Reading in the dark while searching for any light
Giller Prize-winning author muses on pandemic reading
Writers shed light on the times we’re in. So in the time of COVID-19, the Star wanted to hear what some of the best in Canada had to say. This is the first in a series of essays that share ideas, emotions, ways to cope — and bring us together.
A friend of mine, when he begins a novel, always reads the last page first. Perhaps he wants no surprises, perhaps he wants to read for voice rather than plot, or, perhaps he doesn’t want to read in the dark. He claims that any novel that can be spoiled by knowing the ending isn’t worth reading. This is the same friend who reads in large gulps, like a dog bolting down food. He is fast, he is efficient — he read “The Idiot” in one day. Is this impatience? Rapacious desire? A need to dominate the narrative?
I have been thinking of my friend these days as we experience the virus that has affected billions of people. What do you do if the ending of this story has not yet been written and you cannot skip to the last page, if the narrative is constantly changing? We would like to believe that we are the authors of this story, not the virus. If it were otherwise, we would all throw up our hands and hug each other.
As a writer of fiction, I live under the illusion that stories can be shaped, that I have control of my characters and their actions, and that I can determine the various voices, and the structure of the novel. Of course, every story has a structure, even ones with dire endings, and just because we don’t like dire endings doesn’t mean that the story can be ignored. In our story, right now, it is difficult to trust the narrator, or the many narrators. And this makes it difficult to keep reading. I mean that literally. Many people I speak with are having a hard time concentrating on reading. Oh, news works. Facts. And more news. And more facts. But at some point, the news bleeds together and so we have a reappearance of the same story. Eternal repetition. Eternal return. But why this difficulty with fiction?
Some say they have found it easier to go back to Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Virginia Woolf. Well-worn stories, where the endings are known. The familiar. Read what is safe. Others, those who can parcel up the world, are devouring fiction. My father reads Revelations and calls to tell me about the pale horse. I am reading “Threshold” by Rob Doyle, a young Irish writer. It is drug and sex addled — a quest for dead writers, a search for meaning. Which is what all novels worth their salt do: they deal in death. They trigger our imaginations, and our memories.
I am also reading “Decameron,” a plague novel by Bocaccio, a story of seven women and three men who go up to a deserted villa in Italy during the Black Death — this is the 14th Century. Each night, for ten days, they gather and tell stories to each other as a distraction or as a reminder of better times. The stories are not about the plague and death, but about life. The tales are often sexual, and full of trickery. Freed from the morality of the city their stories grow wild and wanton. Even the nuns of the villa have their wily ways, seducing a deaf mute who cannot out them.
Another book: “The Plague,” by Camus. Like many a reader, I recently went back and reread the novel, and discovered that Camus had captured, in 1947, the intricate details and emotions and dread that we experience today — the failing economy, the rich going short of practically nothing, letting the weak die, herd immunity, fear of the other, the efficacy/inefficacy of wearing a mask, flattening the curve, “doubtful cases,” fingerpointing, the bravery of the doctor, the nurse, the undertaker. Camus of course is dealing with more than a plague foreshadowed by dead rats. He is looking at how the plague is both outside of us and inside of us. He is saying that Yes, our bodies may survive, but if we don’t recognize the interior pestilence, we will be diminished metaphysically. At the end of the novel, as the fear of the plague fades, the rodents return. Beware the rats. What is astounding about Camus’ novel is the use of facts, the counting of the dead, and the utter banality of the pestilence. “The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.” First goes imagination, then goes memory.
I watched a YouTube video recently, in which a psychoanalyst said that during this time humans are regressing. He said that the virus has normalized paranoia and has literally scared the s--t out of us — hence our need to hoard toilet paper. We have lost our sense of control, our sense of the future, and therefore we have lost our sense of time. We are in isolation, stuck here forever, never ending, eternal. Usually, time passes from the past to the present to the future. And that future includes death, for all of us. No one wants to live forever. We just don’t want to die quite yet, not in this manner.
My daughter, who is in isolation in Montreal with her husband and their four-month-old daughter, sent me a Sylvia Plath poem called “Nick and the Candlestick.” It is about a pregnant mother who wanders like a miner through her cave-like house, carrying a candle, talking to her unborn child. It is perfect for our times, in that it recognizes the child to come, the future. Plath ends the poem by pushing away dread and praising the unborn child. Let the mercuric Atoms that cripple drip Into the terrible well, You are the one Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn. The baby in the barn. The book as barn. Do we build fictions like barns, to protect ourselves from the unknown? In literature, in art, in photographs, film, in any art form that succeeds, there has to be a sense of movement, of life beyond the frame, of the story continuing after we close the book.
Also, art requires work. It isn’t a Twitter feed, or Instagram — rather than being fed, we must learn to feed ourselves. As we read the narrative of our own plague, in real time, we keep looking for what is to come. We want hope. We need it. We want to sustain a sense of time. We must protect the baby in the barn.
Giller Prize-winning author David Bergen’s new book, a collection of stories and a novella, is called “Here the Dark” and is published by Biblioasis.