George writes: "We’re assuming that the story’s energy is so sure of itself that it doesn’t care where it dances; it just needs a place to dance."
I don’t agree. Or I don’t agree at this moment—I’m very good at completely changing my mind. I think a story’s ending needs exactly the right place to dance, the exact right container. Maybe for some writers of pure genius, anything can be made to work—a resonance will appear no matter what. But for the rest of us… I think Babel very intentionally chose this ending. (I’m actually disappointed that George chose not to discuss it. I really wanted to hear his take on it—on the meaning that George draws from it.) I think Babel knew every element he had written and then chose an ending that speaks to the rest of the story. I think Babel looked at the beginning of the story—at the narrator’s claim to wanting to live a certain life—and then wrote an ending that reflects back on that, as well as reflects back on the entire story. I can’t imagine another ending would work as well (but again, maybe Babel could do it). I don’t think it’s a no-no to use one’s conceptual mind to figure out how to end a story. At a certain point, a writer has decisions to make, plot points to take into account, meaning to discern, pacing to consider, dialogue to cut or expand, vocabulary that needs tweaking—all of this from the conscious mind. Yes, an ending can be written while still working in a dream state. But later—in the revision stage, a writer must awaken to what is on the page. No?
What do we expect from an ending of a story? Why do some story endings disappoint us? Why do we sometimes say, wait—that’s the ending? Why do we sometimes simply sigh and think, wow, perfect ending…? Why do we sometimes feel we’ve been shortchanged? An ending is demanding of its writer. The reader’s expectations are on high alert. You don’t want to disappoint your reader. And so, a writer carefully chooses, paces, lays out the best possible of all endings. It’s not random. It’s not a crapshoot—well, I’ve got three ideas, I’ll take THIS one. It’s a puzzle piece that is carefully set in to make of the story a unified whole.
As often happens here, I wonder if I’m reading all of this wrong. (I’m exhausted today! I drove a friend to a doctor’s appointment and we had to leave at 6:45 a.m. I was up all night worried that my alarm wouldn’t go off…. My brain is a bit tanked at the moment.) Am I missing something?
And can we still talk about the ending that Babel chose? About the meaning of all of it? We have a character who announces himself at the start of the story. The inciting incident—woman needs help with translation. Rising action—each time he visits, he feels the sexual tension rising. Crisis moment—is she asking him to have sex? (Mrs. Robinson, are you seducing me?) Climax—decision made. YES. The sexual encounter occurs. Falling action—he walks home drunkenly, though he’s not drunk. But he’s singing. Oh, life! Denouement—but oh, look! Look how his hero Maupassant died, like an animal. Life is both beautiful and terrible. Live your passions, but know that nothing can save you from life itself!
And so—the ending Babel chose is the best way for that denouement to be revealed. No?
I like George’s idea that an ending is “one beyond which no new meaning presents itself.” In this case, though, I think Babel’s ending is something different: a final twist that he foregrounded earlier. The secret of a good phrasing, our narrator has told us, “rests in a barely perceptible turn. The lever must lie in one’s hand and get warm. It must be turned once, and no more.”
In this case, the barely perceptible turn is the brief mention of the “burning” scars on Raisa’s back, hands, and arms, and the lever is the narrator’s final realization that de Maupassant, the inspiration for Raisa’s passion for the narrator, died of syphilis. Instead of an ending to the story’s meaning, this realization twists a new meaning into the story that the narrator had failed to see all along: the potential tragedy lurking in the reckless, unmoored passions of an arrogant youth.
I came to agree with George’s theory that Raisa and the narrator did the deed when a previous contributor suggested that Raisa might have syphilis. After an image search, I found ample evidence that victims get sores and scars on the backs and hands in the secondary stages of the disease. Which may mean Raisa’s had it for awhile. In Babel’s day, a reader more familiar with the marks of syphilis might have recognized the possible signs more readily than a modern reader.
Now, for me, the thematic resonance between the ending and the story came together. For example, in some ways Babel seems to be correlating the progressive syphilis symptoms described by deM’s doctors in Babel’s final bio to Raisa’s behavior. The “degeneration of the patient to an animalistic state” correlates to Babel’s progressive portrayal of Raisa in increasingly animalistic terms. Eyelashes like reddish fur beneath a moleskin cap. “The neighing of mares” to describe her laughter with her sisters at dinner. And later, when things heat up, Raisa’s body sways like a snake.
