Writing The Sacred

Peggy Payne

SOME years ago, in the darkest days of trying to finish my first novel, I happened to attend a lecture by the renowned literary critic Alfred Kazin, then a visiting scholar at the nearby campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Mr. Kazin's topic was God in American fiction; and his complaint was that God did not seem much present in our contemporary fiction, including most of that which purported to be devoted to the subject.

At the time, I was engaged in the arduous process of revising a novel about a highly intellectual minister at a Chapel Hill church who hears the voice of God while grilling shish kebabs in his back yard. The Rev. Swain Hammond had never believed in a God who talks out loud in English, and is thus presented with a crisis.

As I sat in the lecture hall that day, I knew I had a manuscript that Mr. Kazin had to see: the answer to his wish for fiction that dealt substantively with the divine. I went back to my office and got it. Boldly, on behalf of my manuscript, I went back to campus and tracked down the great critic in his temporary office. Before he left Chapel Hill , Kazin was kind enough to read the first chapter. He wrote me a note about those pages, the content of which stays with me today. Essentially, he said my style was "too fluent," too consistently smooth to reflect what should be present in the story. He suggested that when God speaks out loud in the yard, the event should have sufficient force to disrupt or break the style.

That novel, Revelation, did eventually come out, published by Simon and Schuster in 1988. Yet for me that issue lingered: how style shifts and breaks and makes room for the big subjects. It gradually became clear to me that I needed to be able, at will, to break through the flow of anecdote and scene that are the main tools of a fiction writer's craft. When I set out to write Sister India, a novel set in a holy city beside a holy river, the question became central.

I decided to do some formal research on the question of metaphysics and style. The catalyst was an invitation to be a guest lecturer at Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi , India . I had been awarded an Indo-American Fellowship to spend three months learning about Hinduism and the city of Varanasi , or Benares , where Sister India would be set. Part of the fellowship arrangement was that I would provide some service to an Indian university. So I wrote to the head of the English Department at BHU, a huge and highly regarded school, and offered to give a few talks. Possible subjects included contemporary fiction of the American South, where I live.

The invitation I received in response made no mention of Southern fiction. Instead, I was asked to give talks for graduate students on particular works by Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, Saul Bellow, and Herman Melville.

I was dismayed. The last time I had read any of the books listed was during my own student days in the 1960s. What I had done in the intervening years was write-books, articles, scripts, brochures. I'm not an academic; I know virtually nothing of theory or criticism. And most of my teaching then was a half-day workshop once a year on "How to Sell What You Write." Dubious preparation for this new assignment.

So I began to prepare. For six weeks, I re-immersed myself in books I hadn't looked at since my days as a student at Duke University , and in the critical writings about them. In that time, I came to a sort of turning point: I decided to look at the books technically, from the point of view of a novelist wanting to learn how to write better, rather than as a critical scholar. (As much time as I was spending on these talks, I figured I'd better learn something useful.) I emerged from my studies with a second education.

The most important lesson I learned comes back to the one urged upon me years ago by Mr. Kazin: the question of how style properly accommodates its subject. The text for my study was Herman Melville's Moby-Dick .

Who among us, I said to myself, has not been at least temporarily buffaloed by Moby-Dick? I could claim to have read it. As a college senior, getting the teacher's certificate that my parents required of me, I had taught an abridged version of this novel to high school students in Raleigh , North Carolina .

My tenure as a student teacher was not the happiest; I thought and still think it's the most demanding work I've ever done. My discomfort at trying to "teach" Moby-Dick to thirty-some kids almost my age was so obvious that one student offered me his assistance. One afternoon after school, slumped at my desk recovering from the day's battering, I looked up and Ira was standing in front of me. He was one of the stars of third period, a wiry little guy with a wild head of Einstein hair, who carried a briefcase that banged around his knees when he walked.

"Miss Payne," he said, standing before me with his briefcase, "I'm going to help you get through this."

Ira, as it turned out, had a totally different view of Moby-Dick than I did. His strategy for getting all of us through my teacher training was that he would offer his counter-interpretation of the book in class, and see what happened. In the coming days, Ira rallied about half the class to his side, and a hot debate raged for weeks. Thanks to Ira, the unit on Moby-Dick was a success . So when I learned I was going to be talking about the book once again, I thought of him. Curious, I called the teacher who had been my supervisor at the high school where I taught. I learned he's now a full professor of math at the University of Chicago , which meant that I was on my own.

