He’d anticipated, when he set out to write his first novel, that he would encounter obstacles emotional, intellectual, and psychological, obstacles filial, familial, and financial, obstacles of sterility, banality, and unoriginality, the obstacle of finding an agent, the obstacle of finding a publisher, but he had not anticipated, despite manifestations of obsessive-compulsive disorder elsewhere in his life, that he would feel compelled—or, rather, obligated—to manually justify his own text in Microsoft Word; in other words, to tinker, endlessly, with each sentence, sometimes for hours, pruning it and expanding it, adding and deleting words, uncontracting contractions and then recontracting them, making commas dashes and dashes commas, until that sentence lined up flush with the others, on the right-hand margin of Microsoft Word.
That, he told me, was a surprise!
Or not necessarily flush, exactly: the sentences did not, and do not, need to be uniformly flush to the right-hand margin, although of course that was, and is, ideal; there were, and are, certain “extremely symmetric patterns,” the most fundamental of these being a flush sentence followed by a not-flush sentence followed by a sentence precisely as flush as the first, that his brain permitted, and still seems to permit. His brain signals that permission, whenever a sentence fits properly into place, with an intensely satisfying and almost audible little click.
Why, he wondered, in addition to all the obstacles intrinsic and natural to writing, did his brain, the very organ that he thought would help him write fiction, actually supply a further obstacle, one that, besides being totally unexpected, was utterly pointless, wholly debilitating, and completely crazy?
The pointlessness of the behavior, which sucked up and continues to suck up huge swathes of his life, can hardly be overstated. Even if he succeeded in lining up all of his sentences on the right-hand margin of Word, he would then send the manuscript off to an agent who, with a single minor edit on page 1, would throw all of his painstaking formatting out of whack, unwittingly eliminating, with a well-intended keystroke, years of labor; and even if she edited nothing, his editor would probably edit something, and destroy everything; and even if his editor edited nothing, his copy editor would change a “1” to a “one,” and thereby destroy everything; and even if his copy editor destroyed nothing, the manuscript would then be typeset properly, his sentences would be lined up by a professional using the appropriate technology, by no means Microsoft Word, and his flush sentences would be jettisoned for the typesetter’s even flusher ones; and even if none of that happened, if his book were never properly typeset, if it were never copy edited, if it were never edited, even if he never found an agent, even if he self-published his book, simply uploaded his Word document to the Internet—even then no one would notice his meticulously, madly flush right-hand margin, since even he, while reading, paid almost no attention to the right-hand margin, ragged or justified, he paid almost no attention to it at all, a ragged right-hand margin never bothered him as a reader whatsoever, even though as a writer it was a scene of the most acute, unrelenting psychological drama.
Perpetually in the aspiring writer’s head was a line from Kafka: even if he were to succeed at this, nothing would be gained.
He tried everything. Everything! Everything, at first, in the realm of font and line-spacing settings. With a hopefulness that in retrospect can only be described as touching, he held there to be some ideal combination of font, font size, and line spacing that would relax his brain and dissolve his compulsion, and to this end he tried every conceivable combination of Times New Roman, Cambria, Georgia, Garamond, etc.; font size 12, font size 10, font size 14, font size 11, etc.; line-spacing single, line-spacing double, line-spacing 1.5, line-spacing triple, etc.: all to no avail. Next he tried the “Justify” button in Word, which afforded him a blissful half hour in which he thought he’d cut the Gordian knot of his justification compulsion with a single technological sword stroke, before realizing that Word’s unspeakably deficient justification algorithm had generated intolerable white spaces at random intervals in his text, white spaces between letters and words that he knew at one glance would, if not in the course of a page then certainly in the course of a whole book, drive him to the brink of insanity and then right over the brink. Next he tried writing by hand, with a pen, on paper, much like the ancients, as his and my mutual friend Karan Mahajan recommended not long ago to Poets & Writers, but he found that he couldn’t write at all without the consoling quasi-mathematical click of a sentence locking into place, onscreen, beneath its brothers, even if that click took hours, hours of his life, to engineer, and even if the correlation he sensed between that click and the quality or “rightness” of the sentence was, as he well knew, irrational, an illusion. He even tried writing in LaTex, a scientific word processor he’d used a decade earlier for an undergrad thesis on the physical dynamics of a particular hypothetical fluid, but although LaTex, with its superior justification algorithm, produced sleek, flush paragraphs, the fact that coding was required to, for instance, begin a new paragraph suggested to him that his cures for his compulsion were finally becoming crazier and more detrimental to his fiction than the compulsion itself.
Now in the aspiring writer’s head was a new line from Kafka: I am only accepting this to keep you from thinking you’ve omitted anything.
