A Million Windows (15 page)

The detail about to be reported has not only stayed in my mind since my first and only reading, nearly forty years ago, of the work of fiction
Epitaph of a Small Winner
, by Machado de Assis but is the only detail that I can recall from my having read the work. The first-person narrator pauses in his account of his life-story, so to call it, and reports that a butterfly had come into his room through an open window a few minutes before and had alighted on his desk and had seemed to look at him as though he might have been the god of the butterflies.

The detail about to be reported has stayed in my mind since my first and only reading, nearly sixty years ago, of the work of fiction
The Mayor of Casterbridge
, by Thomas Hardy. As part of his effort to describe, as it were, the peculiar characteristics of the fictional town of Casterbridge, the narrator of the novel, so to call it, claims that the town merges so comfortably into the countryside surrounding it that many a butterfly urged to travel from some or another grassy landscape north of the town to some or another more congenial landscape south of the town chooses not to follow some or another long, circuitous course around the margins of the town but rather to flit through the town itself: to pass over roads and between shops and houses as though these are only recent and temporary alterations to the long-standing arrangement of things; as though the countryside is permanent and the town merely temporary.

When I first drew up the plan of this work of fiction, I intended this, the nineteenth of the thirty-four sections, to comprise an argument in favour of reliable narrators as against
unreliable or absent narrators. (Unreliable narrators are most often discoverable from internal evidence, so to call it: the texts for which they are seemingly responsible are found to be inconsistent or self-contradictory. Fictional texts lacking narrators include those presented as collections of letters or of documents or of reports by a number of different first-person voices, so to call them. Such texts offer no explanation as to how they could have come into being: as to how the letters or documents or confessions, so to call them, came to be arranged as they are.) The notes that I made at the time are so brief that I cannot now recall the details of my intended argument. Moreover, it occurred to me just now, while I was writing the passage in parentheses above, that no discerning reader should need to be convinced of what is surely self-evident. When I begin to recall the dreary effect on me of even the brief passages that I have sometimes read in certain texts before deciding to read no further, then I feel confident that the discerning reader about to begin a work of fiction expects the personage seemingly responsible for the existence of the text to be seemingly approachable by way of the text or seemingly revealed through the text and to seem to have written the text in order to impart what could never have been imparted by any other means than the writing of a fictional text. In short, I feel confident that the discerning reader would prefer to be in the seeming presence of a personage who could be trusted to have once noted the passing of a butterfly above a street in the south of England or the alighting of a butterfly on his desk in a suburb of Rio de Janeiro
than to have in front of him or her a mere text the seeming work of no recognisable personage.

When I first drew up the plan for this work of fiction, I intended that the last paragraph of this section would expound the final, persuasive claims of the argument that I cannot now remember. I shall include here instead something that occurred to me while I was writing about the butterflies mentioned above. A frequently repeated anecdote tells of a Chinese sage who dreamed of being a butterfly and who, on waking, questioned whether he was, in fact, a man who had dreamed of a butterfly-existence or quite the reverse. A discerning reader who had dreamed, or had seemed to dream, such a dream or a seeming-dream would surely ask, on awakening, not merely what the Chinese sage is reported to have asked but whether the butterfly or the seeming-butterfly was actual or fictional and, if it was fictional, whether or not the narrator reporting its existence was seemingly reliable and to be trusted.

He was reported in an earlier section of this work of fiction as having experienced, or having seemed to experience, as a younger man several of what were called at the time nervous breakdowns and as having during one such experience consulted a medical specialist but as having merely endured the other experiences until they had passed or had seemed to pass. He did not merely remain passive during each of those other experiences but took thought constantly as to how he might
bring an end to the experience. He often supposed that his best means for recovering, so to speak, would be to meet up with a certain sort of female person or to read a certain sort of work of fiction with a trustworthy narrator. Even while he was consulting the medical specialist, he still supposed that he was more likely to recover by one of the means mentioned just now than as a result of his taking the medicines or following the advice provided by the medical specialist. As time passed, however, without his having met the certain sort of female person or having read the certain sort of work of fiction, he drew on his memories of what he had read in certain books, some of them being works of fiction with narrators not necessarily trustworthy, and began to conduct himself in the company of the medical specialist as though he, the nervously broken one, was a character in a work of fiction with a narrator not necessarily trustworthy. (The medical specialist, from the time of their first meeting, had been conducting himself thus.)

This and the following few paragraphs will be more easily written and more easily read if I report of the chief character that he
pretended
to do this or that rather than that he did this or that as though he was a character in a work of fiction with a narrator not necessarily trustworthy. He had satisfied himself, during his first visits to the medical specialist, that the man subscribed to certain popular theories as to what constitutes the mind and what are the causes of mental disorders and the most effective treatments of them. After he, the broken-down one, had begun to pretend, he pretended first that he too subscribed to the theories
mentioned just now, then that his having broken down, almost certainly not for the first time, was a result of difficulties that had for long existed and still existed between him and his mother, and finally that he might remove some or all of these difficulties by writing to his mother, who lived in a provincial city far from the capital city where he and the medical specialist lived. He was not surprised when the medical specialist agreed with this pretend-diagnosis and pretend-remedy. He, the pretender, then wrote to his mother the sort of pretend-letter that might have been written by a character in a work of fiction with a narrator not necessarily trustworthy.

