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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Adam Phillips, in his book Terrors and Experts, describes symptoms, from a psychoanalytic point of view, as secret ways of asking for something. At one time, my daughter had been full of secrets: her longing to be a separate person, and her terror of that longing; her desperation to take charge of herself, and her fear of being in charge; her wish to shake me loose and begin growing up, begin to be on her own—and her horror of growing up, being on her own, and losing me. These secrets revealed themselves through metaphors—for what are such symptoms but metaphors?—that she herself didn’t understand . She wept every time she had to throw anything away; she was desperate to make everything come out even—a process she called “catching up”; and she talked nonstop, without taking a breath, without editing, without pause, without any ability to stop herself, even when she began to cry—she would talk and cry at the same time—terrified that if she didn’t tell me what had passed through her mind it would mean that it had never passed through her mind. Now, a year later, assured that she was physically healthy, I was ready to look at the rogue symptom (as I had begun to think of it) as a metaphor. It is an article of faith that novelists and poets (or the writers of “literary essays” like this one) will turn to metaphor when they reach a point at which language, “ordinary” language, fails them—when ordinary words that will tell the reader what something is without invoking anything outside it won’t do the job that needs to be done, or it would take so many words to do a job that metaphor can do quickly, more efficiently, much more precisely. As rich as language is (and for whom is it richer than for a writer?), there are times when it seems to us that we are attempting to describe something that will require more precision than “mere” words can capture (something too small for the naked eye to see). But words are all we have (not microscopes, not 108 Seeing Things telescopes, not electrodes to connect one brain to another so we can show our readers exactly what we mean), and so we make use of words in a way that transcends their ordinary (even their most elegant, even their most beautiful but still “ordinary”) use: we use them to sketch a picture of what we are seeing, feeling, thinking, experiencing. It is almost exactly like this, we say. You know what this is, yes? So now just imagine that this is that. That is what a metaphor does on the page. In life—the unconscious is the artist making metaphor. Symptoms are not only secret ways of asking for something but are ways of telling us—the world—exactly what it feels like to be oneself . And that too leads to a question: Will you understand what it means to be me? This is, of course (I say “of course” but I realize that this is not an “article of faith,” since my own students so often resist the assumption ), what a novelist does when a character comes alive on the page. Let us say, then, that it is my article of faith. For a character to be real—to move the novel’s readers to believe in him or her, to allow them to become “lost” in a book the way they hope to and to experience the world through that character’s consciousness—we must understand what it means to be that character. This is not so much a matter of our seeing what characters do, or what they encounter as they go about their lives, but being able to see what they do with their experiences: how they process the world as they encounter it. In my teaching, I talk about this as the protagonist ’s “experience of the experience”; I talk about the experience itself—whatever that may be: hearing bad news, running into an old friend on the street, walking through a busy airport, getting slapped across the face—as “raw material” for our characters. As a writer, what I’m interested in is the psychological, sensory, emotional, and intellectual space between the encountering of the “raw material” of life, and how each of us will take that in and make sense of it. What I want to...
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