Dark Space
It's on even when it's off
I finished Ben Lerner’s Transcription last night. The part that struck me most was the early discussion between the narrator and his mentor, an old writer-academic named Thomas, for whom to listen to a story was to become involved in its composition. Thomas is a deep thinker, an absent father, a man of many objects and red wine, of facts and philosophy that fuse with someone’s personal anecdote to create a new thing, to the frustration, delight or habituated resignation of the interlocutor.
Yes. No one ever leaves a theater. A black box theater. Like the black box of an airplane.
The book is largely, it seems, about fiction and nonfiction, devices and discussion, recordings and retellings. Our man has dropped his phone in the sink, his final interview with Thomas must happen on the fly, to be then remembered and retold in print, which people take as fact and rehash in various ways including at his funeral. His son has his own recording of a conversation, which, despite his fury at our man’s ‘remembering’ of his father’s words can still never give the accuracy he is looking for. It reminded me of the awful, traitorous feeling of having reconstituted the ‘facts’ of my life to create a nonfiction narrative; those on the outer circle and outward, nobody knows or cares, but for those at the centre, how dizzying. What is true? Is the recording of Thomas true? Or is our man’s retelling, with its natural mix of his own bias and humanity, as honest as the distorted truth of an actual conversation with Thomas?
In their discussion early in the book, Thomas puts words to that nebulous thought I’ve tried to articulate for years about that space between what an artists is doing, and what it is we are receiving:
… the meaning is in the cut, the splice. So what you cut is present, the dark matter.
The absent is present. What isn’t here is here, simultaneously.
Later, Thomas talks about a radio in his childhood home. Our man asks if it was always on. He replies:
It is late for the literal, no? We practise literature, not law. It was on even when off. Because it structured experience even when quiet.
I have been thinking a lot about this; what is seen and felt by an audience that we don’t intend. The gaps between the words in a book, the strokes of a paintbrush, the feeling we as an audience member perceive that is not shown, not concrete.
At a writers’ festival last week, I was on a panel with two nonfiction writers, and in discussing the idea of portraying the self in literature, the great ‘I’, I asked one of the panellists, a renowned writer of memoir and essay why she had never written fiction, though she had covered most other forms. She actually had, she told us, written two unpublished novels, and when prompted as to whether she felt less naked in writing fiction, she said something along the lines of finding fiction just as much, if not more, exposing. We think we can distance ourselves from ourselves, but we can’t. There is nowhere to hide. She went on to say that it’s the decision-making in fiction that exposes us to our audience; within each choice we are always making some kind of point, revealing ourselves. In fiction we don’t have the luxury of falling back on well that’s what actually happened. Fiction is equally as raw as a ‘true’ account, and both are as fallible. And in Transcription, though each man holds his account of a conversation with Thomas, one recorded, one re-imagined, each seems to hold as little of Thomas as the other.
Is Thomas, then, the dark space? The feeling between words that can’t be described, the radio on and not on, cut, edited, never written at all?
A friend at the festival, the author of several fiction novels, over lunch admitted her books contain zero autobiographical element. Zero? I asked. Zero, she said. Impossible, I said. No, she said. Zero. She makes them up entirely, she swore. I found this hard to believe. Was she saying that between the words, in the dark space, she could not be found? Was this her desire?
If the words were removed, what would be left? Is it the absence of herself that represents the dark space in her work? That haunts me. There can’t be nothing there, or if there is nothing, then that nothing is something. Writers don’t need to admit their presence in the text, despite our desperation for them to do so, but still, we feel them. Their residue. What they leave in the gaps, in their wake, that they cannot predict. A sadness, perhaps, at a writer’s desire not to be present or leave traces of themselves, a coldness, curiosity. In my friend’s writing I feel a softness despite herself. A child wanting to live in the imaginary, never to come down.
It’s scary to think what we cut is present, and even what we never put in. We sense it, it lives. We can’t even hide in omission. Whether we write or not.