messages in bottles is my kind of style :)). Your line about struggling 'in the beauty and nightmare of American dreams' is beautiful. I think that's what good framing does - it shifts attention from the overt/obvious/surface-level impacts of the story event, and pulls us towards the subtle/intense/complex impacts that come with distance (either physical, like in Gatsby, or temporal, like in An Incident).
Reading your message made me think about the two stories twined (or 'braided' as George says) as a tree - the prominent story is the trunk and branches living above the earth and on display, but the 'other' story is the roots pushing below the soil into dark and hidden crevices. They are connected at small and finite points in terms of the text, but fundamentally interconnected in the soul of the story; they almost seem to form an imperfect reflection of the other (and in that imperfect reflection we can better observe what is different/has changed). As readers, we see the surface level of the prominent story and judge it as a distant observer, but it's the 'other' story that worms its way into the darker/unexplored parts of our minds...
Maybe that's why, without the framing, it would be easy to sit back and judge the rickshaw customer as a jerk, but with the framing we are not just confronted with his humanity but our own? And maybe that's the same with Gatsby - without hitching our ride with Nick, it would be easier to judge Jay and Daisy at a distance; but with Nick, we're pulled in and pushed out of that orbit, that 'struggle in the beauty and nightmare'...
Hi Mikhaelya: Wow - your beautiful descriptions, comparisons and ideas! I see them so vividly. You are bringing them to life. There is entirely something else that happens with the narrator in "An Incident" that has its own moments of escalation, urgency, and ultimately change - in the narrator, and I hope in the reader. And yes!!!! That worming and winding into our minds; there is a soul in this story, and I think if we sit with the story, really read it, the soul shows itself. If we are lucky enough, we find our own souls in it. (There is a madly beautiful appreciation of Virginia Woolf written by WH Auden, and in it he quotes her statement that: "'One can’t,' she observes, 'write directly about the soul. Looked at, it vanishes; but look at the ceiling, at Grizzle, at the cheaper beasts in the Zoo which are exposed to walkers in Regent’s Park, and the soul slips in.' ") And so I really love how you are exploring this: that this story, a well told story, reaches another level of awareness "even" if it talks about the seemingly ordinary "incident."
One of my favorite photographs in the world is Edward Steichen's "Moonrise" (1904; https://www.moma.org/collection/works/51812). It is that "imperfect reflection" you describe: it is a still moment and yet shimmering in the sky, and (I'd like to believe) even below, in the seemingly dark and sleepy water. Maybe your post has also helped me to understand why I so love to look at this photo.
That quote by Virginia Woolf is beautiful! As is the photograph. When I looked at it, I was arrested by the image of these story frames as reflections, reflecting back, imperfectly, our core story. And of course, the word 'reflection' made me think of the rickshaw's driver 'reflection' on the incident, which made me rush to explore the etymology of the world: "flecto" - (Latin (figuratively)) I persuade, prevail upon, or soften. I bend, curve or bow. I turn or curl + "re-" (Latin ) again; prefix added to various words to indicate an action being done again, or back, backwards = "reflecto" (Latin) I reflect. I turn back or away.
How beautiful is that? For me, it holds the essence of both the Incident's narrator and Nick Carraway.
There should be a "love" option on Substack. "I reflect. I turn back or away." Oh, Mikhaelya - what a wonderous post.
"I turn back or away."
Maybe this raises a point about the ending in at least the two stories mentioned ("An Incident" and "TGG"): there are shown endings (scene/image with little commentary); told endings (voice-based scenes but perhaps little reflecto), and reflecto endings (some combination of the told or shown with reflecto). And combinations of these. And endings are sometimes a mix: a paragraph or line of reflecto; a paragraph or line of shown or told endings.
Maybe narrative is really about finding the balance and "pattern" (however irregular) we want of show, tell and reflect. Sometimes the edges blur; sometimes the edges are sharp(er). Here is the famous opening of Vladimir Nabokov's novel "Pale Fire":
"Two leaves, two triskelions, like two shuddering three-legged bathers coming at a run for a swim, are borne by their impetus right into the middle where with a sudden slowdown they float quite flat. Twenty minutes past four.
View from a hospital window.
November trees, poplars, I imagine, two of them growing straight out of the asphalt: all of them in the cold bright sun, bright richly furrowed bark and an intricate sweep of numberless burnished bare twigs, old gold—because getting more of the falsely mellow sun in the higher air. Their immobility is in contrast with the spasmodic ruffling of the inset reflection—for the visible motion of a tree is in the mass of its leaves, and there remain hardly more than thirty-seven or so here and there on one side of the tree. They just flicker a little, of a neutral tint, but burnished by the sun to the same ikontinct as the intricate trillions of twigs. Swooning blue of the sky crossed by pale motionless superimposed cloud wisps.
The operation has not been successful and my wife will die."
This weave ("braid") of show, tell, and reflecto creates urgency and beauty. (And it blurs even within the sentences.)
I don't know how much of this should be thought of consciously in early drafting, but it can certainly be considered in revising. Maybe even a reflecto can be used as a writer's mental note as to why the character/narrator is telling the tale (what's at stake), and maybe the reflecto can be ultimately included or discarded. Nothing has to remain in the final draft. But the writer/reader can feel it.
Can you imagine - at the risk of spoilers - collecting "reflectos"? Perhaps another literary non sequitur, but here is an ending reflecto that haunts me from a novel, Iris Murdoch's "The Sea, The Sea" (do not read if you do want want a reflecto spolier):
"She came to me, she ran to me, that was no dream. That was no phantom I embraced that night. And on that night she said she loved me. My idea of her return to an 'original resentment' was too ingenious. One can be too ingenious in trying to search out the truth. Sometimes one must simply respect its veiled face. Of course this is a love story. She was not able to be my Beatrice nor was I able to be saved by her, but the idea was not senseless nor unworthy... The past buries the past and must end in silence, but it can be a conscious silences that rests open-eyed. Perhaps this is final forgiveness that James spoke of."
Mikhaelya (and George!), thank you for guiding me/us through this process of reflection on so many levels.
Nabokov - word artist extraordinaire. And I love the idea of frames within a work, bracketing individual microcosms of story and providing a lens we take with us until the next one is provided. Have you ever been to those science museums where you enter a room that's lit with a colour-filtered light and everything appears yellow or olive green or brown, and then you shine a white light torch around and suddenly everything is cerulean, and magenta, and emerald? That's what this framing feels like, except you sometimes forget you have that white-light torch and just let the author guide you through the rooms with their differently filtered lights...