What I wanted to discover in my study of Moby-Dick was precisely how a writer manages to stir in readers a sense of awe, wonder, and amazement. Typically, a reader is stirred to ask: Who is this captain? What is this whale? Take a look at one brief example of the grossly out-of-fashion sort of writing that provokes these questions, the description of the "spirit-spout:"

It was while gliding through these latter waters that one serene and moonlight night, when all the waves rolled by like scrolls of silver; and, by their soft, suffusing seethings, made what seemed a silvery silence, not a solitude: on such a silent night a silvery jet was seen far in advance of the white bubbles at the bow. Lit up by the moon, it looked celestial; seemed some plumed and glittering god uprising from the sea.

The typical reader reaction comes through clearly in a survey of American teachers teaching Moby-Dick, published by the Modern Language Association of America. One teacher wrote: "Last year my encounter with MD was deep; it was disturbing, terrifying and joyful.... It was my own struggle with the ungraspable phantom of life. At the risk of being eternally stove and sunk, I fully and deeply explored the Ishmael and the Ahab within myself, and I survived."

D.H. Lawrence also commented on this quality of the novel. In his Studies in Classic American Literature, he says of Melville, "his book commands a stillness in the soul.... There is something really overwhelming in these whale hunts, almost superhuman or inhuman, bigger than life, more terrific than any human activity."

Ever since the book reached its first burst of critical acclaim, people have been arguing about what exactly its powerful symbols mean. Which is the god and which is the devil? What is the natural order and what is the violent disruption? Are we supposed to sympathize with Ahab or the whale? There will probably never be consensus about what Melville is saying in Moby-Dick about good and evil, death and God. Certainly neither Ira and I, nor the two factions in third-period English ever did agree. While I don't remember Ira's interpretation or my own at that time, what has lingered for me is the sense of power and presence within the book that overrides all of its persistent ambiguities. Melville evokes with his prose the same kind of awe we reserve for whatever we consider to be holy. He is doing this, in large measure, through the use of some clear-cut and describable techniques.

As my own guide for this study, I used a book by the theologian Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy . Otto describes ways in which art can express what he calls the numinous, the sense of the divine radiating from a particular object. Melville made use of these methods years before Otto wrote his book. My Sister India relies on them too.

According to Otto, the idea of the holy or awesome in art is best expressed by a combination of two factors: the appearance of power and the sense of mystery. What is described must seem, by force or size, immense, and in addition there must be some sense that we cannot fully know or comprehend what we are seeing. Power and mystery brought together produce a strong response, in fact, a set of dual responses: we feel both attracted and hesitant, both humbled and exalted, both fearful and joyful.

In Moby-Dick, size and force are depicted in the most monumental terms. In every way, the story is presented on a grand scale: the desolate stretch of open ocean, the vast whale. Captain Ahab, the "grand ungodly godlike man," is made powerful by his fury, defiance, and superhuman tenacity. The members of the crew and the industry of whaling, down to its smallest tasks, are all glorified. A night of dancing on deck becomes a party held on the graves of sunken ships and drowned whaling men.

My novel is the story of an American woman who has given up on life in the United States and run away to a distant place that she expects to be a sanctuary: the Hindu holy city of Varanasi . When I began writing, on return from my three months of note-taking in India , I did not know what the story would be or who the main character was. About a week after my return, as I worked at my compute r on some minor task, a sentence came to mind: I am the keeper of a small guesthouse in the holiest city in India . I wrote it on a scrap of paper and took it acros s the room and left it on a shelf. A week later I retrieved it and began typing:

I am the keeper of a small guesthouse in the holiest city in India . For more than twenty years-all my adult life-I have lived here: my great weight sunk, torpid in the heat, into this sagged chair on my rooftop patio, or presiding downstairs at the table that guards the entryway: a once-American woman, taking down the passport number of each traveler, managing this inn for the Mohan Joshi family.

The newly arrived always stare: at my bloated flesh bathing in sweat, my fair coloring marked by freckles. I am not what one expects to find hidden away in this place.

This is my home, though, the Saraswati, eleven rooms and a little restaurant, a view of the river, which at this moment burns with early morning light. From my roof I watch it go by: the Ganges , Ganga it is called in Hindi by those who revere the river goddess.

