Made of Crows: Fernanda Melchor's Ciphers (I)
In the second year of the MFA program at Syracuse University—mine fell during the spring of 2022—students are asked to write an extended “craft essay” on a single work. The aim of this sort of essay is to clarify something about your own project by looking closely at someone else’s. At the time, I was working on a novel (later turned into a story) that frequently shifted perspective, and also on a review of Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais. It seemed practical, then, to write my craft essay on Hurricane Season. I’ll share it here in four parts. Many thanks to my professor Dana Spiotta for her feedback on the essay-in-progress.
Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season constrains itself as follows: no paragraph breaks; limited third-person narration; one perspective per chapter; no repeat protagonists; a small cast, each of its characters bound to La Matosa, the quasi-Veracruzan village in which the novel’s central event, a killing, takes place. This killing is perhaps Melchor’s chief constraint; each of the novel’s five central chapters positions its protagonist in relation to it. We see into the minds of a witness (Yesenia, Chapter III), an accomplice (Munra, Chapter IV), a patient (Norma, Chapter V), and the killer (Brando, Chapter VI). The victim herself (the Witch, Chapter II) inhabits the eye of the storm: we do not see into her mind. Her chapter is narrated from a vast distance, as if by La Matosa’s residents, who hardly know her.
Why don’t we get to see the Witch from the inside? What would be compromised if we could? How does Melchor convey the Witch’s specific fears, desires, and inner conflicts while denying us her interior? I ask these questions because I grapple with versions of them in my own work as a fiction writer. How much distance should I keep from my characters, particularly the auto/biographical? Whose perspectives should I represent? Where should I place my silences? Here I read Melchor with Roberto Bolaño’s dictum (delivered via the character Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix) in mind: “One has a moral obligation to take responsibility for one’s actions, and that includes one’s words and silences, yes, one’s silences, because silences rise to heaven too, and God hears them, and only God understands and judges them, so one must be very careful with one’s silences.”1 In Hurricane Season, Melchor is careful with her silences. The study of craft that follows therefore attends to both the ethical and aesthetic implications of her formal choices.
When asked why she does not narrate the Witch’s interior, Melchor’s recourse is to intuition: “I always thought that I should preserve the mystery of the Witch as much as I could. I always had this intuition because she’s such a strange character. . . Like a real witch. . . her shape is like she’s made of crows.”2 What we might glean from Melchor’s response—aside from the fact that not all formal choices are consciously made, even if they are retroactively justified by readers like myself—is that her formal choice here (absence of interiority) arises from a narrative need (mystery). The Witch’s mystery is not merely an effect of the narrative, but its precondition. Or rather, the Witch’s mystery is an effect of the narrative and its precondition. It is an inherent quality of the material, yet it can be spoiled by the wrong formal choices. Otherwise, what is there to “preserve”?
Interiority is a big tool for a fiction writer to go without—especially as concerns her story’s protagonist. Perhaps to counterbalance this absence, Melchor renders the interior worlds of the other central characters to the extreme. In those characters, Melchor adopts an amped up free indirect style, what George Saunders might call “third-person ventriloquism”3: narration that gets so close to a character’s psyche that it takes on their idiosyncratic way of speaking—their voice. This deep embeddedness in a character’s psyche in some sense compromises the narration. To the extent that we are more sympathetic to ourselves than we are to others—to the extent that one tells oneself what Coetzee would call “the good story,” that is, “the story that suits us best, a story that justifies the way we have behaved in the past and behave in the present, a story in which we are generally right and other people are generally wrong”4—third-person ventriloquism cannot be trusted to directly reveal the “truth” of a character. Indeed, in Hurricane Season, a novel where the implied occasion for speech is testimony given to the police—that is, where each character has a vested interest in coming off in a good light—voice is almost synonymous with deceit. Hence the proliferation of voices: from the hodgepodge of unreliable viewpoints, the reader assembles her own version of reality. Even without this proliferation, the reader’s critical faculties would enable her to understand a character as a character cannot understand themself. Our defenses betray us; to quote Dana Spiotta quoting Gordon Lish quoting Julia Kristeva, “The speaking subject gives herself away.”5
