Essay Submission for the Millions

Keyhole Factory Factory - a submission to the Millions by William Gillespie

The review of my novel Keyhole Factory in the American Reader brought color to my cheeks. It was a great review—not necessarily in the sense of saying my book was great—but in being thoughtful, researched, and well-written, and raising worthy critiques. If I were to enter into dialog with this review, I would question the reviewer’s tendency, in describing unconventional narrative or typographic form, to use words like “hijinx,” instead of “new approach” or even “innovation.” I don’t fault the reviewer; I think this biased language reflects an established (possibly valid) distrust of what, in the current skirmishes, is called “experimental” writing.

The dichotomy between “experimental” and—what would the opposition like to be called? “non-experimental”?—serves neither side. A brave new art mixes established and new elements. Take Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End, which accomplishes the feat of telling an excellent, highly readable, relatable, relevant narrative using an obscure literary technique that shouldn’t work at all—he composes an entire novel in first person plural, having, essentially, no central character. Perec attempts something similar in Things: A Story of the Sixties, using third person plural, but I can tell you that it is tricky to make this technique work well.

In this three-part essay I illuminate three of the explicit writerly experiments I conducted in Keyhole Factory, and the readerly effects I hoped thereby to obtain.

1. Keyhole Factory Factory:
The Unlinked Novel

There is literary magic in parataxis, disjuncture, elision, non-sequitur. Meaning pours from cracked transitions between adjacent texts. A readerly mind seeking linearity will hallucinate it when it is not spelled out. The power of text to trigger the reader’s heated dream-reflex lurks in obtuse angles between words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters. I am speaking of a sort of ambiguity that is not vagueness, but a condition in which two or more, mutually exclusive things, are both true. “Schrodinger’s, he thought, cat.”

The readerly mind seeks continuity but also category. Books that defy conventional bookseller/librarian taxonomies, when encountered in the wild, can be mind-bending if they seem to simultaneously occupy contradictory categories such as fiction and non-fiction.

I focus here on books that fall between the novel and the collection of short stories. The difference between the novel and book of short stories is whether the individual pieces are to be read as self-contained (that’s all the closure you get) or chapters (this is all likely to be developed and resolved). Compilations versus albums, perhaps, but more like a faux-documentary (Bob Roberts or Kenny), a prank website (whitehouse.net), or the famous Wells/Welles War of the Worlds radio broadcast. In a book falling in an unknown zone between novel and collection of stories, one doesn’t know whether what holds true in one story applies to the others. Unless this is resolved, each story occupies two truths, its own and that of the other stories. In a collection of conventional, realist fiction this might not be as vexing a dilemma, but to presume that in Kafka’s The Penal Colony: Stories and Short Pieces, Gregor Samsa might exist in the same world, perhaps just a hop over the Mediterranean, from In the Penal Colony, would require a bit of expansive imagination to draw an outline around a story universe that contains both these truths.

My favorite example is Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. I am lucky to have had the chance to read the book cold, knowing nothing about it, put onto the title by an authentic word-of-mouth suggestion (before the internet as we know it), unsure even whether Denis Johnson was male (Dennis) or female (Denise). There was at that time no threat of a movie to overwrite my mind’s visual interpretation of the text. Though I am now familiar enough with the author’s career, and a closer inspection of the book shows that it appears critically acclaimed, encrusted with demystifying blurbs, and that most of these misguided stories were actually placed in high-profile journals, I refuse to let go of the innocence that informed my first reading of Jesus’ Son—I refuse to let the author or his industry anywhere near his book; it is mine. It fell, smoking, out of the blackness and landed in my life, no pedigree, the scrawled confessions of an unnamed narrator who had lost count of how many people they were.

Jesus’ Son: This slim, misleadingly-entitled book freaks me out every time I read it. I find it disturbing not for the prurient surface stories of hapless addicts and their eroded morals, nor the deeper level of deceptively stumbling, meticulously elegant poetry-prose, but for the magical fact (I maintain) that it is impossible to prove that these first person stories are or are not all told by the same narrator. There are recurrences of people (Jack Hotel), locations (The Vine), themes (is heroin a theme?), which, along with a consistent and unique literary style, suggest glimpses of a single milieu or even a single point of view. One story’s opening (“The Other Man”) seems to refer to another story’s opening (“Two Men”), but if this is a connection, it doesn’t explain anything.The elusive tease of continuity (my readerly mind seeks) is heightened by a story at the end in which the/an unnamed protagonist, probably male, is in recovery, but far from healed, issues far from resolved. As every story leading up to this ending shows as narrator as or among addicts and alcoholics, the classic addiction-recovery arc is hinted at (though there is never a stated desire for recovery), but this is not about redemption or endings—neither as a book, nor in the individual story fragments—and the final story’s gesture toward closure only confounds.

