Hybrid Forms

Nonfictional asides in novels, short stories in the middle of essay collections, and other literary conglomerations

One place I like to hike is Schunnemunck Mountain in the Hudson Valley. Much of the rock there is a pinkish conglomerate of quartz, quartzite, chert and shale pebbles suspended in a sandstone matrix, known colloquially as puddingstone. As a function of its mixed nature, Puddingstone is strong. Hybrids of all sorts can be a bit off-putting because they are more complicated to classify than simpler substances but for that they are generally more interesting, and though many monsters are hybrids, so are many of the most powerful and beautiful things.

The Periodic Table by Primo Levi takes an intriguing hybrid form. The book consists primarily of chapters that blend personal history and meditations on chemistry, but these chapters are importantly punctuated with a number of short fictions, some almost fable-like. With the exception of two essays, “Cerium” and “Vanadium,” the pieces in the book tend to circumlocute the subject of the Holocaust, during which Levi was interred at Auschwitz (as Levi writes, that story “has been narrated [by him] elsewhere”) while simultaneously also being governed by it. The Holocaust is something of a gravitational force here, largely invisible and also absolutely fundamental.

Levi makes few arguments. Instead, in both the fictional and nonfictional modes, he deploys powerful metaphors. The distillation and purification of elements, so satisfying to the chemist, so virtuous seeming, look different when viewed against the notions of purity that underlay the Fascists and Nazi racial laws. The irrationality of so much human behavior is illustrated in the short story “Lead,” about a prospector who is profoundly gratified by and eager to pass on the chemistry-cum-magic of his trade to the next generation, despite his awareness that it is toxic, the cause of the illness and premature death of his forebearers, not to mention his own impending one, and his future child’s. The banality of evil is revealed in the form of the civilian manager of the Auschwitz factory where Levi was forced to work, whom Levi encounters again professionally after the war. This Nazi, or at best Nazi collaborator, seeks Levi’s absolution without ever accepting his own agency — neither in the (postwar) manufacturing of a deficient chemical product nor in the incineration of countless Jews within view of his factory window, during the war. The limits and possibilities of human resilience in the face of destruction are explored through Levi’s meditations on subjects including genealogy, purity, survival, and the law of conservation of matter, as illustrated by tracking a few hundred years in the travels of a carbon atom. By laying down fiction and fact alongside one another, Levi finds a surprising path toward truth truths larger than those of his characters or the substances they interact with.

None of these stories, Levi makes clear — not those of his fictional characters nor those of the actual victims, perpetrators and bystanders of the Holocaust — is as vivid or true as real life. As Levi writes of his friend Sandro, killed fighting the resistance, “it is a hopeless task to try to dress a man in words, make him live again on the printed page,” but he attempts it anyhow, and achieves something great, if not quite revivification. The hybrid form Levi has chosen and the hybrid nature of his metaphors are both essential to the success of the book as whole.

Thinking about fact being brought into fiction, and about the ironies inherent in the idea of purity — not to mention the several references to Moby-Dick in The Period Table — I can’t help but come back to Melville. In Chapter 42 of Moby-Dick, “The Whiteness of the Whale,” a list — of white things and their supposed virtue or horror — explodes into a meditation, an essay. So, directly following the highly dramatic Chapter 41, “Moby Dick,” in which are recounted Ahab’s prior encounter with the white whale and the loss of his leg, comes this essay on whiteness, the relativism of the value of whiteness, the intense irony of it — a color that can imply not just two different things but two Polar opposites — virtue and vice, good and evil. It’s philosophical to say the least, and many a reader has surely skipped Chapter 42, its non-narrative musings seeming beside the point, or too old-fashioned, or indeed needlessly postmodern. And yet, it is just such chapters that catapult the novel from a mere sea-going tale to something great: a meditation on the meaning and purpose of life.

As Levi’s juxtaposition of fact and fiction push us to think about the ironies of purity, Melville explores the irony of whiteness, its potential to connote either purity or abomination. And both these books bring to mind another of my favorites: Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, which centers around the idea that order and disorder are the true principles that underlie our notions of purity and danger. Take dirt. We tend to think of the forest as a place that is natural and pure, though it is literally covered in dirt. Scatter just a small amount of earth from a forest floor onto your kitchen floor — and it's filthy. Is it dirt that’s either pure or dirty? Or is it us, our minds, our constructs? It whiteness virtue or vacuum? Is purity something with a fixed value, regardless of context?

Essayistic meditations may seem like a risky precipice for a writer to step out onto. They may seem likely to make a book less commercial, harder to sell, but that’s not necessarily so. If one noses around, it turns out this hybridizing of form isn’t so arcane after all. It can be found in the work of many highly successful contemporary authors, including fiction writers W.G. Sebald, Rebecca Solnit, David Foster Wallace, Andrea Barrett, and Junot Diaz, and the poets of Anne Carson and Cornelius Eady, to name just a few.

PROMPT:

Is there a topic your main character or narrator is obsessed with? Take a break from plot indulge this. Start, perhaps, with a list, as Melville lists white things, from priestly alb to great white sharks, from white storms to the White Mountains. Once you have a list, explode that list into a meditation.

Even if a meditative nonfictional passage doesn't belong naturally to your work, you may end up with fragments that can be retained, or an essay that is a companion piece to your primary work, or a better understanding of your character.

If this idea interests you, push it in the direction that injects complexity and subtlety into your work. Explore, in your meditation, the inverse of your primary topic, as Melville plumbs dualities and opposites in considering whiteness. And think about the work that could be done obliquely. Though race is so often an issue in Moby-Dick — in Chapter 42 we're just coming down not just from Chapter 41, “Moby Dick,” but also 40, "Midnight, Forecastle," in which a knife fight occurs after a race baiting incident between the Spanish Sailor and Dagoo — Melville doesn't directly refer to the whiteness of people of European descent. He hardly has to, when he's turned his white leviathan into a symbol of evil.

How does the way your character understands and assigns value judgment regarding the topic of your nonfictional aside reflect their psyche? Push your meditation to include inversions, opposites, inferences and ironies.