Another symptom described by DeM’s doctors is that he “struggled with passion”, wandering from country to country. The narrator is an itinerant pleasure-seeker, an avowed philosophical hedonist who lectures Kasantsev that we are born for only one thing: to find pleasure in working, fighting, and love. Yet, he admits that Kasantsev, who finds a motherland in his love for Spain, is happiest of all. The narrator has no motherland, just a life of random, aimless wandering from pleasure to pleasure to fulfill his overwhelming passions, like poor de Maupassant.
Raisa shares this trajectory, for all she cares about is her passion for de Maupassant, who will be for the lovers, as the narrator tells us, “a beautiful tomb of the human heart.” The erotic stories they read together are seductive, as is the pleasure of drink, and in the heat of things, when Raisa first bares her “burning” scars, the besotted narrator sees it as a sign of passion, not a warning.
This reckless passion is played out against a larger theme: the careless and self-centered hedonism of the lovers juxtaposed against the narrator’s foil: the lovable, generous Kasantsev and his noble attempt at idealism in the face of poverty and hardship — like Don Quixote, the hero of his motherland.
The narrator, also lays into Tolstoy with the typical materialist reduction of faith to fear of death, but is not so cocky after leaving Raisa’s house, his pleasure, the supposed pinnacle of existence having been requited. All that remains for him now is a fevered, Dantesque hell world: vapors, fog, monsters (like the ones painted in Raisa’s trendy Roerichs) seething behind the walls, (will they soon show their faces?) and streets cutting people off at the legs. The kind of thing De Maupassant might have seen on his way to the madhouse.
Kasantsev, though, sleeps happily, dreaming of Don Quixote and his Spanish motherland. When the narrator gets home to Kasantsev, he thinks : a book. A book to put you to sleep like that, to take your mind off the dank fog pressing even now against my very own door.
Something inspiring, perhaps, about the great passions of de Maupassant himself. That’s the ticket.
As an abstract painter, I completely understand the point George is making about turning away from the conceptual mind at the juncture of completion. One has developed the painting or the story with great concern or readiness for perfection or making sense, but perfection or completion can happen far more elegantly with an opening for the reader or viewer or what could be discerned as an imperfection or painting awkwardness or mistake. That juncture of something "thrown in" not seemingly an ending or completion can allow the audience a larger venue of viewing or contemplating and finding the reader's own needed ending...that just might not end. Shelley H-T
I agree with mary g about the ending to this story. As I see it, Guy de Maupassant is not the subject of the story -- Babel's semi-fictional younger self learning a "lesson in life" is -- but he is so much more than a passing theme. He's almost handled like a movie star or a rockstar. His full name is the complete title of the story. Raisa simply loves him, and the Narrator is evidently an admirer. Translating his works from French to Russian forms a major part of the action. Specific Maupassant stories are referenced and paraphrased more or less intensively. Concomitant with all this, there's a background theme of France (another homeland, like Kazantsev's Spain?), a largely fictional country of sun, wine, and roses (and sexual openness, which was indeed part of the late 19th--early 20th century reputation both of France and Maupassant, oh la la !).
The climactic scene itself takes part of its narrative limbs from the sauciest of the three Maupassant stories. The sauce can be said to boil over into the action when Narrator and Reisa get into role-playing, "Please sit down, Monsieur Polyte." (and not, "Please leave immediately, Isaak Emmanuilovich.") Whether one thinks they had sex (as I do), or not, it's undeniable they're at least sailing very close.
Let's suppose Narrator now walks down the street singing, pretending to be drunk or pretending not to be, leaves the McMansions of the nouveau riche part of town and freezing, piss-yellow fog greets him as he comes into the low-class Peski area. An intimation worms into him, something that might be whispering to him: "This is reality", or something that is not put into words but left in the atmospherics for the reader to feel for herself.
There would surely be, as George suggests, a bowling pin still in the air. The pin could have the label "Maupassant" stuck to it, but Maupassant is a metaphor for literary success, fame, sexual freedom, in a land of sun, wine, and roses.
Babel uses a biography of Maupassant to say there's another side to the coin. Maupassant's reality was quite different. Life's a bitch.
I’m with @mary g - I don’t think it’s just having a place to dance. It’s knowing what dance the character is going to do. It’s a first person narrative so, to me, it’s a little like method acting - there’s the story/the narrative but there’s the character - and for me as a writer, the character is foremost. If I know my character, I can find their dance.
