Silence: The Blank Page
Last week the air was filled with noise about the teaching of certain books by certain kinds of writers and not others and teaching only what you love. The question of loving (or not loving?) what you teach preoccupies me. What does love mean in this context? Surely it depends on the kind of love. If it’s a love that only permits you to take in things that look like yourself then the nature of the love is a problem. If love means believing that something matters, then we who teach the writing and reading of literature or anything at all need to love what we teach. We need to teach books because we believe that they are an urgent matter, that the art of reading literature and responding to it is an urgent way of being alive. Otherwise, why do it? Love as altruism and an attention to the world beyond us. (There’s tenderness in attention, a stretching towards something, from the Latin tendere, that is surely required to truly take in something or someone other than ourselves.)
All the noise steered me back to a story I hadn’t read in a long, long time, “The Blank Page” by Isak Dinesen, from her Last Tales. It’s available online here. It’s a story about storytelling, and life, and reading, but not imprisoned in self-referentiality. It’s too mysterious for that. All the storytellers in it are women. It’s mostly narrated by an old woman who makes a living as a storyteller, whose grandmother admonishes her while giving her a kind of professional advice.
“Where the story-teller is loyal, eternally and unswervingly loyal to the story, there, in the end, silence will speak. Where the story has been betrayed, silence is but emptiness. But we, the faithful, when we have spoken our last word, will hear the voice of silence.”
I don’t want to try to summarize the story because I want others to read it. I want you to read it. It’s not long. Read it out loud if you can. The story itself, within the story, is passed from voice to voice or hand to hand. It asks us to pay attention in unstraightforward ways. It tells of journeys through time and space, of different lives, of nuns and princesses, of flax made into the finest linen and sheets woven of it that are stained with the blood of women from their marital beds and hung in frames on the wall of a gallery to be viewed by others. Viewers read lives into each sheet. There is one framed sheet that remains blank. Which might have been left out but wasn’t. Out of loyalty, which is perhaps another kind of love. What happened to cause its blankness? We aren’t told. The blank sheet is the one that strikes its viewers dumb — and makes them think.
The blank page is not noisy with event. It gestures to what isn’t there, what isn’t spoken or can’t be spoken or speaks through silence and is nevertheless felt as a presence. The best writing invokes such a silence. The strongest words have silence on the other side of them. The words shape themselves around what isn’t there even as they summon up what is. The loyalty that is demanded of storytellers is also asked of readers: pay attention, pay attention to the absences, which are their own heart beat.
Beauty
There’s such pleasure in having a beautiful book: cover, paper, font, all these things matter. And Goose Lane has made Accusation a very beautiful book. I have to call attention to these endpapers. Open the book and you discover these. There’s a juggler in the novel and it’s as if the papers bring his juggling to life. They’re almost like a circus.
Nakedness
The night before I had to give my first reading from Accusation, the book newly in my hands, I had a dream in which I was walking naked through the streetscape of my adolescence. The dream itself felt clear in its self-revelation. Bringing a novel to the world is pleasurable — and yet also, oddly, shameful. There’s an inevitable vulnerability in the risk of self-exposure, or in the risky self-exposure. Humiliation rises among a sea of other emotions. We don’t talk much about the place of shame in publication but I’d wager most writers touch it to some degree. We long to disown what we’ve written, to cast it off in case it embarrasses us, or because it embarrasses us, because we’ve put everything of ourselves into it and that’s embarrassing, because the disowning is necessary in order to move on. We don’t know what we’ve done. We don’t know how to think or speak about what we’ve done. Writer Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer has written a paper about it — well, about the relationship between publishing and shitting, and the weird commingling of pleasure and shame as something … comes out of us. After having been turned so far inward, it’s strange to face outward. All our actions on the page become visible. Moments before, in the same dream, I was clambering over a ladder stretched across the depths of a vast, dilapidated building, trying to navigate a tricky journey. No more disappearing into the text, it’s time to slip on a vulnerable body and hit the streets, the book itself a form of nakedness whatever I’m wearing.
NOW review of Accusation
The day before the launch it was lovely to wake up to word of this review by Susan G. Cole, which deftly summarizes the emotional and ethical quandaries of the novel, and notes that while documenting events can be a form of witnessing, it can lead to its own dilemmas, particularly for journalists. As another reader said to me recently, this is not only a novel about accusations but about trying to do the right thing.
Talking about Accusations
Love and Accusation Launch: September 17, 2013. I know the room was packed to the rafters. That Douglas Glover gave a lesson about aphorisms and spoke about Savage Love. That the Accusation Chorale went off without a hitch, thanks to Becky Blake, Darren Hynes, Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer, Leanne Milech and Shyam Selvadurai, who proved a remarkable spoken-word chorus. Some of the MFA crew were quoting lines from the Chorale to me over a week later, such as, “To say, I am innocent, invites people to imagine the opposite.” So it must have made an impression. Mike Hoolboom’s achingly beautiful trailer for the novel looked even more beautiful projected on the big screen.That I didn’t even set eyes on everyone who came out. That I signed a lot of books. But I’ll leave it to Susan Swan to give her description of the evening.
“Last night I heard fiction writer Catherine Bush talk about her new novel, Accusation, at her book launch. I was hypnotized. Why? A few weeks ago I was falsely accused by somebody very close to me and I felt struck through the heart. Bush says there is no return to the state of being unaccused. The accusation lives on inside you even though you know it is untrue. This is how I felt. Bush has put her novelist’s finger on something difficult and important. Can’t wait to read her new book. When were you falsely accused and did you secretly believe the accuser? I know I did even though I knew his accusation was wrong. How can you convincingly speak up for yourself in the negative, Bush asks. She says the accusation renders you as helpless as a child.”
Talking about accusations with Mark Medley of the National Post
Accusation/Labour Day/Air Show
My new novel Accusation opens on a hot and humid Labour Day in Toronto in the midst of the air show. I can’t help thinking about that today (humid Labour Day Monday, the window-rattling, heart-seizing Air Show on its way). Here’s the opening to whet your appetite:
She pushed her chair back from the desk as the awful word on the screen entered her, and the name of the man linked to the word.
Mid-afternoon on Labour Day Monday: heat filled the room, the upper floor of her house, the streets of Toronto, the air above them, and more sweat pooled under her arms and at her throat and across her chest, as she stood, trying to calm the blood speeding through her veins. Outside, when she paced to the window, beyond the Norway maple, a car passed and with it the ordinary mystery of strangers going somewhere. The cry of a cicada soared, and out of the stillness, a jet fighter, part of the holiday weekend air show, roared into tumult, shaking the walls and window glass.
Accusation‘s pub date is coming soon: September 17 from Goose Lane Editions.
Accusation Book Trailer
Here’s the beautiful book trailer made for Accusation by filmmaker Mike Hoolboom.
Featuring the amazing cast of Elena Bush Anderson, Sophia Bush Anderson, and Stephen Anderson.
The Accusation Project
In the lead-up to the publication of my novel, Accusation, I’ve been gathering stories for something I’m calling The Accusation Project. I’m not sure exactly what form it will take but I hope to share some of these stories. I’m interested in stories of being accused or falsely accused or making an accusation against someone – not necessarily in the legal system. Accusations small or large. I’m interested both in what happened and what the experience felt like. If you have a story that you’d like to share in a short paragraph or so, please get in touch with me at info@catherinebush.com. The stories will be kept anonymous. Stay tuned for more about The Accusation Project.
