In Search of the Sideshadow

Our lives are anistropic narratives—that is, they are constantly in the process of being created, bound to inescapable directedness from past to future, ‘til death parts us from this mortal coil. As such, they don’t much resemble the narratives we read for pleasure. They don’t, for example, have anything resembling literary closure (unless you count death, but we don’t really get to close the book and ponder it with detached satisfaction or disappointment afterwards), and they certainly don’t contain within them any force akin to foreshadowing (except for maybe intuition, which isn’t really the same thing because it’s not the product of backward causality). 

Unlike fiction or even carefully crafted nonfiction, our lives are open—they are not shaped according to the Freytag’s triangle, are not bound by determinism or, to be literary about it, “plot.” This poses a challenge to Realist writers who must lull readers into attaining Gardner’s fictional dream despite the artifice of form. . . .

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To look at a book as a whole is to recognize it as a product, the creation of an author that eventually ends in some form of artificial closure. Even a nonfiction book ends according to the author’s will (it’s not like a writer stops living his or her life after the memoir is over). As such, for our characters (and ourselves as character), life in literature is not very similar to life as we know it. Rather, it is determined, finalized, simulated, a man-made construct.

On one hand, this allows us to do some interesting things with time. We can compress it to avoid mundaneness (who wants to read about every second of a character’s life—one-step, two-step, three-step, and so on?). We can also blow it up at certain moments to increase dramatic tension. On the other hand, this artificiality presents us with a number of potential pitfalls. A simple misstep dealing with backstory, a moment of ham-handed foreshadowing, and we risk the curtain being thrown back on us like the Great and Powerful Oz.

In Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time, Gary Saul Morson argues that some books transcend this art v. life, artifice v. reality conflict by displaying what he calls eventness—moments in writing that are unaccountable, surprising, not predetermined, moments where the reader recognizes the possibility of actual alternatives. These alternatives are what Morson calls “sideshadows,” and they open the book up by presenting readers with the shadow of an alternative present that runs parallel to the structure of the book, offering a surplus of possibilities (rather than a surplus of authorial knowledge): “in addition to actualities and impossibilities, a middle realm of real possibilities that could have happened even if they did not.”

Morson is a Slavic Studies scholar and so he focuses these theories on the works of Russian masters like Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov. Still, the implications of his work are relevant to us as contemporary writers when considered in the right context.

Sideshadowing is a slippery concept. Hard to define. Even harder to make use of. And while it’s going to seem like something of a cop out, I don’t want to give any concrete examples of what I take to be sideshadowing in practice because I don’t want to be too directive about this. For one thing, sideshadowing has dual meanings. It is both the name for an open temporal sensibility and also the category used to describe any aesthetic device or stylistic choice that conveys that open sensibility. There’s no finite number of techniques, in other words. At least, not as far as I know.


The other reason I don’t want to load up this post with examples of sideshadowing from literature is because I don’t want to give the wrong impression that these techniques should be adopted in some sort of paint-by-numbers attempt to achieve openness in a book. A writer should not sit down and ask himself/herself, how can I inject some sideshadowing into my story/novel/memoir?  As I’ve said many times before, we don’t build narratives the way we build shopping malls—with detailed blueprints and heavy machinery. We allow the work to surprise us, and as we draft, we follow it where it takes us.

As such, it is more helpful to think of sideshadowing as the byproduct of open writing than a conscious maneuver made by the author, more useful to talk about what qualities sideshadowing has as a whole than it is to discuss tricks of the trade. Where foreshadowing reveals apparent alternatives to have been mere illusions, sideshadowing restores the presentness of the past by cultivating the sense that things might have happened differently. In doing so, it weakens the determinism of a book, downplays the preordained quality of what has happened, and allows us to view the single line of development (plot) that arose out of the multiplicity of possible outcomes as rational yet coincidental. It alters the way we think about earlier events. Think: Fortune, rather than Fate.

Simply put: Sideshadowing may be thought of as the rejection of authorial agency, the removal of the overbearing author’s hand which leaves greasy fingerprints on everything it touches.

Okay, but how is any of this practicable, you might ask? 

I’m arguing for a quality here—one that is hard to define, hard to identify other than by feel. I might as well say, aim to write a book that is “beautiful” or “tragic.” You know one when you read it, but there’s no playbook for creating such a thing.

My best (and only) answer is this: when we talk about qualities of writing like this, we internalize something felt, which emerges from the discussion. It becomes a part of who we are as a writer, joining the bouillabaisse that is our subconscious and making that stock a bit richer. If that’s too airy-fairy, I’ll rephrase: it’s never a bad thing for a writer to become smarter about how books work, even if the knowledge at hand isn’t directly helpful when it comes time to actually write a book.

