Puzzling Fiction

I recently read an interesting article where a young boy in 1963, fed up with classroom speculation on literary symbols, wrote letters to some of the most prolific and iconic writers of the time asking them several questions about symbolism in their texts. Some answers are comical, others pedantic, but some of them are memorable and interesting. However, besides some outliers like Ralph Ellison, there seems to be consensus on the fact that direct and implicit symbolism stints creativity.

S. by Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams

For Christmas I received a copy of S. by Doug Dorst and J.J. Abrams. The novel is intricate and tells several different stories at different time periods. The book is not only a great story, but it is a gimmick. From the moment you cut the "library" tape on the box to remove the edition, the reader has started an adventure. A stressful, confusing, dense adventure. The entire novel is a great conceit; the physical book is dressed up as a library book from a fictional university, sporting a dewey decimal call number, library stamps, and appropriate copyright pages for a book published in 1949. The true necessary markings, ISBNs, 2013 copyrights, and Library of Congress subjects are hidden in tiny text beneath the table chock full of real ink stamps from decades of the book being removed from the library. Of course, it's all fake, but it stretches reader imagination and inclusion in the story.

Read S. if for no other reason than to experience it.

However, I digress. The important take away is that a new era of author has emerged. They may have a fancy title like the Romantics, the Modernists, or the Post-Modernists, but that doesn't matter. Writers have begun to cross over into interactive territory. You can read articles on your devices that are enhanced by audio-visual elements. We can download supplementary podcasts to worlds we've fallen in love with. Yet, this isn't the new type of interaction I'm talking about. Videos, songs, and podcasts in electronic novels aren't groundbreaking, they're just new ways to interpret old data.

S. made me think about writing and I started to realize that, at least as I am concerned, I think it's time writing takes a new turn from the article I mentioned above.

I'm a product of the same English classes the kid in the article is protesting. I jested with teachers in high school about the plausibility of some insane symbols, and I've successfully argued for a symbol I  found in a narrative that was made up. I've spent much of my education chasing and finding symbols. That chase, that desire to find the pieces to the author's puzzle has also transformed my writing.

I write like I analyze. I write like I'm writing a game. I think of writing as a game of I-Spy. For the tech-savvy, a point and click adventure. I want my readers to drink in everything and I want them to feel the same elation I felt when I discovered that clever use of symbolism or language in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

I'm not writing novels, I'm writing mysteries, but they're not the capers of Conan Doyle's day. No, these mysteries occur in the real world, on the page you hold, not in the world I've crafted. Follow the clues I'm telegraphing and you might just get the jump on the action. But it's not cheating. It's piecing it together one chunk of narrative at a time. Everything is a symbol, and everything means something. The fun part is discovering what that symbol really means.

S. is one of the best examples of full reader immersion and the mystery of the novel makes me want to read it again and again to try to unravel and understand one more bit of it. Reading something more than once is an interesting thing to explore: why do we return, what does that return teach us, do we see something we never saw again? Perhaps for another time.

Magritte's "La Trahison des Images" ("The Treachery of Images") (1928-9).

Yet, the power of S. lies in the powerful handle of writing as a craft. Dorst and Abrams are able to tell one story in the margins, another in the marginalia, and the reader is tasked with making that story whole. The novel, in essence, is a massive jigsaw puzzle with no edge pieces and no box art to use as a guide.

It's another tremor in movement towards the gameification of the written word. It's a text adventure in paper form. It is, in fact, not a pipe.