In this case, surely Babbel knows his character? He’s young, full of restless energy and passion. He’s finally - after all those breadth! - had sex. Perhaps not for the first time but probably the first time with literature as the wing man. He walks home pretending to be drunk - the freedom of youth. His friend’s asleep so he can’t say, ‘you’ll never guess what happened to me tonight!’ Instead he picks up a book - and there’s the shadow side of - well, everything - laid before him in plain, almost matter-of-fact sentences.
That’s his dance and it’s exactly what it should be. And I reckon Babbel got to it knowing his character. Conscious mind? Unconscious mind? Serendipity ( lovely word!)? Percolation? All of the above - because why not? We are complex and contradictory beings and our work is rarely one thing or the other. Surely engineers dream of arcs, wings and impossible spiral ladders? Surely poets dovetail, tighten and tension?
George's "complex energy flows" seem to be akin to what I sense are, initially, microscopic droplets of authorial emotion which grow until they fill a structure of the author's perhaps unintentional design. The author creates both, of course, but the structure will continue to grow in seemingly unpredictable patterns until the internal pressure the droplets exert evens out. The initial surge of authorial emotion will pulse through internal pathways and force growth through unseen pathways inside the externally unregulated exoskeleton. The location of those pathways differ from story to story and some will inevitably be pruned through the revision process. To me, the primary concern is that the droplets must all be able to circulate through the system down to the capillary level, and the "right" ending is the one that assists that process most efficiently.
First off, “Sod Poodles” is about the best High School moniker of all time. Good on Amarillo. Second, I really appreciate the buddha (small “b”) approach, including its hit-or-miss results. Be great to hear an instance when it missed for you, George. It’d also be interesting to take up a Nabokov short story. A writer who insisted he consciously controlled all aspects of his stories. With Babel, in this case, his ending (to me) was more straightforward. He wanted to bring the whole thing around to De Maupassant; the contrast to that writer’s “life” as a spur to the narrator’s romantic notion of what Life should be. In short his title near determined its ending. I remember a similar feeling as a younger man when I “discovered” Henry Miller. I thought “here is a man and a writer who is really living”. It was a romantic notion that like most such notions is, in reality, inoperable. Babel’s narrator is on the path to finding this out. Once on this path the story can end.
"Then Babel asks (and, of course, 'asks' is not quite right – this, too, no doubt, all happened in a quick, intuitive flash) ..."
Well, maybe / maybe not.
I don't buy that work that comes from a conscious, reasoned place is inherently less interesting than work that comes from the subconscious and intuitive, or, similarly, that work created in a flow state is likely to be better than work that is painstakingly built one word or concept at a time.
I'm very curious to know what others here believe and what they have found in their own creative endeavors.
I do find that the spontaneous, flow-state work is a lot more fun to write. It's a rush, as we used to say back when I was young enough to say that. But when I've let time elapse between when I've written something and when I'm reading it -- enough so I no longer recall which parts came to me in which state -- I usually can't tell the difference.
I write from both places, and I think a lot of us do. Some of my prose that felt most alive in first draft has come from that spontaneous place, but I have rarely known what to do with it unless I've built scaffolding, consciously, to contain it.
There are writers who, like George, work primarily from a spontaneous, intuitive, subconscious place, and others who work very consciously, and others who work in both modalities at different times. (You don't have to take my word for it! Page through some of the Writers at Work interviews from the Paris Review, a series of fascinating windows into How It's Done.)
Long, long ago (possibly before time was invented), I was trying to break out of the rational, engineering mind I'd had since childhood, and William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which he rails against the rational (later, he invents a character called Urizen, which I always read as "Your reason) was a useful lever, as was a brief foray into psychedelics. But when I think about the writers I have been drawn to -- including Blake, who painstakingly engraved his words onto copper plates -- they come from both camps and, likely, several in between.
Not about the story at all, but I think that returning to your home town and seeing your name on a billboard as you drive around, must be such a thrill. I know it’s a little egotistical of me but I think that sounds really cool….there’s nothing like a hometown welcome for a returning hero. Congratulations George!