Sound familiar? The same is true of great jazz musicians who know their scales and chords like the back of their hands but don't pause to think about individual notes when they are improvising.

I think one way that writing—whether it be fiction or nonfiction, long or short—displays sideshadowing is by avoiding the clichés of its form and subverting our expectations of genre. Back in the day, Edgar Allan Poe and writers of a similar mindset advanced the argument that all writing should fit together scientifically, like a puzzle, according to formula, each word having been carefully chosen for its impact. Pull one card and the entire house comes a-tumblin’. 

We may not ascribe to these beliefs anymore, but they continue to impact the way we talk about writing. There are still teachers who make students outline their stories, for instance. And it is not uncommon to hear people say things like, “cut everything from the novel that doesn’t directly support its plot” or “every word must serve a purpose” and so forth. I'm not against being picky or particular about language, but these aphorisms seem to miss the heart of the matter.

In previous classes, I shared with my students a section of my yet-to-be-published novel Hungry Town in which one of the characters, Rieux, is cleaning her gun. It has no direct bearing on the plot. We don’t learn anything about Rieux we didn’t already know. It doesn’t advance her storyline whatsoever. I would argue that the scene remains essential to the book for what I am calling its “world building” properties. It allows us to see Rieux in her element, doing what she does. It lets us linger in her presence and provides opportunity for a writer (me, in this case) to attempt something interesting.

A traditionalist might call this artlessness. I would argue that it is the very soul of art.

My mentor, Darrell Spencer, once said:

[I] try to entice readers into an experience with a particular brand of language, such as, in a specific sense, the jargon of sign painting or roofing, or, in a broader sense, the language of loss or grief or joy. Each piece contains, I hope, at least ten cats in a bag. . . . My work is, I hope, baggy. Off-shot. Disjointed. Unwieldy. I hope my stories, like John Berryman’s poetry, won’t hold still.

What I think Spencer is talking about here is polyphony. A polyphonic work is not simply one in which there are multiple voices. It is also not merely a piece where the narrator sounds like (or is) one of the characters (e.g. Holden Caulfield). A true polyphonic work is one where language works in such a way as to allow the protagonist some freedom to surprise both the other characters and the author him/herself. As Morson says, “the interaction of unfinalizable characters . . . makes the world . . . an open one.” In other words, the author takes a backseat.

I know I said that I didn’t want to use specific examples here, but just one, just to show you what I mean. (I hope Darrell doesn’t hate me for this.) From the opening of his story “Park Host”:
 

So Rose and Red Cogsby, they get into these one-on-ones where they lock horns, do these everyday equivalents of Piper Cub open-cockpit wingovers . . .”

That’s enough to give you an idea, but I must be clear about one thing: This is not a first-person story. It's told entirely in third-person. That voice you are hearing on the page doesn’t belong to a specific character who is narrating the events. It also doesn’t belong to real-life Darrell. (He doesn’t go around talking like that.) It may be free indirect discourse—Red’s voice bleeding into the objective narration—but it’s probably more accurate to call this the voice of the story’s world. A world in which Red Cogsby, the park host, walks around the Nevada trailer park, packing heat, performing a certain persona that really only works in this particular place: the mostly-arid outskirts of the city where Dino once filmed the original “Oceans Eleven.” This relationship of the book’s writing to its character allows Red exceptional freedom to go anywhere, to do or say anything, to “refuse” the author’s intentions.

In one of the dust jacket blurbs of Spencer’s book (Caution: Men in Trees), Debra Monroe says the following:

Because of the dazzling verbal texture—syntax that contorts itself to serve up pleasure, his telling and idiosyncratic details, sentences full of gaps and light—it’s tempting to say Darrell Spencer’s forte is style. But here style maps the sensibilities of men who live in awe of turning points, unseen precipices where events and responses to them accrue and characters turn up temporarily reprieved or guilty.

In many ways, what Monroe is describing with those “gaps and light” is sideshadowing. This is not simply a stylistic dressing that is poured over the work. It’s a way of writing that allows for openness.

Polyphony (or surplus of humanness) is just one example. There are many ways in which a piece might be delightfully baggy, or “open” if you prefer. It can be open because its plot is loose, unresolved, open-ended. Morson calls this aperture: “a relative closure at several points, each of which could be a sort of ending or, at least, as much of an ending as we are ever going to get.” This is a book’s answer to a predetermined conclusion. Many books end by adhering to the outcome that had been planned all along, providing the narrative a feeling of completeness while simultaneously rendering false any traces of eventness that occurred earlier: “the ending is silently present in the beginning.” This neatly wrapped-up, finalized product underscores a determinist perspective where characters are not given a choice in their actions or decisions, but rather are fated to make the decisions that they make throughout in order to actualize the predetermined conclusion (deux ex machina). The story is over before it has even begun.

