Sunday afternoon, I attended a RSO chamber concert at Government house which began with a wonderful piece for flute, cello, and piano called "Cothurnus" by Canadian composer Alice Ho. Simon Fryer, who frequently offers insight into the music, told us that "cothurnus" refers to the shoes worn by Greek Tragedians, and compared the emotional points of a drama to the structure of Ho's music. "It doesn't so much develop as unfold," he told us, and indeed, I experienced the music as a kind of an emotional/psychological soundscape, a series of moods or reactions that unfolded.
But Fryer's words rattled around in my brain at around 4 a.m. Monday morning when, unable to sleep, I finished reading Colm Toibin's Nora Webster, which I began as soon as I finished Murakami's Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. The novels have much in common: both begin, at least chronologically, with a trauma. Tsukuru is shunned by his close adolescent friends while Nora has to see her husband through an incredibly painful death and then take over raising her four children alone. (The book takes place in Ireland in the Sixties, when pain medication was withheld, even from a terminal patient, so that he or she wouldn't get addicted. Fortunately, we know better now.) Yet I can't help feeling that Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki develops while Nora Webster unfolds. I may be splitting hairs, and if you have any insight, please help me out here. Because I'm trying to figure out something about "plotting": how sometimes a writer's creative vision requires a very purposeful structure, while other creative projects have more space in which to unfold.
Maybe it would help to consider "development" vs. "unfolding" in musical terms first. All art, Aristotle tells us, strives for unity. In the 21st century, this is perhaps arguable, but let's go with it. A narrative draws unity quite naturally out of a sequence of events that might be shaped by a beginning, middle, and end; or that might simply be related chronologically or causally. Music, being abstract, has no meaning as narrative, so composers often draw unity out of repetition, or repetition plus variation, or repetition plus contrast. I remember seeing a film of Leonard Bernstein when I was in high school where Bernstein explains the sonata-allegro form, a basic structure for European and North America symphonies, piano concertos, and chamber music. Sitting at a grand piano, he sings--well, he kind of sings--a Beatles song. Eight bars of tune. Repeat those eight bars of tune. Insert a contrasting tune and then wind it all up with the initial eight bars, repetition optional. I think the song was "And I love her," and as I read the lyrics just now and hummed to myself, I thought "yup, that would do it."
Liszt, that bad boy of nineteenth-century music, introduced another way of structuring music that would come to be called "through composed." Start a tune, take it as far as you can until you get bored or it peters out, and then start something new. I'm not a Liszt fan, so I'd say that this was like a lot of his other innovations: more effective in someone else's hands. Liszt simply unfolds, and you have to be interested enough to simply wander on with it.
Here's where my possible hair-splitting begins. It seems to me that the plot of Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki develops. Murakami achieves this a couple of ways. Sixteen years after his shunning, Tsukuru's current girlfriend wants him to visit the friends who shunned him and to learn what happened. Tsukuru has constructed a purposeful life for himself as someone who sensitively designs railway and subway stations in Tokyo, attempting to make the traveler's experience as simple and pleasant as possible, even in stations that see thousands of passengers a day. He's created kluges around his wound, though he still feels that there is clearly something profoundly wrong with him that he himself can't see--a belief that has led him to have a series of rather non-committal relationships so that he's not deeply wounded when they end. His new girlfriend, Sara, won't settle for this and thinks he needs to meet his past head on.
This element of the novel is so human: I doubt there are many of us without such a wound that only hurts sometimes, but that reminds us that we're really deeply flawed and only lucky sometimes that people don't see this. Also human is the "reflection" that Tsukuru sees in his friends' eyes: they tell him what he was like for them, how they loved him, how their mothers were his biggest fans because he was always polite and carefully dressed, how he gave them all a kind of ballast. With each visit to a friend, the reader's knowledge of Tsukuru becomes deeper, along with Tsukuru's vision of himself. And each visit is a kind of repetition, a kind of revisiting of the past.
Murakami underlines this impression of return/repetition through motifs and tropes that come back again and again, sometimes developing. Several times, Tsukuru describes his friends' rejection of him (which was not his fault, as we learn, but I'm not going to spoil the plot); he likens it to being thrown overboard into a dark, cold ocean. A piece of music played by one of his friends--Liszt's "Le mal du pays" from his "Years of Pilgrimage Suite"--comes back again and again, and each time Tsukuru hears it, he is both taken back to his past but also reminded of his present "groundless sadness." Besides thinking of himself as a "colorless" member of this group, he also thinks of himself as an empty vessel, telling the first friend he visits "I've always seen myself as an empty person, lacking color and identity. Maybe that was my role in the group. To be empty" (179). But Murakami skillfully shifts our reading of the "empty vessel," so that toward the end of the novel, in the hands, as it were, of a young friend who had loved him deeply and who has become a potter, the concept of "empty vessel" changes significantly. Repetition plus variation and contrast: this novel develops.
Whereas Nora Webster, an equally compelling read, seems to unfold. Nora's task is to find her way beyond her grief and to face a series of practical difficulties, such as the fact that she hadn't held a job in years. Although memories of her husband's death come back constantly, her basic narrative task is to move beyond them. Whereas Murakami's novel feels so carefully built (I only hinted at the many tropes and motifs that come back again and again)--appropriate for a novel about a character whose name means "maker,"--Toibin's skill is to depict Nora's growth through the absolutely everyday, often accidental events or through the pressing decisions she must make about her children.. The time she tells the office manager to get off her back. The evening when she visits friends she's made in a musical club to listen to records. Redecorating the back room and the front room, and painting a ceiling. Figuring out how to help her oldest boy adjust to public school, to keep his long-term good in mind while finding a way to make the immediate disorientation bearable. She's making it up as she goes along. Here, perhaps, that powerful human project is grieving. Toibin and Nora suggest it isn't really a series of purposeful, nameable stages, but that it's putting one foot in front of another until you look back and find that much has changed, though not your love or longing for the person who is gone. And just as this project simply unfolds--you could take any number of routes through a life swamped by grief--so does the novel. Each chapter feels absolutely casual, as if it's simply a "slice" of Nora's life; yet each chapter is a purposeful record of the everyday process of grieving and living.
"Ah," you are thinking about now, "she's still reading aesthetics." Well, not at this moment, though I'm hoping that tomorrow I finish my chapter on Mrs Dalloway. But what I admire about these two novels is that they are so quiet, like most of our lives. The don't have that classic opening that I might describe as "Something Terrible Has Happened: Whaddaya Gonna Do?" At the same time, their structures are perfect for the human projects each novel envisions for the eponymous character.
And here is where I come round to Mrs Dalloway. What good is the use of such beautiful structures? Does the ordinary reader--the reader who simply reads out of a love of reading, not the reader who also loves reading but who is trying to learn how to write--notice these structures on a conscious level? On a subliminal level? Does this reader simply sense the rightness of the shape, of the language, of the rhythm of each sentence? Does the author earn her or his sense of authority in the reader's eyes by creating something that's shapely, integral, appropriate to the task?
I have the sense that when we respond to the shaping, the making of a novel, we are simply aware of its rightness, its beauty. "Wow! That chapter was all about redecorating and painting ceilings. But painting a ceiling put Nora in a lot of pain, and her doctor kind of went overboard with the pain medication, so Nora's sisters and aunt came in to help, and she overheard them talking about her and told them so--which healed a lot of rifts. Beautiful!" And I suspect that our sense of the novel's beauty--a beauty that goes beyond the people and events the novel describes and the wisdom and compassion the author brings to their treatment--stays with us like a beautiful moment in our own lives.
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