On Fiction: An Introduction to 'The Crooked Little Pieces', or The Sunken Island of the Soul

Scribes' manifestos often rant about a creed or principles. This tells you what you have in common with my characters (as well as others’).

Cover for The Crooked Little Pieces: Volume 1 by Eloise G. Morgan.

Straits store veiled vaults of existence: civilisations, colonies and cliques impenetrable to inspection. Stained glass in texture, their contrasting colours speak of dipping paw-sized fingers into wells; of earache caused by daily diving for one’s dinner; cherry stones and wishbones clustered in a makeshift waste bin.

Fantasy tastes saltier with seascapes - but the customs aforelisted constituted life in a small Neolithic village off the coast of Israel’s Haifa some nine thousand years ago: a set of cultural exchanges in which cooking meant the sound of sizzling oil and spring a throng of pollen-pestered sneezing children; citizens complained of toothache while the grieving adorned graves with gifts.

Bouquets were hardly sought after. While axes were a must-have for defunct men, grindstones made for tributes to lost women. Frescos conjure scenes of our forgotten ancestors but stop short of depicting this lost cosmos, now named Atlit Yam. Its offerable visions remained out of sight until a clan of keen-eyed archaeologists dug far into the deep to snatch the curtains sealing hunched-up skeletons and scraps of grain, wild grapes and poppies late in 1987.

Swift are the newest generations to dismiss these individuals whose daily grind comprised the deeds of swimming, fishing, calling for their kids to come back from the beach for dinner. Scant traces feature after countless earthquakes, wars, tsunamis and relentless shipwrecks. Clutter shades the souvenirs of those whose islet may have been destroyed by a tsunami – or wiped out by inundating sea levels. They make up grounds resistant to our tread; some samples whose faint outlines easily fatigue our straining eyes. Even on television.

Obscured by equal obfuscation is the mystery of how a homogeneous species slowly morphed into a thing inscrutable. In The Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Mating, Marriage and Why We Stray, anthropologist and matchmaking aficionado Helen Fisher shares the theory that originally we were sexless: heaps of cells stuck in an endless struggle to transfer our lonely genes. At loss to let them reproduce, it took our formless former selves half an eternity to process procreation – and progress the little lame worth that we had.¹

Fast-forward several million years. So far-evolved are we that even turbo-speed technology evades our limited complexity. One hundred billion neurons (round about) compose a brain allegedly the largest among mammals (some might question that). Following our centuries of cinching deals and sealing gaps and singling out the best and worst we have become as blurred and insurmisable as those few fractions left of human frames, flora and fauna in the bay of Atlit.

Kant argued – somewhat like his predecessor, Plato – that these images at which we marvel or express dismay were things of fiction: dreams pulled out of thin air like a magician’s rabbit from a hat. Verbiage and vistas, stanzas and stirrings don’t suffice to close a chasm carven wider with the nearing of our continents. As psychiatrist Irvin Yalom described at the ripe age of eighty-two in Yalom’s Cure (2014), “When we get into trouble, very often, it's the expression of parts of ourselves that we don't know very well... We all have to face questions about isolation; we all want to merge and pair; to submerge this lonely ‘I’ into a ‘We’; these are universal... What we live for… [but] there's a unique world that each of us inhabit because no one has had the exact same experiences as you have had. No matter how close we try to relate to another person, there's something - some space, that can never be bridged.”

Insight of such a lofty height is granted only craftsmen with a special superpower. Shrinks, spies and private eyes are humbled by their enviable omniscience.

These men and women are narrators.

Steering stories into storms of their own making, scribes belie the notion that the soul is scarcely touchable. So sage are they that even our fugacious nature is discerned with sharp sophistication: “A person…” wrote Proust in the third volume of his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, “is a shadow which we can never penetrate, of which there can be no such thing as direct knowledge, with respect to which we form countless beliefs, based upon words and sometimes actions, neither of which can give us anything but inadequate and as it proves contradictory information — a shadow behind which we can alternately imagine with equal justification, that there burns the flame of hatred and of love.”²

Imagining is no necessity in fiction – where the author puts the secrets of our stand-ins on an indiscreet display. Wuthering Heights’ Cathy and Heathcliff would have never told us of their sentiments; not we, mere mortals. But the omnipresent Nelly with her infinite capacity has etched into art’s walls specifics more explicit than the ones we know about ourselves:

The two, to a cool spectator, made a strange and fearful picture…. Her present countenance had a wild vindictiveness in its white cheek, and a bloodless lip and scintillating eye; and she retained in her closed fingers a portion of the locks she had been grasping. As to her companion, while raising himself with one hand, he had taken her arm with the other; and so inadequate was his stock of gentleness to the requirements of her condition, that on his letting go I saw four distinct impressions left blue in the colourless skin.³

Shame shuns our consciousness from sighting traits like these within: we stay oblivious too often to invisible shenanigans. Not so for the erratically jealous in the world of lyrical confusion; those stupefied by pain so much they start to feed on it like leeches on a corpse.