I gave myself a Hindi name long ago, only weeks after my arrival here. I am Natraja. It has come to suit me well. I answer to it in my dreams; never mind that I was born Estelle, forty-odd years ago. Such an old-fashioned farm-wife name did not fit me.

As Natraja, I have gained a modest fame. The Lonely Planet travel guide each year advises the adventurous to come to my table: "Mother Natraja at the Saraswati is worth a side trip. A one-woman blend of East and West."

What the guidebook does not mention is that I weigh perhaps four hundred pounds, twenty-five-or-so stone. I have more flesh than Ganesha, the elephant-faced one.

I had not planned to write a story about a woman of such size. But her voice is what came to me as I sat at my screen. Because it felt right, I left her that way. I was not then consciously thinking of what I'd learned about hugeness months earlier from Melville and Otto. But the ideas and images had sunk in.

My psychologist husband, Bob Dick, often reminds me of the way ideas and images do sink in. If I say that I'm stupid for having lost something or forgotten something, he says to watch what I say to myself: "The unconscious doesn't take a joke." I'd spent so much time meditating on the white whale that I'd unwittingly produced my own pale giant, an enormous woman as ill-tempered as Ahab.

Melville had other ways of producing the sense of mighty power. For one, he used Shakespearean cadence, diction, and syntax. I hate to think of the response a modern writer would get sending an agent or editor a manuscript written in such a style. Yet for Melville it worked as a way of making the subject even larger, because that language is innately dramatic, what Melville himself called "a bold and nervous lofty language." And he gets power simply by association. Shakespearean English has long been considered the most elevated form of our language; those characteristic phrasings communicate a sense of importance.

My narrator Natraja, this dislocated, belonging-nowhere woman who has lived for twenty years in Varanasi, speaks Indian English, with its distinct rhythms and construction: "Only this I am telling you," she begins. I became aware that her speech, unusual among American voices, is a source of strength for her. Her eerie mix of Indian and American styles unnerves the foreign travelers at her inn and keeps her set apart.

But it is the Ganges , the river that runs through the holy city, that must convey the greatest power in Sister India. I kept coming back to it, as the citizens of Varanasi do, so that the river came to feel omnipresent, as it felt to me when I lived there.

I've also learned a few things from my husband, who uses hypnosis in his clinical practice. Hypnotic trance is essentially a state of relaxed concentration on one thing, which then allows other thoughts and sensations to fall into the background or go unnoticed. "Getting lost in a book" is one common example. If I'm so deeply involved in a story that I don't realize someone is talking to me, then I'm in a sort of trance. In that state hours can feel like minutes. As a reader, I want that from a novel, and I want to offer my own readers that gift.

Hypnotic elements helped me to convey the power and mystery of these holy sites. I used precise sensory information: particular details of how the city looks, feels, smells, sounds, and tastes. When the American traveler Jill comes to the sacred place on the river where bodies are cremated, I wrote: "She could feel the heat of the nearest fires on her face. Down where the men were shoveling up ash, the firelight flickering on their sweat-soaked necks and shoulders, the temperature must be deadly. The smell of grease would soak into your very pores."

Like a hypnotist, I relied on cadence to subliminally comfort and relax. The voice of Natraja in particular has a characteristic rhythm: short bursts followed now and again with a longer sentence, a sort of held note, to break the rhythm and keep the reader from being lulled to sleep. She describes the tourists coming into the center city with its medieval feel: "They've read on the train: this is the Hindu holy city, the place to die, to have the body burned and offered to Ganga , the place to bathe and be purified. Yet they don't know how it feels to walk into a lane only two sets of shoulders wide and look behind them to discover the exit is no longer in sight."

I also wrote directly of hypnotic experience: the obese Natraja falls into the soothing rhythm of eating. As a newcomer to India she takes part in an evening ritual, moving a candle or torch in an upright circle before the image of the deity. The crashing, dissonant music is so strange to her that it holds her attention, and everything disappears but this time and place.

Melville also built a sense of awe and sacredness by "breaking" his style-just as Kazin suggested to me-shifting from form to form throughout the novel: from sea story to essay to stage play to rhetoric and poetry. He manages to imply that his story is too large for any one traditional form.

