Afterwords: Iceland
On first-person narrators who lie to themselves and Philip's describing "yoga" when witnessing his wife in trauma.
THE UNRELIABLE NARRATOR
I am at the quarter-way mark through this project. I have published twenty-one stories with four in the wings. I was warned that the stories would “start to talk to each other.” At least five already have. A story-telling pattern has come into focus.
I’m fascinated with unreliable narrators.
And not just unreliable narrators: unreliable first-person narrators. I’m not thinking of Agatha Christie novels, where the narrator turns out to be the killer. At least so far, I’m not interested in narrators lying to the reader. I’m interested in them lying to themselves, where “we see it and they don’t.”
Examples: Backgammon has a lawless teenage narrator oblivious to his impact on a girl he doesn’t even realize he loves. There is a child ghost in Howl who can’t bring himself to use the first-person, in Philadelphia Freedom a teenage girl who writes love letters to herself from the man who has assaulted her. In Liner Notes last month, a divorcé wrote his ex-wife a bitter letter that unintentionally confirms her accusations.
Clearly, I’m riveted by the integrity gap between the stories we tell about ourselves and a parallel, objective truth emerging for the reader between the lines. Stories told by unreliable narrators come streaming out of that gap like woes from Pandora’s Box.
Maybe we’re all riveted by the disconnect. Who hasn’t found themselves in a conversation with a friend or acquaintance who tells us a story about a break-up or a work incident where we don’t find ourselves siding with the other party? Don’t you want to tell someone else about the blind spot you were being enrolled in?
Why is this so fascinating?
My stories are arguing that there is a disconnect between who we tell ourselves we are, and who we demonstrably are. They are demonstrating an engine of moral mischief, and sometimes of moral horror. A character — person — animated by a lie, or a limited self-awareness, is a loose cannon. Gaps and breakdowns in integrity and self-knowledge are a root of evil.
That my stories take place, fairly consistently now, on a sexual battlefield is because the disconnect between truth and reality is so pronounced there and the interpretation of residual damage so slippery. The stakes are stratospheric when moral confusion is sexual.
The evidence is overwhelming that there’s a gap between what many, most or all of us tell ourselves about our sexuality and what might be visible to others. I believe there’s at least a sliver of daylight between the two with everyone. From that gap arise all manners of mischief and catastrophic human toll.
That’s the boiler steam from the engine room.
Unreliable first-person narrators are a way at getting right inside of it.
Iceland started with the simplest idea.
Some couple would travel to Norway where one of them would show the other snow for the first time. This pivoted to the idea of a threesome breaking apart over this tiny moment of intimacy between two of the three. From there, the idea grew of one character gradually becoming a third-wheel in the sexual arrangements. This ramped up further for it to involve a marriage, where the relationship split on those sexual fault lines.
Stakes and events, but not a story yet. I kept on.
Then I imagined the aggrieved as a deeply passively-aggressive character in this scenario as a husband who felt himself marginalized. He’d milk these grievances for years, demonstrating his sad story to the others, cataloguing the slights, stoking the infernos of self-pity. Aggrieved victims evangelizing their sorrow scare me, particularly lies about agency, desire and choices.
And that’s all very painful and sad and possibly interesting, but, to my mind, it still wasn’t properly a story. These were characters and situations. If it was just an account of three miserable people, it wouldn’t be enough.
But it’s a story the moment we see daylight between what we’re being told and what we’re witnessing. When our relationship with the narrator starts to falter, we can feel the car starting to slide. Somebody’s story about what is actually happening has to go sideways. Bad shit is happening in real-time, and it is in direct proportion to the scale of the deceit.
A great engine of human mischief starts to turn over in the boiler room, and we are actively being enrolled in a story of innocence and victimhood.
In many ways, this is a story about the reader, which is what makes it doubly fascinating to me. Does the reader buy the “victim’s” story? Do they think, horribly, that there is comeuppance in the final scene? Do they take everything at face value from Philip, possibly to avoid the moral horror of it?
These were miserable characters in Iceland: manipulative, deceitful, self-serving, cruel, and spending time with them in the bedroom and elsewhere was a slog, but, I believe, seeing the world from inside the deluded mind of Philip, of being dragged into his narrative has value. Similarly, re-examining all of our individual victim stories about our lives has value. Even when they are subtle, especially when they are subtle. The trajectory of even the smallest deceits are worrisome.
But my decisions writing this were a gamble that you’d read closely, start to suspect Philip, fall out with him, and ultimately see his crime for what it was.
For those of you who stuck with Iceland, thanks for reading to the bitter end. Forgive me for not wrestling down the demon in front of you and naming it, instead for forcing you to tackle the crime on your own. I know that I didn’t label the crime to make it safer to read — or explicitly disassociate myself from the narrator until this post — but I wanted to create a face-off with depravity in both word and deed. That meant leaving both reader and writer exposed in service of the story.
Life continually forces us into face-offs with depravity. We must do our best to recognize them for what they are and address them in ourselves. It is, as Philip knows, far easier to settle on one’s own narrative than to challenge it.
We can choose to see “yoga,” when we are witnessing trauma.
Iceland, in the end, is less about sexuality than it is about moral courage.
WHAT’S AHEAD
Gentler stories ahead: a bird and a tree; a best man; a man and dog; then a different man and a different dog; and, very possibly an untitled, eleven-word piece of micro-fiction next month. I’m not sure I can squeeze any more words out of my micro-tale and still have it work, but there’s time to compress.
After reading this, you will not be surprised that that eleven-word story has a character with a disconnect between his story of himself and the impact he had on others. He’s the briefest unreliable narrator I could fit into the collection.
Till next Sunday, 9:00am.