Since I sold my publishing house Podium (proud Dutch publisher of a translation of Saunders stories!), I’m writing a novel and I am so delighted to read your (George’s) analyze of the writing process frequently and with gulfs of recognition and admiration! Thank you, Joost
I’m struck by how intuition works, explicitly and implicitly. George sees a guy pushing a trolley and the next sentence comes to him. Talking about Babel, George says “and likely his mind was ‘working’ simply by ‘writing;’ that is, I don’t think he was actually reasoning everything out,” and later “this too, no doubt, all happened in a quick, intuitive flash.”
I just read another Substack today, by Garth Greenwell. He’s talking about the first sentence in his forthcoming novel Small Rain: “That feeling was pretty set when this sentence arrived, and I didn’t really question it.” That feeling is what “you just feel on your pulses.”
I love how a guy innocently pushing a cart solves a writer’s problem (and here we are today, years later, hearing about it; where's that guy now?), and how a sentence “just arrives.” Reminds me to trust my instincts and just breathe.
I'm relying heavily on my rational mind when writing these days and what's coming out isn't very good, but something in me wants to keep being rational and neat and mediocre.
I knew Agnes Martin. Not well. She was kind enough to ask me to her studio for tea in my youth. She was very calculated.She loved Beethoven. Her paintings were very thought out and planned and very conceptualized. Her writing, it seems to me is far more flowing and talks about and with a spiritual template of which artists and writers might find of great interest in it's beautiful simplicity.
I was told by Morton Feldman's wife, Barbara Monk Feldman, a marvelous New Music composer in her own right, a quote he often used, "When I see an idea coming I run the other way."
This just might be the muscle man pulling the cart of bee hives...
Grasping for that complex energy is really what I enjoy the most about writing, because you never know where it will come from, or even if it will arrive. Damned ephemeral. That line in Frankenstein always pops into my head when I roll up my sleeves and try and get a story to breathe, “ With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.” Sometimes, no matter what I do, the blasted story will just lie there, but I think after today I will reach for arationality and see if it revs things up.
And I was totally off base with my public health angle on this story- I missed the word, “congenital,” which means the story is about something else entirely.
George writes: "We’re assuming that the story’s energy is so sure of itself that it doesn’t care where it dances; it just needs a place to dance."
I don’t agree. Or I don’t agree at this moment—I’m very good at completely changing my mind. I think a story’s ending needs exactly the right place to dance, the exact right container. Maybe for some writers of pure genius, anything can be made to work—a resonance will appear no matter what. But for the rest of us… I think Babel very intentionally chose this ending. (I’m actually disappointed that George chose not to discuss it. I really wanted to hear his take on it—on the meaning that George draws from it.) I think Babel knew every element he had written and then chose an ending that speaks to the rest of the story. I think Babel looked at the beginning of the story—at the narrator’s claim to wanting to live a certain life—and then wrote an ending that reflects back on that, as well as reflects back on the entire story. I can’t imagine another ending would work as well (but again, maybe Babel could do it). I don’t think it’s a no-no to use one’s conceptual mind to figure out how to end a story. At a certain point, a writer has decisions to make, plot points to take into account, meaning to discern, pacing to consider, dialogue to cut or expand, vocabulary that needs tweaking—all of this from the conscious mind. Yes, an ending can be written while still working in a dream state. But later—in the revision stage, a writer must awaken to what is on the page. No?
What do we expect from an ending of a story? Why do some story endings disappoint us? Why do we sometimes say, wait—that’s the ending? Why do we sometimes simply sigh and think, wow, perfect ending…? Why do we sometimes feel we’ve been shortchanged? An ending is demanding of its writer. The reader’s expectations are on high alert. You don’t want to disappoint your reader. And so, a writer carefully chooses, paces, lays out the best possible of all endings. It’s not random. It’s not a crapshoot—well, I’ve got three ideas, I’ll take THIS one. It’s a puzzle piece that is carefully set in to make of the story a unified whole.
As often happens here, I wonder if I’m reading all of this wrong. (I’m exhausted today! I drove a friend to a doctor’s appointment and we had to leave at 6:45 a.m. I was up all night worried that my alarm wouldn’t go off…. My brain is a bit tanked at the moment.) Am I missing something?
And can we still talk about the ending that Babel chose? About the meaning of all of it? We have a character who announces himself at the start of the story. The inciting incident—woman needs help with translation. Rising action—each time he visits, he feels the sexual tension rising. Crisis moment—is she asking him to have sex? (Mrs. Robinson, are you seducing me?) Climax—decision made. YES. The sexual encounter occurs. Falling action—he walks home drunkenly, though he’s not drunk. But he’s singing. Oh, life! Denouement—but oh, look! Look how his hero Maupassant died, like an animal. Life is both beautiful and terrible. Live your passions, but know that nothing can save you from life itself!
