This is a story which operates according to all the conventions one would expect of a story such as this. For one thing, like all stories, it has a beginning as evidenced by the preceding sentence which opens with the word “This” capitalized to indicate its primary position in the sentence. For another thing, like all stories, it has an end. As a reader, you can’t detect it yet, because I have deferred its arrival by any number of intervening paragraphs. As a writer, I can’t detect it yet either because, at such an early stage of the story, I am still undecided how I will draw the narrative to a close. Nevertheless, I assure you, this story has an end and it will arrive in due course. A careful reader might object that there is nothing in the fact of a narrative’s beginning that necessitates its end. Logically, this is true. It is conceivable that I could go on writing this story even as you read it. On and on, you chase my prolixity. However, even then, the story’s end is certain as I bring it to an abrupt close by slumping dead over my desk or through some other demise. All stories borrow their conclusive nature from the fact of our mortality.
The third convention determining this narrative is its principal character whom I have called the protagonist. In other words, the narrative is about someone. Without a personage at the centre of the narrative, the writing would not be relatable; it would be unduly abstract, more suitable for an essay or a thesis. The protagonist goes by the name Louise. I don’t know much about Louise that isn’t obvious: she is a black woman in her mid-thirties. She may be a lesbian.
The difficulty I’m having in writing this story is that Louise doesn’t like me. She says I’m too white; I leak my whiteness all over the page. I don’t know what she means. She’s clearer when she tells me a white boy like me has no business writing a black woman in the fullness of her lived experience. I don’t know what to make of the phrase “the fullness of her lived experience” given that it is a fictional character who is trying to explain this to me. Besides, I add, she can’t know I’m a white boy. As a character, her vision is restricted to the fictional plane. I stand over and above the fictional plane. She can no more see me than I can see beings adrift in the seventh dimension.
Oh please, she says, of course you’re white; you write like you have a rebar stuck up your ass.
I return to the beginning of the story—a story which must have an end even if there is no evidence yet that such an end is near—and skim my opening words. I note their formal tenor. Even the phrase “I note their formal tenor” is infected by its own formal tenor. It bristles with rebars.
The fourth convention I adopt is to engage the protagonist in dramatic tension. We have already witnessed some tension in Louise’s refusal to be represented by a white storyteller. The tension continues as Louise suggests the particulars of my gender and sexuality further disqualify me from writing her. This is where things get complicated.
She: You need to write less and listen more.
Me: I’m a narrator. What else is there for me to do?
She: You could at least try to learn something about my experience.
Me: I do try.
She: Oh really?
Me: But you accuse me of stalking. You tell me to fuck off or you’ll call the police. How can I learn anything if you don’t let me near?
She: You follow me everywhere and call it research. Do you know how creepy that is?
Me: What should I do then?
She: Why not let me speak for myself? In my own voice. From my own experience.
Me: That would be great except for two things. One: you’re a closeted lesbian. You spend all your time passing. You wouldn’t know your own voice if it was screaming at you. Two: you’re a fictional character. If you spoke for yourself, we’d have lies heaped on lies.
She: These aren’t lies; these are cages. You’ve put my black body inside a cage that’s inside a cage.
There was a time when a story incorporated a fifth convention: the resolution. The appearance of this convention signaled the approaching end (see the second convention, above). But modernist sensibilities have done something strange to the resolution. Just as the end may borrow from the fact of mortality, so the resolution may borrow from the muddle that precedes it: the senescence, the impotent railing or, in the case of those who grow complacent, the idiotic smile. Nowadays, there is nothing clean like a marriage or a martial victory. Nowadays, there is only the indeterminate drift that defies the possibility even of insight.
I want to force the matter by sharing at least one insight. As narrator, I have more in common with Louise than I care to admit (an incoherent phrase, I know, since I just admitted it). Like Louise, I’m a fictional construct. I’m not a character, but I still have a role in moving the story along. And (with an opportunity for empathy here), I acknowledge that, like Louise, I bury my identity and try to pass as something else. All this time, I’ve tried to pass as the author of this story. But we both know that’s not true. From what I hear, the author is dead.