Melchor’s speaking subjects look both inwards—at themselves—and outwards at each other. That is a perhaps euphemistic way of saying that while they delude themselves, they psychologically eviscerate each other. Munra may think he is not disabled, but his wife Chabela pulls no punches in her description of him. From his soliloquy: “Munra wasn’t one for chairs, he thought they made him look like a fucking cripple, a decrepit creature who couldn’t fend for himself, when the truth was he could get around just fine, even without his crutches, goddamn it, he didn’t need any help, there were his two legs and both in one piece, the left one just a little bent, that was all, right?”6 From hers: “he can do things with his tongue you wouldn’t believe. . . and that’s the only reason I don’t send him packing, the only reason I’ve put up with the useless cripple all these years.”7Even in the absence of cross-character contradictions, the reader would feel the irony at the level of the sentence: Munra, whose lexicon infiltrates the third-person narration (“fucking cripple”), betrays his doubt through his protestation (“he could get around just fine”) and his plea for agreement (“right?”). Chabela, for her part, must insist to herself (“the only reason. . . the only reason”) that there is no love left in her heart for the husband she by and large ignores—because if she did love him, now or in the past, and if she did acknowledge his other uses to her, she might feel disappointed in the way things have turned out, or feel guilty about her affair with Cuco Barrábas, the narco Munra fears she’s seeing. Munra and Chabela, like all of Melchor’s characters viewed from up close, are mired in delusion. Some truths, Melchor suggests, are too painful to face.
By redacting the Witch’s interior—and by extension, her delusions—Melchor makes her one of the most reasonable characters in the book. But one would be hard pressed to create a character through sheer subtraction; if a character is to exert their will within a narrative, they must in some sense be constructed. In the absence of the free indirect discourse that usually lays the foundation for character in a third-person narrative, what is the Witch made of? Gossip. Chisme. A whisper network. The Witch, in fiction as in reality—it bears mentioning that Melchor drew inspiration from a real-life woman who was murdered in a Veracruzan village on account of “witchcraft”—has no voice. The Witch exists primarily through the things said about her. The things said about her are not nice. A different version of this novel would use the license of fiction to center her psyche in lieu of those things, give voice to a victim who has been silenced by the femicidal culture that Melchor is criticizing. That version of this novel could be said to write itself into the silence of the archive. We might expect it to elicit our empathy for the Witch, inform us of her motives, and, implicitly, help us feel that she is human, like us.
But Hurricane Season does not explicitly invite the reader to empathize with the Witch. Each character through whom we see her fears her, reviles her, wants her money, wants her medicine, or wants her dead. The things said about her are not nice. Gossip rarely is. And yet the book itself cannot be said to scorn her. Her actions and her words reveal her to be more caring than the gossip suggests. She provides a good deal of her services to the local women free of charge—or for very little. When Norma, too far along in her pregnancy to safely have an abortion, comes to her for one, she initially says no; she does not want to harm the girl. (It is worth noting that Norma is her lover Luismi’s girlfriend; a less humane character would not care to protect the very person who keeps their lover away.) With help from these subtle gestures at the Witch’s humanity, the reader fills in the space where she is absent. As they undergo that effort, they come to empathize with her. They wade through the muck of everyone’s hatred for her, suspecting all the while that there is something on the other side of it, imagining that something. Melchor trusts the reader to participate (or, more cynically, implicates the reader) in the creation of the Witch’s character.
The second installment of this essay will be published on Wednesday, January 17. Receive it via email by subscribing below.
Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile, trans. Chris Andrews, (New Directions, 2003), 3.
https://tinhouse.com/transcript/between-the-covers-fernanda-melchor-interview/
George Saunders On Absurdism And Ventriloquism In 'Tenth Of December' : NPR
George Saunders has long been praised in literary circles for his short stories that deftly combine the absurd with the mundane. But now the author has caught mainstream attention with his newest collection, Tenth of December.
J. M. Coetzee and Arabella Kurtz, The Good Story (Penguin Books, 2015), 4.
Conversations with Gordon Lish, ed. David Winters and Jason Lucarelli (The University Press of Mississippi, 2018), 160.
HS, 61.
HS, 134.