Subtracting ... explanation
This month I'm allowing space, mystery, uncertainty
There is a certain exhilaration that can take place inside an artist when she chooses not to explain.
In the creative act, I mean, not in ordinary life, although I see the possibility for liberation there too. The injunction to ‘never apologise, never explain’ has always seemed completely foreign to me. An appealing command perhaps, but also absurd, a clear impossibility. Even if you thought it was ethically permissible, or theoretically possible, how on earth might one act upon it? I didn’t know.
But now, in fiction writing, I do.
My latest novel, Stone Yard Devotional, is constructed of things unexplained. If it is not too unseemly to make such an assessment of one’s own work, I think it is my best book, largely because I found a way to leave behind the need to explain. Which is also to say, the need to be liked or approved of.
Equating approval with ‘explanation’ is plainly ridiculous – my own love of art often depends on the work’s inherent sense of mystery, the maker’s gift of space in which I can make my own meaning from it. And nothing is more tedious than an over-explainer. Nevertheless, I realise that this equation has lurked inside me for a long time. It’s partly a people-pleasing impulse, some subconscious need not to inconvenience anyone by causing the slightest confusion. But more soberingly, I now see the explaining impulse as the desire for control of my reader. My describing a vase, for example, so precisely that there can be no mental picture available to the reader except the exact one I give them, may not be a gift to that reader. It may be a straitjacket.
Letting go this need to control is a liberation. But still, leaving space and gaps can feel to the beginner non-explainer somehow cavalier, irresponsible even. It also feels kind of exciting. It might even feel like growing up as an artist.
It seems to have taken me a long time to understand this.
As I began to write Stone Yard Devotional, my tenth book – which eventuated haltingly over several years, interrupted by pandemic lockdowns, the writing of a different book, then a significant physical and psychological crisis – I came across this Yeats remark1, which became my touchstone for the book:
Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.
After each of those disruptive crises, the appeal of Yeats’ declaration grew stronger and stronger. By my final draft, I’d decided that absolutely nothing of the teaching, crying out, condescending, explanatory impulse was allowed to remain in my book. Others may disagree, of course, that I’ve achieved this. But of all my novels I think it is nearest to the mark.
One of the things that makes non-explaining exhilarating is the knowledge that quite a lot of people won’t like you for doing it (and they will let you know, believe me). Causing confusion or annoyance, resentment or boredom or anger in your reader because you refuse to explain even quite basic things about a story can feel, well, rude. That is, until after thirty seconds of thinking about it you realise that plenty of readers have been confused, annoyed, made resentful, bored or angry by almost everything you’ve ever written anyway. I’ve always believed it’s a sense of risk that gives a work of art its central energy, and it’s the same with this one. Risking deliberately dissatisfying readers creates a frisson of propulsive energy. Luckily, I’ve found that while some are annoyed by a lack of explanation, there are plenty of others who, like me, value it a great deal. A common remark in the generous notes I’ve received about my book is the reader’s appreciation of its ‘space’ – a space that seems to fill with the chance to examine their own experience and thoughts and feelings. Some have told me it is the first time they’ve done this particular kind of examining.
Always, though, the challenge for the writer is to walk the line between needless explanation resulting in dreary or condescending prose, and the opposite extreme: a kind of portentousness or insider smugness that can come from calculated obfuscation. Even worse, sometimes deliberate non-explanation is simply a pretentious mask for a lack of substance. Less is more, sure – except surprisingly often, it is actually less.
How do you know when you’re guilty of this portentousness, or you have the balance right? You don’t, maybe, except through a genuine investigation of your writerly motives; via responses from trusted editors or readers; and finally by a decision about which kind of reader you’re willing to disappoint.
What’s wrong with explanation anyway?
Nothing. The word is shorthand, I guess, for an impulse that manifests in various ways. When I think of my own prose, ‘explanation’ is related to a turgidity that comes from all sorts of things:
lumpen back story
needless transitions
too much detail
too many adjectives
justification
evasiveness
laborious logistics & movement from one space to another
throat-clearing, lack of clarity about what I really think
‘pleasing’ fakery / dishonesty
overdescription
general textual busyness
literalness & linearity
reliance on ‘reality’ instead of imagination
timidity
Over-explanation is a form of clutter. When I first began writing classes in my youth, a popular exercise was to write a paragraph describing something, and then, Hemingway-style, remove all adjectives except colour. While I have never stuck to this practice for long (as soon as I’m told something is verboten in artmaking, I have an adolescent impulse to disobey the rules, which in this case might cause me to jam eleven adjectives together in a row), I still marvel sometimes at how much more authority a paragraph can command once its adjectives and adverbs are excised.
Another beginner exercise is to write a patch of work, then remove the first and last lines / sentences / paragraphs. In Crossing to Safety Wallace Stegner quoted Chekhov on this, saying ‘it is in the beginnings and endings of stories that we are most tempted to lie’. Might they also be where are most tempted to justify, and explain?
It may be a beginner exercise, but that doesn’t mean one always learns beginner lessons well. Recently I had the great good fortune of a commission to write about the iconic sculptor and artist Louise Bourgeois. I had a compulsion to link the work of Bourgeois with Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which I’d recently re-read. I was anxious about justifying this relationship (who was I to do this!?), and laboured to make the link plausible. I showed an early draft of my piece to a writer friend who advised me to remove the first two paragraphs – surprise surprise, they were precisely those attempting to make an explanatory link between these two iconic artists. On her advice I chucked those paragraphs, and now the piece begins simply: ‘For greatness to be possible, wrote Virginia Woolf …’
The relief - and the authority - that arrived with that deletion! Imagine it: instead of anxiously justifying my idea before saying it, I could – just say it. Instead of explaining why these two great artists could plausibly be paired, I could just pair them.
