The holographic puzzle box theory of fiction pt. III
I want to watch you be free
My third year in Iowa, I got to teach an advanced fiction seminar. My students would be the absolute best in the English Department, I was told. They would make my job easy. If only, babe.
I don’t know what it was about this particular batch of students, but they hated everything I assigned. And, to be fair, I assigned some pretty “difficult” reading. We started with Garielle Lutz and Barry Hannah week 1—kind of a bold move on my part, I guess. But I had been advised to challenge these students, and I had assembled a semester-long study on point of view: What does style imply about consciousness? How do omissions hint at characters’ assumptions, emotional histories? How can we read everything on the page as a decision and every decision as evocative of a certain way of being a human?
But these students … well. They found every assigned text either offensive, depressing, or “just weird.” They dismissed the protagonists as “crazy” and “on drugs.” (Which, to be fair, in some cases they were. But if that’s where your reading begins and ends, well, there isn’t much more to say.) It was baffling, trying to get them to engage and discuss the readings because it seemed very much that they encountered the whiff of the unfamiliar and stopped at the perimeter of the story instead of venturing inside.
If you couldn’t tell, I found it difficult not to take this disinterest personally. And I can now understand why: in the rural world where I grew up, I was a complete mystery to people. And in an insular world, mystery = threat. To me, mystery = magic, beauty, and delight. A gift! You can see the disconnect here: you give the best gift you can imagine, and it’s treated as a threat. It’s a very particular and painful form of rejection. Every time my students refused to engage with an assigned reading, I felt like they were refusing to engage with me, my worldview, everything.
Here’s the mismatch: They were reading for moral lessons. They were reading for familiarity and the capacity to relate to a character. I was giving them The Hour of the Star and A Little Lumpen Novelita and The Palm Wine Drinkard. Partway through the semester, I realized that my job was to teach them that there are different ways of reading, and things got a little bit better. But I continued to wonder: How is it that I can bring in the books that I find the most beautiful, affirming, alive relics of humanness and my students find them so distasteful? What are my default positions about art which make it possible for me to regard an admittedly “dark” story as a form of transcendence?
The holographic puzzle box theory of fiction is this: We tell stories to engage with the hidden truth that consciousness creates the world. A story is an experimental field in which we can access our role in creating what we see—but indirectly so. Reality is a kind of fiction; fiction is a puzzle box hidden within that fiction. We love stories because they allow us to remember something we have very carefully hidden from ourselves: that the power of the writer to create a story is in essence also how our consciousness constructs our lives. One of fiction’s pleasures is just the simple fact of things happening. (And not necessarily happening nicely to nice people.) Bank robberies! Letters slid under the door and intercepted by exactly the wrong person! A stranger arrives in town! Any event is evidence of the echo effect rendered by our consciousness. Or in other words, waking life is a kind of dream, and fiction is a dream within that dream.
The process of playing with the puzzle box itself is the joy and purpose; the little brass ball rattling away inside isn’t really the point of the thing, and you know this because once you’ve solved the puzzle box, you put it back together and play with it some more.
Dreams are not responsible for making us better people. They are responsible for being dreams—which means that they exist as fields of potentiality in which things hidden from consciousness can echo and rhyme with each other in a way which is pleasing even if it is unsettling.
The moral tale is a way of making sense: events and challenges exist to warn you about events and challenges. The hero’s quest is a way of making sense: events and challenges exist to develop the hero. The trauma plot is a way of making sense: cruelty, suffering, numbness, inertia, repetition, dissociation, and virtually any other kind of narrative irregularity exist as a reverberation of trauma. Hurt people hurt people, etc. And the holographic puzzle box is yet another way of making sense: Everything is a dharma, and all dharmas should be regarded as dreams.*
Multiverse narratives are a literal rendering of this idea that a story is a field of potentiality. They offer a structure in which a dazzling array of images and worlds and turns can be made legible as the true nature of reality. The plot of such a story is about how a character navigates that dazzling array, which decisions they make when presented with infinite variations. And, because there’s a hero and a world in need of saving, they also gratify other sense-making impulses by showing us how the hero transcends limitations. There’s a lesson. (The lesson, by the way is always love.) It’s a more approachable form of holographic puzzle box because it begins by saying, hey, it’s not like this is real or anything … but what if the entire world was an infinite soul?
When I was a kid, I had some edutainment chemistry book that came with a page of stickers. Each sticker said I’M MADE OF CHEMICALS! and the gag was that you could put these stickers on anything and the statement would be true. I always think about this when someone asks Is it real? I used to have a gigantic fake diamond ring—is it real? Yes, it’s a real fake diamond. Is your hair really that blonde? Yes, because I pay someone to bleach it. I know I’m being a bit obtuse here; what people are actually asking is more like: Is that thing what it claims to be? But there’s the problem: The claim about what a thing is or purports to be comes from the person looking, and not from the thing itself.
This is why I have a tattoo that says NOTHING IS REAL/MAGIC IS REAL, by the way.
I have no idea why some readers consider mystery an invitation and others consider it a threat, an insult, a hassle. For a long time I made the mistake of trying to make sense to those readers in the same way I tried to make sense to the people I grew up around. There’s a thread of resentment in my thoughts about all of this: I want to be believed. I wanted the people I grew up with to look a little deeper instead of assuming I was a brainiac who was trying to make them feel bad about themselves. Conflating those two things has made it feel too risky to really embody what I believe on the page because it seems like the stakes are social rejection.
But maybe some of my urgency also comes from passion: I have found it infinitely more enjoyable to live curiously in a curious world, to play with the puzzle box and enjoy the dream, than to approach what I’m seeing with despair and self-pity. I read to be surprised. I read because I love to watch other writers being free. Stories can be a test site for cultivating curiosity and experiencing the sublime logic and non-logic of the anima mundi. I have no desire to supplant all the other theories of fiction—I read for entertainment, information, distraction, lessons, and human insight, too. But also, the dream. The dream! What does it want from you? Why do you recognize its humming?
And I’ve reached the point where theorizing a moment more about dreams becomes its own hell. So I have no choice but to eat a huge bowl of tomatoes and cucumbers with scallions and red pepper flakes and oil and salt and vinegar. Because these little tiny cucumbers they have at Costco, which are so fucking determined to go bad the instant I buy them, are not going to get the best of me this time! It is finally green again in Pittsburgh. The carpenter bees outside the bedroom window are so loud that I woke up thinking they were the gas company workers digging up the line all down our street. March is when things start making sense again. April is when you start eating potato chips and leaving your winter coat at home. And May is time for party rock. (And June is time to record an album on a 4-track in your bedroom. And July, you get the blue liquid eyeliner and red lipstick, white T-shirt and rhinestone sunglasses. ….) The weirdest thing! I’ve suddenly begun listening almost entirely to ’90s deep house compilations. I think: this must be the music god listens to, right?
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*This phrasing borrows from and is indebted to the second Lojong slogan: “Regard all dharmas as dreams.”