He uses anew classic visual images that evoke the dual responses of awe and wonder. When the crew is chasing its first whale and is swamped in the midst of a violent squall, a dot of light shows the vastness of the surrounding dark: Queequeg in "the driving scud, rack, and mist..., holding up that imbecile candle in the heart of that almighty forlornness." A physical sense of emptiness, great distance, stillness, or silence can fill us with awe.

Rudolf Otto points out that the Hebrew word for hallow means to keep something holy in the heart by marking it off with a feeling of peculiar dread. "It first begins to stir," he writes, "in the feeling of 'something uncanny,' 'eerie,' or 'weird.' It is this feeling which, emerging in the mind of primeval man, forms the starting-point for the entire religious development in history." It seems to me that believers and nonbelievers share this-beginning with our childhood fear of the dark.

I felt that shudder in my first view of the Ganges . It was my first day in Varanasi , almost noon when I came out onto the river at a spot near the end of the famous stone bathing ghats that stair-step up from the water up to the narrow lanes. The river seemed flattened by the heat, wide, bluish-gray-green. It was hours past the early morning ritual baths, and quiet. I picked my way down the steps to the water, each step the height of two to three steps on an ordinary flight of stairs; the drop to the river, several stories. No one was close by, only a few people here and there in the distance. To my left I could see the whole curve of river shore, spires of temples, the dome of a mosque, the massive old riverfront palaces. The sight seemed to become less real the longer I looked. It was too still. The water was moving though, inches from where I stood, sliding smoothly along the concrete lip of the ghat . Garbage floated at the edge, dead garlands of flowers and what looked like household trash. The riffle of the water only made the stillness seem more absolute. The bobbing garbage, the weight of the heat, the silence felt ominous. There was nothing to do. No one to watch. I didn't like it.

Finally, there's a way to evoke awe and mystery that is so obvious it could easily be overlooked: carefully choosing what to include in the story in the first place. As the foundation of Sister India I used what I felt to be at the heart of the actual city. Much of its sense of holiness seemed to come from philosophies of cycles, circling, repeating, and rebeginning. The winding maze at the center of the city, the sense that all things in Varanasi come back to the river, the daily repurification at dawn, the larger cycles of life turning and turning, the funeral pyres that have burned steadily day and night for thousands of years, rebirth, Shiva creating and destroying, the circles of women who sing at the riverbank, the infinitely repeated rituals, the circular pilgrimage route around the city, the river pouring on-all these, for me, wind round the great and elusive mystery, moving sometimes closer and sometimes farther away.

The lecture I was to give on Moby-Dick -so I could go to India to write the book that would use the tools I learned from Melville-was delayed until late in my stay because Hindu-Muslim violence had closed the city down. Naively I had imagined that my winter in a holy city to be a time of note-taking and contemplation. I should have known better. Holy cities are coveted turf, Jerusalem being another good example. Acts of terrorism and retaliation had led to two weeks of round-the-clock curfew in the city of one million, lifted only for a few hours at a time in staggered neighborhoods. All businesses were closed; everybody was to stay home; this was enforced by police, the Gurkhas, and other paramilitary units.

Later, when calm had been restored, I took a rickshaw to the campus and delivered my prepared remarks on Melville's techniques to a small group of earnest students who appeared to take down every word I said. When I had finished talking, I put Melville aside for years.

I did not think back, while I was writing, about Melville and my study of him.

What I thought of were the details of the city, the river, the people I knew there, and the characters who had begun to develop. I saw how ineffective the phrase that I'd repeatedly read before going to Varanasi was, that the city was perhaps the most exotic place on earth . I would not argue with that. But the abstract word exotic had not let me feel a single sensation of what life would be like there. My first ten minutes in the city "broke"-as Kazin said-every expectation I'd had. The city interrupted my way of thinking and of doing things. That unexpectedness is also part of the awe and mystery.

The last paragraph of the talk I gave in a classroom in Varanasi said this: Melville leaves us in doubt about what Ahab and the whale actually stand for. He leaves us exhausted by his book's length and intensity and sometimes bombastic language. Yet he also leaves us with absolute certainty that we have encountered something that is larger than any one captain or any one fish. I want Sister India to give the feeling of a mysterious edge, an unrelenting flow that is greater than any river or any riverbank city. That's what I'm after, as a writer and a reader: a glimpse of the force with the power to gather and carry and purify everything.

Issue #39-Summer 2003