And so—the ending Babel chose is the best way for that denouement to be revealed. No?
I like George’s idea that an ending is “one beyond which no new meaning presents itself.” In this case, though, I think Babel’s ending is something different: a final twist that he foregrounded earlier. The secret of a good phrasing, our narrator has told us, “rests in a barely perceptible turn. The lever must lie in one’s hand and get warm. It must be turned once, and no more.”
In this case, the barely perceptible turn is the brief mention of the “burning” scars on Raisa’s back, hands, and arms, and the lever is the narrator’s final realization that de Maupassant, the inspiration for Raisa’s passion for the narrator, died of syphilis. Instead of an ending to the story’s meaning, this realization twists a new meaning into the story that the narrator had failed to see all along: the potential tragedy lurking in the reckless, unmoored passions of an arrogant youth.
I came to agree with George’s theory that Raisa and the narrator did the deed when a previous contributor suggested that Raisa might have syphilis. After an image search, I found ample evidence that victims get sores and scars on the backs and hands in the secondary stages of the disease. Which may mean Raisa’s had it for awhile. In Babel’s day, a reader more familiar with the marks of syphilis might have recognized the possible signs more readily than a modern reader.
Now, for me, the thematic resonance between the ending and the story came together. For example, in some ways Babel seems to be correlating the progressive syphilis symptoms described by deM’s doctors in Babel’s final bio to Raisa’s behavior. The “degeneration of the patient to an animalistic state” correlates to Babel’s progressive portrayal of Raisa in increasingly animalistic terms. Eyelashes like reddish fur beneath a moleskin cap. “The neighing of mares” to describe her laughter with her sisters at dinner. And later, when things heat up, Raisa’s body sways like a snake.
Another symptom described by DeM’s doctors is that he “struggled with passion”, wandering from country to country. The narrator is an itinerant pleasure-seeker, an avowed philosophical hedonist who lectures Kasantsev that we are born for only one thing: to find pleasure in working, fighting, and love. Yet, he admits that Kasantsev, who finds a motherland in his love for Spain, is happiest of all. The narrator has no motherland, just a life of random, aimless wandering from pleasure to pleasure to fulfill his overwhelming passions, like poor de Maupassant.
Raisa shares this trajectory, for all she cares about is her passion for de Maupassant, who will be for the lovers, as the narrator tells us, “a beautiful tomb of the human heart.” The erotic stories they read together are seductive, as is the pleasure of drink, and in the heat of things, when Raisa first bares her “burning” scars, the besotted narrator sees it as a sign of passion, not a warning.
This reckless passion is played out against a larger theme: the careless and self-centered hedonism of the lovers juxtaposed against the narrator’s foil: the lovable, generous Kasantsev and his noble attempt at idealism in the face of poverty and hardship — like Don Quixote, the hero of his motherland.
The narrator, also lays into Tolstoy with the typical materialist reduction of faith to fear of death, but is not so cocky after leaving Raisa’s house, his pleasure, the supposed pinnacle of existence having been requited. All that remains for him now is a fevered, Dantesque hell world: vapors, fog, monsters (like the ones painted in Raisa’s trendy Roerichs) seething behind the walls, (will they soon show their faces?) and streets cutting people off at the legs. The kind of thing De Maupassant might have seen on his way to the madhouse.
Kasantsev, though, sleeps happily, dreaming of Don Quixote and his Spanish motherland. When the narrator gets home to Kasantsev, he thinks : a book. A book to put you to sleep like that, to take your mind off the dank fog pressing even now against my very own door.
Something inspiring, perhaps, about the great passions of de Maupassant himself. That’s the ticket.
And then Babel turns the lever.