Judging from the book copy, and of course from the movie, I think it is assumed the stories are all episodes, maybe even sequential, in the life of a single person who does an elided geographical from Iowa to Seattle and points mostly in-between. In the New Work Times, James McManus makes a good case for this interpretation. But whether this book is properly classified as a novel or collection of stories hinges on the wildly unstable premise that these fragments are chapters, not stories, and this/these clearly unreliable narrator/s is/are the same guy (probably a guy), whose name might sometimes (twice) be "Fuckhead" (but this nickname might easily be applied to any number of the sorry lot in this book).

I am not concerned with which interpretation is correct (which one the author would endorse), but with how to create that uncertainty, that magical ambiguity, I felt.

Vertigo. I return to the book over and over to recapture that dizziness. I occupy the intermittent, amnesiac life of this first person and live disconnected memories that might not be my own. Fault lines divide these already seemingly incomplete stories that don’t really “work” in the workshop sense. In this reading, the book might be straight autobiography, deliberate “experimental fiction,” or sheer clumsiness (I forgot to mention my name, where I live, what year it is, how old I am, or whether I am male); the drug-addled narrative presence and idiosyncratic prose offer no promise of authenticity or craftiness, confessional or prevarication, inexperience or competency.

I've heard this sort of book described by one blogger as "linked short stories," but a more fitting description of the effect I relish might be the “unlinked novel.” To quote my other favorite Denis Johnson text, “The silence went on so long it got to be a thing.” The absence of continuity starts to explain more about the story than the recurrences of Jack Hotel or the Vine. This novel is a blackout drunk. The lack of narrative becomes the arc, the poor development is the character, and his inability to identify himself is his identity.

My novel Keyhole Factory wants to breathe in that magic, to be neither a novel nor a book of short stories, but to fall between, where elision or ellipsis between provocative fragments forces the reader’s imagination to mortar story into the gaps. I can’t say whether I succeeded, but I can show how I tried. Though this essay, to my regret, will attempt to demystify a mystical effect I struggled for years to manifest, I hope it is instructive.

2. Keyhole Factory Factory Factory:
Diegetic Consistence

To establish continuity, Keyhole Factory is linked with a narrative map based on the writings and diagrams of fiction pioneer Harry Stephen Keeler. To disestablish or unlink, Keyhole Factory purposefully sets its stories, each told through a different character, in a far-flung variety of narrative forms. Some are unique, some are conventional. One technique I used to ensure they differed on what seemed to be a fundamental level was to explore different levels of Diegetic Consistence, a term I will define shortly.

Keyhole Factory is a mosaic of 22 narrative shards. Characters recur, but are barely recognizable from each other’s points of view. (Like many of us, they don’t narrate themselves they way others would narrate them.) Characters differ, their experiences differ, their interpretations of events differ, the literary styles and forms in which they are rendered differ, but, most deliberately, the plausibility that their stories can even be told differ.

I use the term Diegetic Consistence for this distinction (although I wouldn’t mind if a better writer had already introduced a better term).

A fiction is diegetically consistent if its text can exist, and does, in its story world. In other words, could one of the characters read the same text the reader reads?

Diegetic Consistence is not concerned with what is real or fictional, only with whether the story universe can include the story’s text.

For example, an epistolary novel shows perfect diegetic consistence—the letters the characters write to each other are clearly texts that exist within the fictional universe.

A story or novel in unattributed dialog (got Gaddis?) shows slightly less diegetic consistence (the verbatim text exists in the story universe, but who in the story transcribed it?).

At the other end of the spectrum—zero Diegetic Consistence—we have a story from the point of view of a character who dies in the story (as in As I Lay Dying). Even if we assume that the dead can still think, and assume that thought is actually a text rather than a firing of neurons, the possibility of a transcript of a dead person’s interior monolog is less than remote.