The rest of this section, which is the twentieth of the thirty-four sections comprising this work of fiction, might have been written in any of a million ways, according to the epigraph of the work. I confine myself to mentioning only three of the possible million. A narrator such as narrates most of the novels, so to call them, of Thomas Hardy might report the thoughts and feelings and presentiments of the mother while she read the letter from her son and while she wrote a letter in reply; the text of each letter would, of course, be reported, as would the thoughts and feelings and presentiments of the son, the broken-down one, while he read his mother's reply. A narrator such as narrates most of the novels, so to call them, of Ernest Hemingway might report nothing of the contents of the mother's mind but much about the gestures and the grimaces and the words muttered by the son as he took his mother's letter from his letter-box and opened the envelope and read the text of the letter; much
would also be reported, of course, of the thoughts and feelings and presentiments of the son while he read the letter afterwards. The narrator of this present work of fiction is one who strives to keep between his actual self and his seeming self and his seeming reader such seeming-distances as will maintain between all three personages a lasting trust. That narrator chooses to report that the son, while reading the letter and pretending to feel what a fictional son might have felt while reading a fictional letter, felt grateful to the mother for having written the sort of pretend-letter that he had expected to receive from her. He recalled while reading her letter that she had read in earlier years many books of the sort called at that time library fiction. After television had become available to her, she had no longer read books, but it seemed to the son that she had not forgotten what she had previously learned from reading books of fiction the narrators of which, he had for long supposed, were untrustworthy.

The mother's pretend-answer to the son's pretend-letter was all the excuse that the son needed for ceasing to consult the medical specialist. Yet another of his seeming or actual nervous breakdowns had seemingly or had actually come to an end before he had met up with a certain sort of female person or had read a certain work of fiction with a trustworthy narrator. In fact, the son, so to call him, only a few months after the exchange of pretend-letters with his mother, read for the first time a work of fiction that he later credited with having turned him not only into a person unlikely to break down or to seem to break down but into a person able himself to plan and to write a work of
fiction. Several more years were to pass before he met up with her who seemed to be the female person he had sought to meet up with, but by then he had already written part of a work of fiction that was published some years later.

When he read for the first time the work of fiction mentioned in the sentence before the previous sentence, he was still an ignorant and gullible reader. The work was of a kind that he would have declined to read twenty years later, after he had become a discerning reader. Twenty years later he would have decided, after having read the first pages of the work, that the implied author of the work had abdicated his responsibility and had hidden himself, so to speak, behind a narrator who was self-evidently incapable of having brought the text into being. The first words of the work, which words the son mentioned above is still able to recall after not having read them for fifty years – the first words of the English translation of the original text are ‘Granted that I am an inmate of a lunatic asylum...' Nowadays, he would decline to go on reading a work of fiction beginning thus, but fifty years ago he read the whole of the work mentioned and even believed himself to have learned from the work, and for the first time, that every event reported in a work of fiction is a pretend-event whether the event is reported to have taken place in the mind of a fictional personage such as Oskar Matzerath or in fictional places such as those in and around the fictional Danzig where he has his fictional existence, according to the text of
The Tin Drum
, by Günter Grass.

The word
plot
is seldom heard in the sporadic discussions that take place in this upper corridor of this remote wing of this building that remains largely unfamiliar to most of us. Many of us claim to find the word not only irrelevant but scarcely comprehensible. And yet, none of us commented derisively on the evening recently when someone reported that Charles Dickens was supposed to have laboured for days over detailed charts illustrating the sequences of fictional events in some or another work, as yet unwritten, together with the names of the characters, so to call them, who were to take part in the events and the sites where the events were to take place. In the brief silence that followed, I surmised that many of us felt a certain admiration for Charles Dickens, even though none of us would care to do what he is supposed to have done. We who avoid using the words
plot
and
character
have too much respect for those we call
fictional personages
to do more than take note of their moods and caprices, but we could hardly not admire a writer of fiction or, I should say, an implied author of fiction, who could so assert himself as to prescribe in advance what should seem to be said and done by those he might have called his characters and where and when it should thus seem. Was the implied author of the novels, so to call them, by Charles Dickens able, as none of us has ever been able, to direct the fictional behaviour of fictional personages? Or, do the so-called characters in Dickens's so-called novels have a different sort of existence from that of our personages, as we call them? Did Dickens's beings, perhaps, even lack for existence until certain words had been written with ink on paper?