Immersion

Yesterday afternoon I attended the reading of a novel-in-progress. It was a good reading and a good novel; the voice was strong and the narrative well-paced, infused with vivid, telling details. In the question and answer period after the reading, there was some discussion of the novel’s theme, and the process the author used to discover the theme. One person wanted to know if the author had gone back and thematically revised the manuscript. Then the author was asked to name her themes and when she responded by explaining how she had woven the moon and the woods throughout the narrative, someone pointed out that those were images, not themes.

The exchange started me thinking about the difference between theme and image, which led me to consider the differences between the fiction writer’s task and the task of the literary critic. A theme, of course, is an idea – basically an abstraction, a compressed thought that expresses a particular point of view – presumably the author’s. Images, on the other hand, are the stuff of the life of the novel. Images are where you find the theme.

So how exactly does a novelist go about establishing a theme? How necessary is it that the writer intentionally shape a story around a theme? For some time I’ve suspected that the best writing is more intuitive than intellectual, and that the writer experiences the emergence of the theme exactly as the reader does – slowly, through immersing herself in the images.

We humans are story-telling creatures. For thousands of years, people shared stories in which images were the primary expression of meaning. Our ancestors were comfortable with metaphor and mystery. Then something changed, and I’m not sure exactly how or when, but it seems that now, in the western world, we’ve become so enamored of “facts” that we are no longer comfortable in the world of symbol. Maybe it’s science, or academic or the media, or a mixture of many factors. But it seems that we want to nail down – exactly – what something means. We are driven by the need to be unequivocal about ideas, from politics to science. We want to precisely explain the meaning of an event or a story. We “deconstruct” fiction, or have it deconstructed for us, so that we can understand it correctly.

But an image always contains more than a single, identifiable meaning. A metaphor is a window onto more than one landscape. A gesture is both more mysterious and more complete than an idea. We know we’re loved not because someone has told us so, but because we’ve been embraced.

Robert Frost was once asked to explain the “hidden meaning” of his poems. He said, “If I wanted you to know I’d had told you in the poem.” Finding the hidden meanings, finding the theme, isn’t the job of the writer. It’s the job of the literary critic. It’s akin to the task of a fisherman –who must drop a line or a net over the side of a boat and pull a fish into the air. But the novelist’s task is a different one, at once more visceral and more dangerous. The novelist can’t stay in the boat; she must jump all the way in, completely submerge herself in the water. She must swim with the fish.