THE
FAT/SKIN/JESUS SOLUTION
-a lecture to
students of Creative Writing at Deakin University -
May 2002
Copyright © Carmel Bird 2002. All rights reserved.
But people do want simple solutions to whatever is wrong – and it is always obvious that plenty is wrong around the place, and the first stop in the remedy is the home gym and the pot of face cream. Only a gigantic catastrophe such as September eleven could bump those things off the screen. You watch the planes hit, you watch the towers fall, and you suddenly see that things really have gone very very wrong. You realise that fixing up the fat and the bad skin is not really the point. You watch TV and see the bloody and tragic drama in the Middle East. Or detention centres. Or drug traffic. Or suicide bomber. Or insurance fraud. Or the Indian Mutiny, or the Slave Trade. Or whatever. Bad, bad, bad.
I didn’t mean to get into a discussion of the role of television in the dissemination of the story of the problem of evil and the problem of pain. You do get nice stories too, like how your house and garden can be transformed if you get a heap of money and twenty people on the job for half a day. But even there the place where it all starts is called Problem Place. Stories start in the Problem Place. There is a Big Problem about being here (alive, on earth, whatever), and any story you care to name poses some large or small bandaid solution to that problem.
From where I am standing, I write stories because I fix on a certain aspect of The Problem, and I examine it and try to solve it, sort of. Anyone who can’t see The Problem, can’t tell stories. I fthre is nothing wrong with the world, then there isn’t much to talk about. Paradise was probably nice, but got boring after a while, and so the stage was set for temptation and transgression. But of course, everyone can see The Problem, even if it is only the fat and skin part. Not everybody is motivated to write stories down, of course, but everybody tells stories, and everybody knows when they have heard (or read) a good one. It is a writer’s business to construct narratives with words so that readers will be engaged by this or that account of The Problem.
A long time ago – it was 1970 – a friend asked me to accompany her while she looked at a house she was thinking of renting. I am not sure why the idea came to me – it had never occurred to me before, and I had looked at plenty of places for rent – but the thought occurred to me that a person could conceal, in one of the big cupboards of the empty house, a dead body.
I even had the idea that this might be the germ of a piece of fiction. At that time I had had a few short stories published, and had written and destroyed a couple of incompetent novels. Once you have an idea, you can’t un-have it. But I didn’t in fact do anything with the idea about the body in the cupboard.
A couple of years ago I went to the Perth Festival and I saw the Angel Project. This was a great kind of fantasy interactive installation where the visitor went alone on a walk through the city, guided by clues, going into weird places in each of which there was, somewhere, an angel. Like – in an inner city church there was a man dressed as a fantastic black angel moving spookily around the rafters, sometimes outlined against the light as it fell through stained glass. Well one of the angels was curled up in a cupboard in an empty display apartment high up above the city. My idea of the body in the cupboard came back to me.
Then a while ago I was delivering library books to a house-bound woman in my suburb, and I saw that the house across the street from hers – an interesting-looking Edwardian place on a big block, with a rambling old garden gone to seed – was open for inspection. So I inspected it. And as I did so, the memory of the house I saw in 1970 returned, quite strongly, and with it the idea of concealing a dead body on the property. Now for all I know there are heaps of novels in which the body is in the cupboard of an empty house. For all I know there are heaps of empty houses with bodies in the shed. But all I can tell you is that my idea had finally come to the surface, and I simply had to construct a narrative in which this thing was a key.
So I began to write a novel with the title Open For Inspection – it will be published in August. This is the second novel I have written that can be classified as ‘crime fiction’. The first one was Unholy Writ – and here the central problem I was interested in was the question of how writing a novel could get you murdered.
Now, at the same time as I have been writing these two crime novels, I have written other books, but in particular I have been writing, all the time, a novel that will be classified as, I suppose, a literary novel. I did not invent the categories, but I know and you know that the way a book is written has an effect on how it is marketed, where it is placed in bookshops, and how it is generally perceived. The literary novel (Cape Grimm) has more murders in it than either of my crime novels, but it will probably not be perceived as ‘crime’ because of the way it is constructed.
In a recent publication The Writer’s Reader – which I think you know – Alan Gold says that the principal difference between a literary novel and a popular novel (I would call the crime novels popular novels) is the fact that the literary ones do not have plots and the popular ones do have plots. Well, I would probably tease that out a bit and say that the popular ones have kind of simple plots, and generally concentrate the reader’s attention on the plot, and the literary ones have very complex plots and take the reader through more levels of thought and feeling. These are however sweeping statements really. All I am observing is that – because of the way I write – Cape Grimm could go on expanding sideways and in circles more or less forever, I think, and would only become clearer and clearer as it went on. Whereas Open For Inspection would probably start to blur too much if I let it run about in too many interesting alleyways.
