To Be Undone: The Art of Mystery in Fiction

We fiction writers talk a lot—for good reason, and to good end—about character, point of view, dialogue, scene, and summary, but in my experience, we don't talk a lot about mystery. It's not easy to talk about something that is a whispered invitation, a siren song, a flickering light in the distance. It's not easy to talk about something that, even as it encourages us to seek it, resists explanation. Something that wafts like smoke around the edges of the page. Especially when there is, in our culture, an alarming and increasing intolerance for ambiguity, for Keats's famous "negative capability," in which, as he wrote, one is "capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

But if stories are one of the ways we make sense of the world, they are also how we experience whatever doesn't make sense, whatever cannot be fully understood. Stories are how we stand in the presence of mystery. If mystery, the genre, is about finding the answers, then mystery, that elusive yet essential element of fiction, is about finding the questions. In Chekhov's famous letter to a friend, he wrote, "You are right to demand that an artist take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you confuse two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author." Mystery in fiction resides in those carefully articulated questions, and in the unparaphrasable content of a story or a novel, the experienced meaning.

Mystery in fiction has some things in common with the mystical experiences William James describes in the lectures he delivered in 1901 and 1902, which became The Varieties of Religious Experience. In them, he lays out four characteristics of the mystical experience: ineffability, a noetic quality, transiency, and what he describes as passivity (an initial effort must be made but then "the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance"), which is what a reader does when she enters into a fictional world. In the end, James's project is not to minimize or dismiss conceptual processes or rational ones but to give value and credence to affective and visceral experience, which is what a writer does when he fashions a fictional world out of words.

I find the most moving parts of James's Varieties of Religious Experience to be the personal testimony of people struggling to give voice to rare instances in which they were shaken free from the cage of self. And my favorite: "I am undone." Slippery as religious experience, mystery involves an undoing that yields wonder.

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Several summers ago, I found myself pushing through hot, thick New York City air on 23rd Street in Chelsea. I was on my way to be hypnotized. It was a pivotal point in my life—a long relationship was ending; life was supposed to have gone one way and it was about to go somewhere else entirely; there was about to be sadness, anger, guilt, the sensation of teetering on the edge of the earth with the possibility of, at any time, spinning off into the ether. The usual fare.

I was on my way to be hypnotized, and then photographed in that hypnotic state. A friend of a friend, a photographer whose work I admired, was working on a project that involved photographing people for whom imagination plays a central role—artist-, dancer-, writer-types. My friend had offered my name; at the time, I was working on a novel inspired by a nineteenth-century French psychiatric case study, which involved hypnosis, the medical intervention du jour, and the birth of photography as, among other things, a forensic tool for reading illness and criminality on the body. The photographer asked me to bring an important moment from my life, something to help me focus while being hypnotized. What felt most lacking in my life right then was wonder, and so I brought with me, like an ice cube in danger of melting in my hand before I arrived at...