Where are we, today? / Supplicants / Preface, Part One

Take that title as a warning - those who don't read the preface of books won't care for this post. I probably wouldn't read it, myself, if I hadn't written it. But if you're the sort of person who likes to know what somebody is up to as he's writing something, then maybe you'll enjoy this. If so, I'm flattered by your interest, or would be if I knew about it. At this point, I don't even know if I have a readership.





Where are we? Much behind where we should be, courtesy of my hunt and peck typing in large part, I'm afraid. The chapters I uploaded yesterday were written last september. The good news is that I was outside as I was writing them, by hand, leaving me with a massive amount of transcription to do, but with a durable copy and the pleasant memory of warm sunny days that turned into warm, friendly nights. The bad news is that the very friendly and more than slightly attractive dark featured barrista from Lousiana who commended me on my bravery, for sitting outside in over 90 degree weather, has vanished from the Pig. She will be missed by many of us, even those who she kept calling "sir".

I'm up to mini-chapter 29 of what one might call the pre-rough draft of Supplicants, a story which I mentioned in my last post. As I explain on the homepage, this story started out as an attempt on my part to redo a translation of a story by Kafka called "The Supplicant", but it didn't remain that for long. The characters in the Kafka stories are enigmas to the reader and perhaps even to each other, and I suspect that might be much of the point of the story - that in a society in which people don't feel free to speak, that communication breaks down quickly, and one's very sense of self might very well be lost in the artificial solitude that results, and much of one's sanity, with it. If the dialog seems a little incoherent, this is only because the characters are more than a little incoherent, themselves, and perhaps with good reason.

I won't claim that I can write better than Kafka or any other author whose name has come down to us through History, but I will say that I can probably write better than a fair number of translators can; what is in that little yellow paperback that I've been peering into have not been the words of Kafka, himself, but those of an obscure academic. Kafka's voice almost certainly can't survive the process of translation, even if his ideas can. So, I decided to write my own paraphrase of the translation, which is itself nothing but a paraphrase to begin with, and as I did so, felt the urge to play a little game. I decided to let one hear the thoughts of the characters, let one wander into their mental worlds, see the events from their point of view.

The paraphase quickly became a story written about a story, in which I tried to make the seemingly inexplicable words and actions of the characters be seen as understandable as they almost would have to be, from the viewpoints of the characters, themselves. I also decided to place this story on "Hiding in Plain Sight", instead of on my book review site, feeling that Kafka was far too Postmodern in spirit to be a good fit for that site, with its more traditional orientation. Having thus escaped the need to distort Kafka's intentions by making him into a traditionalist (or pre-modernist, if you prefer), I found that I needed to distort them in another, by transplanting the events of the story into a city that, if never named, greatly resembles what present day Chicago would become, after it had been let to rot a while longer than it already has. There are no secret police in Chicago, though there are corrupt cops and plenty of human rights violations, so Jack's - I'd already given names to the characters, Kafka having left them unnamed, in a way that fit characters that were being reduced to being Ciphers by the lives they led, I would think - Jack's motivations needed to be altered for them to make some kind of sense, even from Jack's point of view.

At some point, soon after, I simply accepted that this was going to be a new story. Bits and pieces of Kafka's prose (in very old translation) still exist in the text I have uploaded, albeit no more than would be allowed under fair use even if the translation hadn't already passed into the public domain, but still, enough that my work still isn't entirely my work - a point which I acknowledge in the introduction to the story. Thus the failure of this to even be a rough draft - that won't exist until I've replaced the last bits of the translation, which served as a sort of scaffold on which my rickety new edifice was being erected - have been replaced by prose that I've written myself, in its entirety. I'm not sure that this will make the story entirely better, at least in the short run, but it will make it more unambiguously mine.

There is a satisfaction in that, even if it is a vain one which the far better storytellers of generations past would have viewed with a little scorn, feeling that I had placed my ego before my very amateur art. Perhaps so, but one does have to do what what can feel at least a little bit comfortable doing, and I will be leaving the excised passages on pages that will be linked to from the revised drafts. In principle, if one wishes to spend the time doing so - not that I could imagine why one would want to - one could easily, and without doubts about the validity of one's results, reconstruct the original from the notes I'll leave visible. My provider grants me unlimited bandwidth and storage space, so I would have no reason to remove anything from public view, once I've uploaded, other than maybe some search engine considerations (which I don't picture arising) and the desire to create a mystique about my work, one which even I couldn't greet with anything other than laughter.

These are writing exercises that you're seeing my upload, at least for the first few drafts - nothing more - and I'll let you see all of the drafts. If, as you look at the latest draft, you think "Joe, you ruined it - you should have left it as it was" - you'll still be able to read the story as it was, and link to it. As long as Freewebsites / Artshost lets my site stay up, that link will almost certainly not rot.





As I write this, mini-chapter 29 is the most recent to have been uploaded, and here I'll stop, for a while - stop uploading, not stop writing. Looking over chapter 30, I found that the characters seemed to have enjoyed far more familiarity with each other than the history between them, already seen on the pages of the pre-rough draft, would justify. Some events need to be stuck in between, before I start uploading again, a few intervening mini-chapters, with mini-chapter 30 becoming mini-chapter 50, maybe. These "minichapters" are generally only a few pages long - we're bouncing from one point of view to another fairly quickly - but the plot seems to be breaking into a few natural pieces, and I do have some idea of where I'll be marking the beginnings of the real, full fledged chapters, which I'll leave broken into marked sections.

I feel those are absolutely necessary, in the new story I've built out of the fragments of somebody else's. What you'll find altogether absent in the story is the omniscent narrator - if one slips in style from a would-be screwball comedy as Pat Jones narrates, to something else altogether as another character is heard, this is not because I see the story as a screwball comedy, myself, and then change my mind. It's because the events are what they are, and Jones has imposed his own narrative on events that don't necessarily justify it - his view of reality being filtered through his own expectations and prejudices. Anybody seeing a postmodern point of view of my own in that is greatly mistaken - I very strongly believe in the existence of an objective reality, existing outside of our own points of view. What I deny is the direct accessibility of that reality to us in anything other than a distorted approximation, limited by our own unexamined prejudices and capacities.

The redo of a translation has since drifted, without serious resistence from me, until it has been changed almost beyond recognition into a story of its own. I embrace this. One could do far worse than choose Kafka as an influence, which is what I'm doing by using one of his stories as a starting point. If the Pat Jones narratives reflect an influence that I wish I didn't have, resulting from my careless decision to read a book I don't think very highly of, that influence is there whether I want it to be or not, and all I can do is worth through it, until it is as well buried as possible, and see what good I can extract from it as I do. It's therapy, of a sort.

In subsequent drafts, I will be trying to give each character more of a voice of his or her own, mainly by studying the people I meet in a variety of locations and borrowing some of their mannerisms, and working them into the text, to make what one hears sound more natural. I will be working on improving my choice of reading material - really, buying and reading a bad book just because I overheard somebody saying that I was just like one of the characters in it (which I am not) is just sad. Not vanity in this case, just curiosity, but I should have more self-control than that.

The girl, who in Kafka is mentioned only in passing, is already a character in her own right (Meg); all chapters involving the girl are purely of my own making, as are any that involve any character other than Jack or John. Those who know me personally might hazard a guess as to which of my ex-girlfriends Meg is modeled after. Overall, I'd say none of them. Maybe one can see each of those girlfriends in one of Meg's reactions or another, but if so, only because each of those women had a major impact on the person I became, and I created Meg.

An abrupt end to a post, but time draws short, so I'll pick this up later, with the same built-in warning of navel gazing tedium to come built into the title of the post.