Such a forlorn soul is Charles Swann: protagonist of Proust’s The Way by Swann’s. When he discovers, after piquant pining and self-punishment, that his beloved Odette has hidden from him special facts – lesbian liaisons, more precisely – he can’t help delight in masochism. “Odette, from whom all this harm came to him, was no less dear to him,” explains his overseer Proust. “Quite the contrary, more precious, as if at the same rate that his suffering increased, the value of the sedative increased, of the antidote which only this woman possessed.”⁴

Missives marinating in moroseness are in large part inabsorbable in real life: letters obstinately tiresome.

In the other world – that possibly superior world – they’re accidental snippets of exposure. Like a child whose restless legs tell Mummy he’s still waiting for the interval.  The nameless heroine of Stefan Zweig’s Letter from an Unknown Woman (1922) has loved her object from afar for decades; even spending three nights in his company in the beguiling guise of a poor prostitute. Their son (of whom he never knew) has died, and finally she chooses to confess – on the condition, nonetheless – that her avowal reach him only following her death.

A dead woman wants nothing; neither love, nor compassion, nor consolation… I am going to tell you my whole life, the life which did not really begin until the day I first saw you. What I can recall before that day is gloomy and confused, a memory as of a cellar filled with dusty, dull and cobwebbed things and people – a place with which my heart has no concern.⁵

Delightedly derisive grimaces today would relish stressing the tenacious Fraulein’s madness: it would make for a good tabloid scoop. But in the comforting enclosure of this tale her stifled feelings come off as a shy disclosure: stencil art discovered on the caves of Sulawesi said to have been etched thirty-five thousand years ago. Demureness drapes the long epistle in the cloak of sympathy: her words seem to address not denizens in daunting numbers – readers all around the world in every state and every language – but the mere recipient of you. And you alone.

Authors rarely bare so broad an inner scope in their own letters. “I had a great shave and began to dress.” writes Vladimir Nabokov to his dear wife Vera. “It turned out that the sleeves of my tuxedo were too short, that is, that the cuffs of the beautiful silk shirt of the same provenance stuck out too far…” Chekhov, Master of the Unsaid, urges sister Masha: “Find out in the shops what the best mouse poison is; the bastards have eaten the wallpaper up to four feet from the floor in the drawing room.”⁶

Insipidness sips too much of the everyday; occasionally slurping to pronounce our bold banality. But life is more than psyches’ sinking caves and splitting islands. Minds missing memories make up immodest morsels of its habits: ruminations made as flapping collars fight with winter’s wails; stern concentration on intrepid obstacles en route to the invariably stoic bus stop. Days which, as Nabokov wrote in his first novel Mary, are “devoid even of that dreamy expectancy which can make idleness so enchanting.”⁷ Greeting someone in the same apartment block whilst feeling for one’s keys; counting the hours, days and weeks until the end of a long shift/school day/insufferable stay of friends; considering how long it might take to reach Costco as opposed to Tesco if you take the second exit. This is the unique stuff souls are made of.

As advertised, The Crooked Little Pieces is a soap opera. Additionally it’s an invitation to converse about the scarcely spoken; dare to dive into that conversation with the friend – the one who moved abroad with that weird guy nobody liked – to dig into the reasons for her actions still unknown to her. It offers you a one-way ticket to the ride into the risky repartee you never offered (how could it then have got any response?) and lays bare tattered pages of the diary you forgot existed. It recognises how much you don’t know about yourself; how much you’re loath to know and strong-willed in your stand to stay that way.

Graspability applies to just a few phenomena in life: gadgets primarily; the fuel gauge; gallons in the bath and garish birthday cards. Together with an opus of still-permeable literature, The Crooked Little Pieces is for those who seek to feel their fibres and a character’s sensations overlapping overleaf. It tells you more than platitudes exchanged in pricey psychotherapy. As muse Emily Brontë wrote in To Imagination, it is “Where thou, and I, and Liberty/Have undisputed sovereignty.”⁸

Relics, remnants, rest stops shrink with squinting eyes.

Exploration nonetheless is only in its infancy.

The Crooked Little Pieces: Volume 1 will be published on 25th May. Order it now on Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, Google Play, Barnes & Noble or other retailers.

---

1. H. Fisher, The Anatomy of Love: A Natural History of Marriage, Mating and Why We Stray: W.W. Norton, 2016, p. 45

2. M. Proust trans. D.J. Enright, The Guermantes Way:  Random House Edition, p. 82 (originally published in French 1920/1921)

3. E. Brontë, Wuthering Heights: Oneworld Classics Edition, 2007 (originally published 1847), p. 136

4. Proust trans. Lydia Davis, The Way by Swann’s: Penguin Classics Edition, 2013 (Originally published in French 1913), p. 365

5. S. Zweig trans. Eden and Cedar Paul, Letter from an Unknown Woman in Selected Stories, Pushkin Press Edition (originally published in German 1922), p. 83

6. 1894 letter from Anton Chekhov to his sister Maria Palovna Chekhova (“Masha”) in D. Reyfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life: Northwestern University Press, 1997

7. V. Nabokov, trans.  by the author in collaboration with Michael Glenny, Mary: Penguin Classics Great Loves Edition (originally published in Russian 1926), p. 20

8. E. Brontë, The Night is Darkening Round Me: poems from Janet Gezari’s edition of The Complete Poems, first published by Penguin Books in 1992. This selection published by Penguin Classics in 2015.