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Sep. 21st, 2017 02:31 pmIs there a name for this particular story trope: some utterly innocuous-seeming detail at the start of a story that in fact, looked at very closely and perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, gives the whole game away. Obviously such keys can be camouflaged elsewhere, but the start has some unique advantages when it comes to hiding stuff:
1. The virgin reader hasn't the slightest idea what the game will even be yet.
2. It's at the maximum distance from the stretch where one does have ideas about the game, thus its details have been crowded out by everything else that's come between. (Since we do retain initial impressions quite well, not the first sentence(s) but not too far in might work best of all.)
3. We're so used to a story invading its setting that we sometimes think of the setting itself as irrelevant, or as getting to be as noisy and signal-free as real life. So at the start the author actually has some of what we assume all authors always have but they in fact almost never do, once constrained by their plot and the shared readerly/writerly need to get rid of it by carrying it to a necessary end: space. Since they're even more constrained, or anyway compelled, by theme, which is what makes them care enough about plot to suffer through concocting one, if they have any brains they'll fill that space up to the brim. Being caught doing this will be fatal, of course: preceding a story with an essay about the message it will convey ruins the story. So the wool you gather while briefly permitted to had better come pre-dyed.
(Authors can also hide this stuff in spectacles: descriptions of what readers are curious about enough to pause the story for, like what the characters look like or whatever big buildings or geographical features are come upon. Also in stories, texts or art objects inside the story's world. But once the plot's started to come together for the reader all of these will either be viewed with suspicion or afforded only a certain amount of patience, which an author will usually need to spend much of on details that turn out to forward the plot. Of course the more ingenious authors can shoehorn both thematic and plot content in together, at these nodes - and the most ingenious usually manage to find plots that are somehow already one with their themes. But even though those tools are available they tend to be comparativrly blunt. Innocently whistling the song of their guilt permits authors to speak, and not just telegraph, their confession.)
4. Should the reader ever figure this out the fact that it was right there literally all along will affect them powerfully, strengthening their sense that the ending was inevitable from the beginning. See, look, the beginning actually says so!
Rereading doesn't even necessarily turn up this sort of covert revelation, because we can almost never truly reread, rather than tread words while having their initial purport reinforced, until time has revirginized us - at which point we'll be likely hoodwinked in the exact same manner. We'll reread in light of the ending. But suppose there's a secret ending, or a hidden way we're supposed to interpret that ending, and maybe much of what precedes it? Authors can use this particular technique of ... I'm failing to find a term for it, a metaphor ... to show off, or make the final reveal feel somehow right, or to reassure readers who still feel a bit confused by a final surprise. But they can also use it to put suspicion into rereaders (or keen rememberers) about how things seem to have concluded. Or, more ambitiously, to let rereaders who have become suspicious for other reasons know that they are right to be. The ficus in the foyer might hide a sign pointing in a new direction, or might just contain the folded message that those readers who went a different direction than the others were not crazy to do so, that the author sees them seeing her and approves.
...
Borges uses tricks like this because he uses all the tricks. This instance seems to me the trickiest of all, since what he hides in the foyer and in plain sight is the very concept of hiding things in the foyer in plain sight:
Bioy Casares had dined with me that evening and we'd lingered over a discussion on the mechanics of writing a novel in the first person, in which the narrator omitted or distorted events, thereby creating discrepancies that would allow a handful of readers - a tiny handful - to come to an appalling or banal realization.
For me, what that sentence does to the story is as amazing as what its missing encyclopedia pages do to reality.
1. The virgin reader hasn't the slightest idea what the game will even be yet.
2. It's at the maximum distance from the stretch where one does have ideas about the game, thus its details have been crowded out by everything else that's come between. (Since we do retain initial impressions quite well, not the first sentence(s) but not too far in might work best of all.)
3. We're so used to a story invading its setting that we sometimes think of the setting itself as irrelevant, or as getting to be as noisy and signal-free as real life. So at the start the author actually has some of what we assume all authors always have but they in fact almost never do, once constrained by their plot and the shared readerly/writerly need to get rid of it by carrying it to a necessary end: space. Since they're even more constrained, or anyway compelled, by theme, which is what makes them care enough about plot to suffer through concocting one, if they have any brains they'll fill that space up to the brim. Being caught doing this will be fatal, of course: preceding a story with an essay about the message it will convey ruins the story. So the wool you gather while briefly permitted to had better come pre-dyed.
(Authors can also hide this stuff in spectacles: descriptions of what readers are curious about enough to pause the story for, like what the characters look like or whatever big buildings or geographical features are come upon. Also in stories, texts or art objects inside the story's world. But once the plot's started to come together for the reader all of these will either be viewed with suspicion or afforded only a certain amount of patience, which an author will usually need to spend much of on details that turn out to forward the plot. Of course the more ingenious authors can shoehorn both thematic and plot content in together, at these nodes - and the most ingenious usually manage to find plots that are somehow already one with their themes. But even though those tools are available they tend to be comparativrly blunt. Innocently whistling the song of their guilt permits authors to speak, and not just telegraph, their confession.)
4. Should the reader ever figure this out the fact that it was right there literally all along will affect them powerfully, strengthening their sense that the ending was inevitable from the beginning. See, look, the beginning actually says so!
Rereading doesn't even necessarily turn up this sort of covert revelation, because we can almost never truly reread, rather than tread words while having their initial purport reinforced, until time has revirginized us - at which point we'll be likely hoodwinked in the exact same manner. We'll reread in light of the ending. But suppose there's a secret ending, or a hidden way we're supposed to interpret that ending, and maybe much of what precedes it? Authors can use this particular technique of ... I'm failing to find a term for it, a metaphor ... to show off, or make the final reveal feel somehow right, or to reassure readers who still feel a bit confused by a final surprise. But they can also use it to put suspicion into rereaders (or keen rememberers) about how things seem to have concluded. Or, more ambitiously, to let rereaders who have become suspicious for other reasons know that they are right to be. The ficus in the foyer might hide a sign pointing in a new direction, or might just contain the folded message that those readers who went a different direction than the others were not crazy to do so, that the author sees them seeing her and approves.
...
Borges uses tricks like this because he uses all the tricks. This instance seems to me the trickiest of all, since what he hides in the foyer and in plain sight is the very concept of hiding things in the foyer in plain sight:
Bioy Casares had dined with me that evening and we'd lingered over a discussion on the mechanics of writing a novel in the first person, in which the narrator omitted or distorted events, thereby creating discrepancies that would allow a handful of readers - a tiny handful - to come to an appalling or banal realization.
For me, what that sentence does to the story is as amazing as what its missing encyclopedia pages do to reality.