In fact I should have known this from the start, because Bourgeois herself was telling me with every work in the show. In a familiar clip floating about online, indeed, Bourgeois says, ‘A work of art doesn’t have to be explained. If you say, what does this mean? Well, if you do not have any feeling about this, I cannot explain it to you.’
Freedom from the obligation to explain has always seemed to me the enviable prerogative of visual artists. But perhaps even they are subject to the propensity to over-explain. What would that look like in a painting, say? Too much detail? Too much realism? Too much paint, even?
I have heard the painter Jude Rae say that overworking a canvas can result in an irreparable ‘congestion’, a word that seems useful for describing an over-explained piece of writing too. She has also used the word ‘indeterminacy’ about her work, which perhaps might encompass what I’m talking about: deliberately leaving a canvas somehow between states, not one thing or another - and crucially, intentionally unclear in some way. You can follow Jude on Instagram not only for her utterly beautiful paintings but her sophisticated commentary on what she’s doing as she makes them. I learn a lot from her.
Subtract explanation, add space
One of the great things about ‘not explaining’ is that the space left in its place fills with other kinds of energy that can have their own powerful effects. I read recently of the Finnish video / performace artist Pilvi Takala, who, by inserting herself into ordinary capitalist spaces (Disneyland, shopping malls, corporate trade shows, offices) and doing unexpected things without rational explanation, uses ‘awkwardness’ as a tool to discomfit and challenge the unwitting people around her. Her best known work “The Trainee” (2008) had her go undercover as an intern for a month in the Helsinki office of Deloitte, the multinational consulting firm. She did nothing but stare into the distance or ride the elevator up and down the building for hours.
The cringe-inducing awkwardness experienced by those watching these quite passive breaches of protocol can escalate quickly into irritation or even anger, it seems - in the process revealing a great deal about us and our societies.
But the space left by not explaining doesn’t have to be filled with tension. It can be filled with peace, or beauty – or something more obscure, of which we may only ever be half-conscious. I’ve just learned of the Japanese concept of ma, for example, described variously as a pause, an emptiness, an interval. A space between.
Studio Ghibli filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki describes ma as moments of deliberate emptiness. In an interview with Roger Ebert he clapped his hands several times and then said,
"The time in between my clapping is ma. If you just have non-stop action with no breathing space at all, it's just busyness. But if you take a moment, then the tension building in the film can grow into a wider dimension. If you just have constant tension at 80 degrees all the time you just get numb."
In Stone Yard Devotional I included quite a few moments of deliberate ‘emptiness’ – seemingly random, almost static images: a woman scooping up a pile of clean sheets after unpegging them, or a pelican landing on a dam, or some sheep suddenly lifting their heads and galloping off for no discernible reason. At the time of writing I didn’t know why I wanted these moments, but I knew I wanted them. In hindsight I think it was both a rhythmic and an aesthetic, maybe even an ethical instinct: a way of deliberately slowing the reader and (unconsciously) ‘training’ them to grow accustomed to the gaps, the silences, the unexplained moment.
Perhaps it was a way of alerting us to our instant-gratification addiction – we want whatever it is we want (action, satisfaction, understanding, knowledge) now. I can only see this in retrospect though. When I did it, I simply laid those moments down, and hoped my unconscious mind had some deeper reason for selecting and placing them where they eventually landed in the book.
My favourite works of art have always been those that trust us to take our time, to make our own meaning – one of the reasons I find that most visual ‘artist statements’, and many visual art guides, so depressing. They so often labour to ascribe pseudo-intellectual logic to something that should, if it works, speak for itself at a deeper level than language allows. In the attempts to explain, they close over that beautiful space in which the viewer must be allowed to make their own ‘new logics’ from it.
Photographer Bill Henson puts things elegantly, in the transcript of this ancient interview with The Music Show’s Andrew Ford on ABC Radio National. Henson attributes to Nobel laureate Elias Canetti the assertion that ‘The hopeful things in every system are those things that have been left out.’ And he praises poets Frank O’Hara and John Ashbury for their writing on art.
“…it's the fact that they create, if you like, a parallel universe, so that they're not in fact trying to nail anything. They're suggesting, they're constantly suggesting. It's the suggestive potential of the medium that is the thing that takes us all on our individual journeys whether we're sitting in the concert hall or standing in the gallery.”
The suggestive potential, deliberate emptiness, indeterminacy – all of this flows into my favourite thing in any aesthetic enterprise: mystery.
In hindsight, this seems to have been relatively easy for me to mix into a novel about solitude, spiritual malaise and retreat. But as I begin my new book – a novel that so far looks and feels like a very urban, entirely contemporary work of realism, I want to somehow keep these precious stones in my writer’s pockets.
Will it be possible? We shall see.
This month I’ve been …
Reading
Listening to
Seeing
Eating
Image credit: imaginima, via Istock
THE CUTTING OF AN AGATE, William Butler Yeats, The Macmillan Company, New York 1912
This is such a generous insight, Charlotte. Thank you x
Beautifully articulated. I write mainly for children so there is an extra layer of second-guessing when it comes to how much to explain, not to mention a chain of adults who will have an opinion on whether I've explained enough or too much before it reaches the intended reader. In my early days as a writer I received "too obscure" as a criticism but I sometimes wonder if back then I was writing more freely. A pile of novels later I'm finding some balance. And like you I've enjoyed taking risks with recent books and thinking 'to hell with it, I'll never please everyone'.