by Blair Austin, author of Dioramas
I’d like to start off by saying I have no idea how to write a hybrid novel even though I have written one. The truth is, Dioramas found its form by trial and error. Every book is a graveyard of the books it failed to be. I wish this were not true but it is.
Dioramas first came to me as the voice of an old man speaking out of the darkness. From his voice and situation—both of which arrived in a single moment, language and idea at the same time—I knew the world he lived in, I knew the strange, rainy city and I could feel the auditorium full of people listening to him lecture. This was a world far in the future, built on the ruins of our own world, that looked and felt like our past. I even knew it was summer and it was raining outside and because the old man (who later became Wiggins) was speaking about The Diorama of the Taxidermist, I knew that this was a world obsessed with the museum diorama. It was a world with dioramas everywhere—in ever-proliferating museums and also in department stores, in people’s homes, even inside children’s transparent candies. I came to know this all at once when Wiggins began to speak.
The problem was, I had to discover what that first vision, that first diorama of a taxidermist, himself taxidermied, really implied about this city. So begins the story of mistakes that went on for somewhere between seven to ten years, depending on when you start the clock.
A host of different “modes” of telling kept coming up. There were “lecturing,” essayistic sections. There were short sections describing dioramas, with animals and people displayed, that were essentially ekphrastic tries at describing “works” that did not in fact exist, like you’d describe a sculpture or painting you saw in a museum. There were prose poem forays into the meaning of it all that came from the half-gone memory of the lecturer in the form of reminiscences about his past, and finally, a long travel narrative where Wiggins journeys by train across The Diorama of the Town, hundreds of miles across. In short, a kind of controlled chaos that had to be organized in such a way as to pull a reader through.
I knew I needed a structural apparatus to give shape to the book, so I decided to break the thing up into two, separate, stand-alone novellas. Book One would be called, “Animals,” Book Two, “People.” Book One would be organized around the “logic” of poetry and feel like Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, or so I thought at the time, where the pieces fit together with compelling echoes across the prose poems and a feeling of the deeps all around. I arranged Book One carefully so that there was a pull—you were pulled through and you couldn’t quite figure out why—and a feeling of connected but unstated ideas, repeating image clusters, all (and this was the key, I learned along the way) held together by the struggling consciousness of the fussy old man, Wiggins, whose eye was very meticulous. The book would be how he felt about everything (which, being a reserved person, he would never admit to but accidentally “tell” us); this would be the emotional core of the book. And then Book Two with a train journey would speed along just by virtue of its travel narrative and the building sense of the two men, Wiggins and Emery, coming to understand one another. Ultimately, Book One would “teach” us how to read itself and how to take Book Two.
At issue the whole way was the question of whether it was possible to paint the portrait of an imaginary city entirely through dioramas—its history, its physical characteristics, its people and habits—the entire scene. What would stay or go, then, would depend on how each section advanced that picture and whether it contained Wiggin’s inner life.
But the thing is, I couldn’t get out of the way and kept going down false paths, wrong dioramas, straining toward what I felt the book was about all along: the unsayable. The thing beyond language that we intuit but can’t speak because there are no words for how it feels. I can’t tell you how many times I thought I had it—the thing itself—and would state baldly in the text what I thought the “core” was. Only to return, sometimes years later, to see I’d gone down the wrong path because everything from the very beginning would be, and would have to be by its very nature, hidden in plain sight. Death within life. The inside in the outside, separated by glass. The past in the present.
The biggest problem was, if I reached for story, straight narrative, there would be no reason for the very core of the book to exist: the dioramas themselves, static and nonnarrative, would have to go. On the other side of the coin, if the book were going to be a “pure” one, inscrutable with only the cold dioramas there to see, there would be no reason for character or I’d have to twist myself in knots, beating the conceit to death, only to have in the end a simple, boring conceit to show for it. And in a book of cold dioramas there would be no reason for the central consciousness of Wiggins himself.
The hybridity that resulted was just the result of the effort to balance the push-pull of the book’s two poles, the human and the inhuman, so that each made the other possible and at the same time impossible, existing side by side in every moment. That balance represented by the diorama, between the living and the dead, the inside and the outside. The false binaries of existence would be—I thought, anyway—the book’s very core. I didn’t set out to do this or that. If I’m honest, I really wanted that cold, “pure” book—inscrutable and unknowable and built on the back of poetry—the book I couldn’t have.
I suspected I was writing a conceptual novel. I also told myself I was writing a book of “world-building.” I was both right and wrong, I see now.
Funny enough, just to get away from all this conceptuality, when the book was ready to go to Dzanc, I began what I hoped would be a straightforward, realist detective novel set in a Michigan truck stop. But, yet again. That wasn’t my path, at least for now. I am going to have to intuit my way through whatever I write. If I’m lucky.
Blair Austin was born in Michigan. A former prison librarian, he is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan where he won Hopwood awards for Fiction and Essay. He lives in Massachusetts. Dioramas is his first novel.