As an abstract painter, I completely understand the point George is making about turning away from the conceptual mind at the juncture of completion. One has developed the painting or the story with great concern or readiness for perfection or making sense, but perfection or completion can happen far more elegantly with an opening for the reader or viewer or what could be discerned as an imperfection or painting awkwardness or mistake. That juncture of something "thrown in" not seemingly an ending or completion can allow the audience a larger venue of viewing or contemplating and finding the reader's own needed ending...that just might not end. Shelley H-T
I agree with mary g about the ending to this story. As I see it, Guy de Maupassant is not the subject of the story -- Babel's semi-fictional younger self learning a "lesson in life" is -- but he is so much more than a passing theme. He's almost handled like a movie star or a rockstar. His full name is the complete title of the story. Raisa simply loves him, and the Narrator is evidently an admirer. Translating his works from French to Russian forms a major part of the action. Specific Maupassant stories are referenced and paraphrased more or less intensively. Concomitant with all this, there's a background theme of France (another homeland, like Kazantsev's Spain?), a largely fictional country of sun, wine, and roses (and sexual openness, which was indeed part of the late 19th--early 20th century reputation both of France and Maupassant, oh la la !).
The climactic scene itself takes part of its narrative limbs from the sauciest of the three Maupassant stories. The sauce can be said to boil over into the action when Narrator and Reisa get into role-playing, "Please sit down, Monsieur Polyte." (and not, "Please leave immediately, Isaak Emmanuilovich.") Whether one thinks they had sex (as I do), or not, it's undeniable they're at least sailing very close.
Let's suppose Narrator now walks down the street singing, pretending to be drunk or pretending not to be, leaves the McMansions of the nouveau riche part of town and freezing, piss-yellow fog greets him as he comes into the low-class Peski area. An intimation worms into him, something that might be whispering to him: "This is reality", or something that is not put into words but left in the atmospherics for the reader to feel for herself.
There would surely be, as George suggests, a bowling pin still in the air. The pin could have the label "Maupassant" stuck to it, but Maupassant is a metaphor for literary success, fame, sexual freedom, in a land of sun, wine, and roses.
Babel uses a biography of Maupassant to say there's another side to the coin. Maupassant's reality was quite different. Life's a bitch.
Pin down.
I’m with @mary g - I don’t think it’s just having a place to dance. It’s knowing what dance the character is going to do. It’s a first person narrative so, to me, it’s a little like method acting - there’s the story/the narrative but there’s the character - and for me as a writer, the character is foremost. If I know my character, I can find their dance.
In this case, surely Babbel knows his character? He’s young, full of restless energy and passion. He’s finally - after all those breadth! - had sex. Perhaps not for the first time but probably the first time with literature as the wing man. He walks home pretending to be drunk - the freedom of youth. His friend’s asleep so he can’t say, ‘you’ll never guess what happened to me tonight!’ Instead he picks up a book - and there’s the shadow side of - well, everything - laid before him in plain, almost matter-of-fact sentences.
That’s his dance and it’s exactly what it should be. And I reckon Babbel got to it knowing his character. Conscious mind? Unconscious mind? Serendipity ( lovely word!)? Percolation? All of the above - because why not? We are complex and contradictory beings and our work is rarely one thing or the other. Surely engineers dream of arcs, wings and impossible spiral ladders? Surely poets dovetail, tighten and tension?
George's "complex energy flows" seem to be akin to what I sense are, initially, microscopic droplets of authorial emotion which grow until they fill a structure of the author's perhaps unintentional design. The author creates both, of course, but the structure will continue to grow in seemingly unpredictable patterns until the internal pressure the droplets exert evens out. The initial surge of authorial emotion will pulse through internal pathways and force growth through unseen pathways inside the externally unregulated exoskeleton. The location of those pathways differ from story to story and some will inevitably be pruned through the revision process. To me, the primary concern is that the droplets must all be able to circulate through the system down to the capillary level, and the "right" ending is the one that assists that process most efficiently.
First off, “Sod Poodles” is about the best High School moniker of all time. Good on Amarillo. Second, I really appreciate the buddha (small “b”) approach, including its hit-or-miss results. Be great to hear an instance when it missed for you, George. It’d also be interesting to take up a Nabokov short story. A writer who insisted he consciously controlled all aspects of his stories. With Babel, in this case, his ending (to me) was more straightforward. He wanted to bring the whole thing around to De Maupassant; the contrast to that writer’s “life” as a spur to the narrator’s romantic notion of what Life should be. In short his title near determined its ending. I remember a similar feeling as a younger man when I “discovered” Henry Miller. I thought “here is a man and a writer who is really living”. It was a romantic notion that like most such notions is, in reality, inoperable. Babel’s narrator is on the path to finding this out. Once on this path the story can end.
"Then Babel asks (and, of course, 'asks' is not quite right – this, too, no doubt, all happened in a quick, intuitive flash) ..."