With Open For Inspection it was like: here is the dead body in the empty house. How did it get there? Why did it get there? Who was the killer? That, I think, is basically what the reader of a crime novel wants to know. That is the problem, the puzzle. When that is resolved, the reader will experience some kind of mental and emotional relief. Evil will have been exposed and examined, and people (the characters and the reader, not to mention the writer) will have that thing we often seek – closure. But closure is only a mirage, and readers know that evil has not been wiped out, that it will surface again in another novel, and will have to be tracked down and exposed once more. The point about it (evil) is that it is obviously never going to go away, and people have a need to keep looking at how it behaves. That’s why stories are part of human nature, I suppose. They are one of the key mechanisms whereby people remind themselves of how good and how precious and how dangerous it is to be alive. Some form of rupture on the surface of perfection is – I think always – The Problem. You hear people saying that life is just one thing after another – and even the very rich and very happy and very famous etc etc have their share of troubles. Tom and Nicole did not last. The Queen Mother died in the end. Yes, it is all set out in fairy tales, those stories people can hear over and over again, knowing every step along the way, but forever thrilling to the tension, the conflict, the beauty, the good, the fracture, the evil.
It is quite instructive to watch TV in the early hours of the morning, because there it is clear what evil really is – it is as I said fat and bad skin. You can get closure by dialing a phone number and ordering a product. It is also obvious that since they can play these interminable ads night after night after night they are giving people short answers to The Problem. Another late night solution to the problem is that of the TV preacher of course. What you start to think, as you watch the fat/skin/jesus solutions is that people must be crying out: "Tell us stories! Tell us the truth! Tell us lies! But tell us something!"
Then I start to think – what if, instead being the watcher, I was the watched? What if I lived in the West Bank. I would be living the story. I really would be poised, would really know I was poised, on the edge between uncertain life and sudden violent death. I would want water and food and shelter and safety and friends and guns. And maybe that is what stories are, what stories come down to really – is a story a shelter, a shelter for a little while, against the danger in being alive? Is a story a wall I build around me to shield me from the cold, the dark? Is a story a little voice that tells me I am not quite alone?
I think that those things are what stories probably really are. When it comes down to it. But this is a long long way from the Tipperary of writing classes and small magazines and literary prizes and publishing houses and book reviews and book jackets and agents and print runs and six figure advances and literary feuds and who owns the story and should I use a pen name and what is fact and what is fiction, really?
There is a gap – like a war zone perhaps – that spreads and sweeps between the impulse to tell (or write) a story, and the world of professional writing, the world of the novelist or – say – the script-writer. People who want to move from the impulse to the publication of a novel must cross this zone. The zone becomes, in a way, part of The Problem. But the zone is negotiable, and you can get the closure of having your book published. There is lots of help along the way – lectures and workshops and tutors and degrees and agents and editors and so forth. But I do believe that before any of these things can really help, the writer has to be motivated by such a strong and compelling urge to worry away at The Problem that little else matters for a time besides shaping a narrative that somehow works through some facet of The Problem. And nothing can replace the incredible excitement a writer experiences as she realises she is writing something fresh and alive. That is so exhilarating.
As I write I carry The Problem on my left wrist. A watch is always a reminder of the idea that one day time will run out, but I am not so much referring to that as to the fact that my watch tells the twin stories in pictures of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary and the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise. The Annunciation is on the face, and the Expulsion is on the band – I am happy to say. So The Problem is on the band, and the proposed Solution is on the face. The problem is death; the answer is sex (admittedly between an angel and the handmaid of the lord). And all the while the hands move round, and the thing goes tick tick tick and I am conscious that while the pictures and the stories they tell will divert me, they will not save me in the end, for time as I know it will run out. I have given little airplay here to sex – but you would know that in fiction there is no death without sex, no sex without death. And since death is the real bogey, I have concentrated on that.
But like the Sultan listening to Scherezade – and like Scherezade telling her tales to the Sultan – I tell myself stories, I tell you stories, that worry away at the problem, try to hold off the problem, pretend each time that closure is closure, knowing that the big closure is real, that the suicide bomber is barring the exit from the restaurant and I can not get out.
So no wonder I entertain myself with bodies in the cupboards of empty houses. No wonder people dial the number and order the face cream. No wonder they send money to the preacher. And the more beguiling the stories storytellers tell, the easier life can be, for a time, for the readers who read them. They forget they are listening to a story, reading a book, and they participate in the narrative. Maybe that’s what a writer is trying to do, trying to get the readers to participate in the writer’s approach to The Problem. And as you know, if you are going to get other people to join you, you have to make it worth their while, somehow. So that’s why you need to write in some kind of beguiling way. (If I have a tip for you – I think the best way to learn to write is to write.)
But I guess what I am really saying is that in order to give a lot of your life over to writing stories, you need to be very very keen to examine The Problem, and to come up with some more engrossing solutions than those of late night TV. Not so very hard, after all.
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