Aperture restores process to a novel by breaking the “privilege of an ending.” In other words, it signifies that more is to come, that the world of the novel does not end on the last page, and that the narrative account provided by the novel falls somewhere within a larger story. It allows loose threads to remain loose.

When teaching this to students, I don’t call it aperture. Instead, I tell them that I would rather their piece “resonate” with me at the end than have it neatly (and artificially) “resolve" itself. 

Another way that writing achieves sideshadowing, thereby undercutting its own “authoredness” is by avoiding those techniques of form that highlight its closed temporality, any devices that draw attention to themselves as authorial. Foreshadowing is one example, but it’s not the only example. Foreshadowing, as we know, is exposition that hints at trouble to come by having certain events take place in a special way. If my hero sees a bird mysteriously and inexplicably fall from the sky while she is outside enjoying breakfast on the veranda, and later on she finds out that her lover has died in a plane crash, that’s foreshadowing (unless, of course, the bird caused the plane to crash and my hero just doesn’t know it yet. In that case, it’s just plain old cause and effect). The dead bird is a bad omen for what is to come. Because the future—that plane crash—is already decided, there can be no good omens this morning (if there be omens at all). That bird doesn’t die as a result of prior events (old age, avian flu, choked on a worm); it dies as a consequence of events to come. It is the result of the written world sending back symbolic messages from a future already conceived. It’s as preordained as the Oracle’s warning to Oedipus. If the lover were going to land safely, there would be no backward causation, and our feathered friend would probably still be flapping away.

Any B-movie buff will tell you, the bolt of lightning always anticipates the ax murderer who slashes our heroine to death as she steps out into that “dark and stormy night.” We know where this is going. It won’t ever be the Avon lady at the door. It can’t be. That’s what I mean when I say “clichés of form.”

The problem, of course, is that life doesn’t work this way (though it might be nice sometimes if it did), and so this “literary” move (I use the term loosely) offends our sensibilities, drawing our attention toward the “madeness” of the story artifact. It make us cry “fowl.” (I’ll be here all week, folks. Tip your waitresses.) Frankly, this foreshadowing seems as corny as my joke.

Backstory is another place where the artificiality of a book can be made manifest—those long passages detailing a character’s history. Do any of us really talk like that? The conventional wisdom surrounding backstory, flashback or exposition, is that it shines a light on present motivations. That character is a sociopath because his father used to put out burnt cigarettes on his back as a child. It’s a simplistic device, first of all. Motivations are rarely so straightforward, and they hardly ever come out in such a timely and articulate manner. It's only made worse when an action in the present precipitates the flashback (e.g. someone lights a cigarette).

Flashback and exposition are among those devices that draw the most attention to themselves. According to Rust Hills:

Everyone knows, from the movies, what a flashback is. The screen ripples over, the music ripples up, and we drop back in time for a sequence of action that “explains” why a character is the way he is or gives the “background” of the situation that exists “now” in the movie.

In Writing in General and the Short Story in Particular, Hills goes on to share an absurd example where a character is climbing a staircase and flashing back with each step he takes. Better in such an instance to loosen the stranglehold of cause-and-effect, take a lesson from Hemingway who said, “The dignity of movement of the iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water,” and leave the past undefined, up to the reader’s imagination. (Morson has a word for this, too: “past sideshadowing,” and, you guessed it, it also works to open up a piece of writing.)

So why bother with flashback then? I asked my students recently, what purpose could flashback possibly serve if we remove from our discussion the notion that backstory helps explain the present narrative by providing past context. Put on the spot, no one had an eloquent answer.

I think Hills leads us toward a possible explanation when he says that “this convention [flashback] has produced some extraordinarily beautiful passages as well as many abysmal ones.” The numerology is important here—some versus many. A warning to tread lightly. Still, this would be my answer. It is, incidentally, the same answer I gave for my novel scene above that does not work to advance plot, and it seems to run in the vein of Spencer’s argument in favor of “bagginess”: flashback provides an opportunity to do something interesting visually and/or with language that will open the writing up.

We are frequently taught that such aspirations are not lofty enough. We should want clever, ingenious plots. Important symbols and the like. Still, what matters most to me are the memorable little scenes, the great lines, the heartbreaking images, and the meaningful interactions between characters. They form the foundation of good writing. Moreover, they promote the fictional dream by providing places for sideshadowing to occur before the sledgehammer of structure comes crashing down on the work, imposing the inelegant author’s will with the subtlety and grace of a root canal.