Well, maybe / maybe not.
I don't buy that work that comes from a conscious, reasoned place is inherently less interesting than work that comes from the subconscious and intuitive, or, similarly, that work created in a flow state is likely to be better than work that is painstakingly built one word or concept at a time.
I'm very curious to know what others here believe and what they have found in their own creative endeavors.
I do find that the spontaneous, flow-state work is a lot more fun to write. It's a rush, as we used to say back when I was young enough to say that. But when I've let time elapse between when I've written something and when I'm reading it -- enough so I no longer recall which parts came to me in which state -- I usually can't tell the difference.
I write from both places, and I think a lot of us do. Some of my prose that felt most alive in first draft has come from that spontaneous place, but I have rarely known what to do with it unless I've built scaffolding, consciously, to contain it.
There are writers who, like George, work primarily from a spontaneous, intuitive, subconscious place, and others who work very consciously, and others who work in both modalities at different times. (You don't have to take my word for it! Page through some of the Writers at Work interviews from the Paris Review, a series of fascinating windows into How It's Done.)
Long, long ago (possibly before time was invented), I was trying to break out of the rational, engineering mind I'd had since childhood, and William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which he rails against the rational (later, he invents a character called Urizen, which I always read as "Your reason) was a useful lever, as was a brief foray into psychedelics. But when I think about the writers I have been drawn to -- including Blake, who painstakingly engraved his words onto copper plates -- they come from both camps and, likely, several in between.
Not about the story at all, but I think that returning to your home town and seeing your name on a billboard as you drive around, must be such a thrill. I know it’s a little egotistical of me but I think that sounds really cool….there’s nothing like a hometown welcome for a returning hero. Congratulations George!
Since I sold my publishing house Podium (proud Dutch publisher of a translation of Saunders stories!), I’m writing a novel and I am so delighted to read your (George’s) analyze of the writing process frequently and with gulfs of recognition and admiration! Thank you, Joost
I’m struck by how intuition works, explicitly and implicitly. George sees a guy pushing a trolley and the next sentence comes to him. Talking about Babel, George says “and likely his mind was ‘working’ simply by ‘writing;’ that is, I don’t think he was actually reasoning everything out,” and later “this too, no doubt, all happened in a quick, intuitive flash.”
I just read another Substack today, by Garth Greenwell. He’s talking about the first sentence in his forthcoming novel Small Rain: “That feeling was pretty set when this sentence arrived, and I didn’t really question it.” That feeling is what “you just feel on your pulses.”
I love how a guy innocently pushing a cart solves a writer’s problem (and here we are today, years later, hearing about it; where's that guy now?), and how a sentence “just arrives.” Reminds me to trust my instincts and just breathe.
I'm relying heavily on my rational mind when writing these days and what's coming out isn't very good, but something in me wants to keep being rational and neat and mediocre.
So many words here trying to capture the turn. Shelley said this:
'As an abstract painter, I completely understand the point George is making about turning away from the conceptual mind at the juncture of completion'
By chance I was at an exhibition 2 days ago looking at a painting by Cecily Brown titled 'Trouble in Paradise' about which she says this:
'The place I am interested in is where the mind goes when it is trying to make up for what isn't shown there.'
The art of saying less. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/brown-trouble-in-paradise-t07606
I knew Agnes Martin. Not well. She was kind enough to ask me to her studio for tea in my youth. She was very calculated.She loved Beethoven. Her paintings were very thought out and planned and very conceptualized. Her writing, it seems to me is far more flowing and talks about and with a spiritual template of which artists and writers might find of great interest in it's beautiful simplicity.
I was told by Morton Feldman's wife, Barbara Monk Feldman, a marvelous New Music composer in her own right, a quote he often used, "When I see an idea coming I run the other way."
This just might be the muscle man pulling the cart of bee hives...
This helped me finally figure out my story's ending, which i have been blocked on for MONTHS! So grateful :)
Grasping for that complex energy is really what I enjoy the most about writing, because you never know where it will come from, or even if it will arrive. Damned ephemeral. That line in Frankenstein always pops into my head when I roll up my sleeves and try and get a story to breathe, “ With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet.” Sometimes, no matter what I do, the blasted story will just lie there, but I think after today I will reach for arationality and see if it revs things up.
And I was totally off base with my public health angle on this story- I missed the word, “congenital,” which means the story is about something else entirely.
Thank you