Somewhere in the middle—medium Diegetic Consistence—we have the first person narrator who is a player, major or minor, in the story world. Maybe they admit to writing the story, maybe they don’t, but the possibility exists. Take Nick Carraway from the Great Gatsby. There is one fleeting instance where he admits to being the author of the book, but, of course, he is that very rare person whose story is not all about him.

Moving along the spectrum toward Diegetic Inconsistence, we have the interior monolog. Although one could claim that the text of the story exists in the story universe (in the form of thoughts) (although the assumption that thought is textual is unprovable), the possibility of an exact transcription, even of the thoughts of a living person with great literacy, is remote.

Even more inconsistent is stream of consciousness narration, which doesn’t have to be an interior monolog of a single character or even multiple characters—it is more a mode of disorganization. A stream of consciousness narration is diegetically inconsistent. That’s part of the point—to render a story world in a way that might be psychologically authentic, but which is no more a transcript than a cubist painting is photorealistic.

Although it is beyond the scope of my resources or obsession to take a complete survey of the use of varying levels of diegetic consistence in fiction, it seems that, surprisingly, diegetic inconsistence is more the norm. Because one classic example of diegetic inconsistence is the default mode of fiction: the ubiquitous third person omniscient or limited omniscient narration. The unnamed, unidentified, often impossibly knowledgeable storyteller, who, somehow, because their identity falls somewhere between anonymous and impossible, is automatically considered credible. It’s a strange convention. Nobody is reliable, and anonymous people who report the private thoughts of others are absolutely questionable. How can the textual descriptions of a nonexistent narrator, often with access to secrets, the past, the future, thoughts of others, and literary allusions the characters they are used to describe would not themselves get, exist? And why is this question not more jarring? Why is conventional fiction not considered experimental for this very reason? One can speculate that the third person story was written as a fiction by one of the characters in it (that Tyrone Slothrop wrote Gravity’s Rainbow), but that assumption is generally forced and, in the absence of any first person sentences, is unnecessary.

In this respect it might be said that the unreliable narrator is always diegetically consistent, perhaps paradoxically, because they can’t be trusted to not write their own novel.

Here are the stories in Keyhole Factory ranked in inexact, descending order of Diegetic Consistence, with an explanation of how I tried to place them on this spectrum. (The stories have pictographs for titles).

A description of events written as a journal by a person who experienced them, then left them in an abandoned car with a rare Bowie bootleg.
The written confession of a prisoner likely to be executed.
A radio transmission from an astronaut (almost certainly transcribed or automatically recorded).
A pirate radio transmission from an unhinged woman who may be the last person left alive (almost certainly not transcribed or recorded).
A cross-section of multiple simultaneous radio transmissions--FM, police radio, cellphone--during a moment of chaos.
A spoken monolog told to a fellow prisoner, including passages in the future tense.
First person past tense account of a scientist’s career taking a turn for the worse, with the implication that she will not be sitting down to write her memoirs anytime soon.
A first person account of a utopian living collective -- sometimes singular, sometimes plural -- potentially written by one of its members.
First person past tense account, potentially but not likely written down later.
First person past tense stream of consciousness account of a probably fatal experience by a not very literary narrator.
Second person story told about unnamed character by unknown narrator.
Conventional third person past tense.
Present tense story told by an omniscient circus psychic.
Numerous simultaneous first person accounts of the moment the power goes out across America.
A story that starts with one narrator in a single column, and, as the character spreads a disease, splits into more and more columns, each narrating the thoughts of a different infected person (all dying).
Past tense account of a murderer on a fatal arc, with sentences carefully constructed without subjects such that they could be either first, second, or third person.
First person account by a mute, comatose, dying woman.
Brief descriptions of intimate encounters all over the world.
First person past tense account of a fatal event during which there was no time to write anything down.
The final thoughts of numerous, mostly unrelated, dying characters, over the course of decades.
Well, I don't have to explain everything.
Story in the form of a footnote, from the point of view of the earth.

