Black-balled from The Liar's Club

 I wrote a story called "Another Journey By Train" and sent it to a friend to read. He asked me what the story meant. And I'm not sure I'm able to answer that question. 

There are quite obviously "themes" in it. There are events. Stuff happens. But the narrative is fractured, unreliable, and the main character doesn't know what's going on. He's unlikable and smug, a nasty piece of work. He'll get a sort of comeuppance. He's haunted by strange dreams, and a look-alike is walking abroad committing terrible if non-specific crimes, while wearing his face. He's trying to track down a phantom beer he once tasted, and that he can never forget and never find. 

Those are the sorts of things that happen in the story. It's dreamlike, wayward. You experience the protagonist's confusion and rising panic, you see his consumption and degradation. That's what its about. That's what it means. 

Is it a fair question? "What does it mean?" What does "what does it mean" mean? The story is the story. It either works or it doesn't. I've signed it off, I've called it finished. That's why I stopped writing it. It has achieved the effects I wanted it to, to the best of my ability. I have considered it worth sending out into the world and, as far as I'm concerned, it's done. Perhaps contrary to how this sounds, I love notes. I want criticism. But asking me to explain what the story is, is the opposite of that. It seems like a refusal to meet your part of the bargain. I don't want to engage, John, tell what I'm supposed to feel? I'm busy, mate, could you give me a reader's digest? 

Is it a sort of artistic dereliction to not want to explain it away? Obviously, I know my intentions for the story - it went through any number of re-writes before I was half-way pleased with its shape, it's finish. But do I have to tell people what it's about? Is that the job of a writer? 

I wrote a story previously where a man receives a series of mysterious parcels - all sent from Sweden - in the post. After opening the first package, which contained fingernail parings, he doesn't open the rest. They just sit in his kitchen, while he frets quietly about them. 

The story ends with the protagonist about to snip the hairy string on the package with scissors, and find out what he's been sent. We are not told what is inside. Some people who read the story were outraged. Was is a two parter? You can't just leave it there - you have a responsibility to the reader. I was confused. I was surprised that people so involved in reading the story couldn't work out what was in the packages - it was generously seeded throughout. But more than that, I was amazed people need to be told, that they needed that certainty. For me that story - and, in fact, "Another Journey By Train" -  are mysterious. That is the quality that they have. They are nebulous and uncertain. That is the effect I'm looking to present. 

I know what I think is happening in "Another Journey By Train", just as I knew what was in the packages in "Please, Please Mr Postman". But I'm not telling. That is the nature of the story I have chosen to tell. You have to work it out. Or you have to not work it out and not worry about it. Read it again. Let the words wash over you. Inhabit the text, fill it with bits of yourself, become part of the story. That's your bit to do as a reader. You have responsibilities. This is not a passive experience - you're a reader, God dammit! 

The novel "Picnic at Hanging Rock" was originally written with an explanatory final chapter, explaining exactly what happened to the girls on that fateful Valentines Day in 1900. The author, Joan Lindsay, was advised to drop it by her editor, and the book was published without its punchline. It was the right choice. With the ending you've got an odd meditation on time, holes in space and indigenous Australian belief. Without it you've got a hazy, evocative mystery for the ages. 

We live in howling chaos. Everything seems terrible all the time. I get it. Of course I do. Demanding an explanation as to what happens in a story springs from the same existential panic that sees people clinging to conspiracy theories: its cosier and safer to assume somebody, somewhere knows what's going on, however iniquitous they might be. At least there's someone to blame. But often I write about limited, guileless people who don't know what's going on, who find themselves in terrible circumstances and can't find a way out of all the horror. People on the threshold of discovering they have no real purchase on the world, that everything goes wrong all the time, and they'll never know why as there are no explanations. The world is not neat. To be poor and ignorant and powerless is a very dangerous thing to be, and I'm very frightened because I tick every box. 

To demand a summing up in a story, to require it to parcel itself off and render itself neat, looks downright dishonest. I'm not lying to you. I'm just telling you a story.