Dirk Stratton, in his review of Keyhole Factory, not only shares my thoughts on point of view, but provides a defense (or dismissal) of the entire idea of "experimental fictions:"

I've read some reviews of "Keyhole Factory" elsewhere online that dismiss the book because of its postmodern approach, and decry its use of--what are denigrated as--textual tricks and gimmicks. But let's get real: ALL novels depend on tricks and gimmicks. Is there any trick larger (or more common) than the third person omniscient narrator, who supposedly has the god-like powers to perceive and then perfectly record the thoughts, actions, and words of any number of human beings (and sometimes animals), creatures who furthermore, as the result of another trick, are not even real, but completely made up? Or how about the first person narrator (FPN) gimmick that often depends on the idea that some people have perfect recall, the uncanny ability to accurately reproduce every conversation they have? And that's when the FPN deigns to write things down: sometimes the FPN's . . . thoughts? speech? . . . appear in a book without any evidence of how that was accomplished, how we the audience have become privy to the FPN's words.

As it turns out, there are some very good reasons why Gillespie has chosen the variety of tricks he has to tell his story. "Keyhole Factory" suggests that when the world ends, the conventional ways of telling stories also end, or, at the very least, they become increasingly inadequate for the task of recording a frighteningly new and chaotic situation. "Keyhole Factory," then, is a compendium of different points of view of the end of life as we know it, each presented using a different narrative technique (or seen through a different keyhole, if you will).

3. Keyhole Factory Factory Factory Factory
Lucid Dreaming

For my entire life I had been haunted by nightly, recurring dreams of being trapped in frustrating jobs awaiting some catastrophe I was helpless to avert. I didn’t think too much of these dreams because they seemed to reflect my waking life, which was a lot like that. A lot of people’s lives are like that. Practically everybody. But as I talked to people and did research, I came to believe that my own dream experiences were unusually vivid, bizarre, and consistent. And exhausting. By day I’d wait tables or work a computer desk and await death; by night, asleep, I’d do the same thing. It was like working a bad split-shift with no time off. I wasn’t always sure whether I was dreaming or awake.

Starting at age sixteen, I attempted to notate the dreams, treating them as fiction and poetry. At times, these writings were about the characters in the dreams, at other times they seemed to be dictated to my by those same imagined people. The characters who populate my dreams, unusually, were not memories, not people from my life, but individuals I do not recognize, entirely disconnected from myself.

During a stint as a student worker in the Education and Social Science library at the University of Illinois, while goofing off, I happened upon a rare book: Dreams and How to Guide Them, by the Marquis Hervey de Saint-Denys. This book, written by a French aristocrat in the nineteenth century (and never fully translated), is a manual and documentation of the techniques of lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is the process of becoming conscious while dreaming, aware you are dreaming, and willfully exploring your dream world without waking up.

In my early dream experiences, I found myself locked in a series of deadening low-age jobs, consumed by helplessness and dread. These are the experiences recorded in my novel Steal Stuff From Work. Harnessing the techniques of lucid dreaming (with much difficulty),m I found myself able to explore the world of my recurring nightmares. Indeed, over time I overcame much of my fear and helplessness in this dreamed world, and became assertive. I developed agency. I was able to recognize that my “dream jobs” were not real, escape from their entrapment, address the other people in my dream, and developed some ability to travel through space and time (even making a few clumsy but successful attempts to fly), and explore the world. I followed the dream figures, interviewed them, at times occupied their bodies, discovered their relationships, and was able to piece together a history of their world. Sometimes I was like a fly on the wall, moving invisibly through the intimate situations of other dream characters. The dream world was permeated by fear because of a particular catastrophic event I could, while in the dream, clearly anticipate, though most of the people in the dream seemed oblivious to their fate.

An important part of lucid dreaming is keeping dream diaries. Keyhole Factory began as a dream diary.

As a writer, I then began to reconstruct that world, and even the literature I found within it. Although some lucid dreamers report being unable to read in their dreams—that the text swims on the page—I discovered that many of my dream figures were themselves writers, and that I was able to read their books in his dreams, and even remember fragments of them when awake. (I have also transcribed a number of weird songs from my dreams).

At Brown University, I had the opportunity to live on student loans, a meager stipend, and a $10/hr valet job, and sleep, exploring and transcribing the dream universe into the interconnected books Keyhole Factory and Steal Stuff From Work.

The meaning and consistency of my dream world, which I came to call “The Keyhole Parallel,” is unexplainable, no more easily understood than dreaming itself. But I continue my efforts to document it, exploring the catastrophe that awaits the people in my dreams while trying to ignore whatever catastrophe awaits me.