At last the aspiring writer decided to incorporate his justification compulsion into his writing routine, to accept it as part of what he sarcastically referred to as his “artistic practice,” and even though this new aspect of his “artistic practice” was totally crazy, and had no rational basis, his brain (which was, as you recall, the cause of it!) now inevitably set itself to rationalizing it, to justifying his justification compulsion, to furnishing it with philosophical underpinnings. The aspiring writer soon discovered that the absurd destructiveness of his mental compulsion was matched only by the absurd elaborateness of his retrospective justification for it.
First he thought the following: You know who else cares a great deal about how words actually appear on the page, about line breaks and so on? Poets! For a few days he wandered around or sat at his desk with the thought in his head: I am a poet! I am a poet! And from this new poetic perch of his the aspiring writer began looking down on mere writers of fiction, who, for some reason, paid no heed to the (vital) visual arrangement of words on the page. He looked up lists of poetry movements on Wikipedia and concluded that he was not just a poet, he was a concrete poet. For a moment he thought he might be a Black Mountain poet. Whatever my movement, he thought, what I am writing is not really prose but linked sequences of prose poems! Prose poems: a salvific phrase. Prose, sure, of course, but also? Poems. Prose poems! Hence my eminently reasonable and not at all insane concerns regarding the flushness of the right-hand margin. It was only when he started reading the work of his new colleagues—i.e., poets—that he remembered he hated poetry, never read poetry, was incapable of writing a poem, objected to the very concept of poetry, and was therefore probably not a poet.
Next the aspiring writer inducted himself honorarily into the Oulipo. By manually justifying his sentences, he realized, he was practicing a form of constrained writing not so different from Perec’s lipograms, Abish’s tautograms, or Queneau’s permutations. This felt promising! Even though he’d never actually managed to finish reading a single Oulipian work, he had always felt immense sympathy for these rigorous shock-headed arithmetical Frenchmen, who seemed, like him, he told me, inept at plot, and who had discovered ways to advance by logical variation rather than causal machination. Yes, of course, he thought, freedom is stifling, constraint generative! He now concluded that his seemingly senseless, extremely protracted efforts to align his sentences on the right side of Microsoft Word were in fact generating unusual syntactical constructions and strange word choices. Formerly he’d believed that he was kowtowing to his compulsion by substituting for his original word choice a shorter, or longer, word; now he decided, with sudden Oulipian fervor, that the original unconstrained choice was almost always the cliché choice, the forced substitution almost always superior to it, and the gnarled grammar that was often needed for everything to fit was gnarled in a good way. Far from ruining his writing, the constraint imposed by his justification compulsion—even if it vanished in the end result, like self-dissolving sutures—was really saving it.
In his elation he finally forced himself to finish “Life a User’s Manual.”
Eh, he thought.
He began to sour on the Oulipo.
Wasn’t there something illicit, he thought, in the attempt to transform writing into puzzle-solving? He understood the appeal of that transformation, of course, especially for heads like his and Perec’s. (With characteristic grandiosity, my friend had no trouble asserting that his head functioned more or less like Georges Perec’s head, which, in turn, functioned more or less like Italo Calvino’s head.) The pretense of a logic, the fantasy of a solution. Click: a solution. Click: another solution. But shouldn’t coming up with a new sentence be a bit less like solving a mate-in-two chess problem and a bit more like falling into a pitch-black hole that turns out, weirdly, to be infinitely deep, he wondered? Shouldn’t writing that aspires to be autonomous and irreducible consist for the most part of screaming and falling? “Puzzle-solving,” he informed me, though I knew this already, is Thomas Kuhn’s term in “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” for the activity of normal, non-revolutionary science, but it is also, he asserted grandiosely, the activity of normal, non-revolutionary literature, swaddled in rules and parameters, and assured—if the writer simply works hard enough, “puts in the hours,” “applies ass to chair”—of a solution. Whether literature inherits those rules or assigns them to itself, is swaddled by the Western canon or is, so to speak, self-swaddled, like the Oulipo, is immaterial, he believed. His justification compulsion, he now realized, had to be seen, similarly, as his brain’s attempt to swaddle his fiction.
Kuhn: “It is no criterion of goodness in a puzzle that its outcome be intrinsically interesting or important.” Precisely! cried the aspiring writer, thinking not only of an enormous number of successful contemporary novelists whom he despised but also of his own work.
At this stage in his self-justification procedure, which was quickly curdling into a procedure of pleasurable self-laceration, he began to see everywhere he looked the illicit attempt to transform fiction writing into puzzle-solving, of which his own justification compulsion was merely one unremarkable example. The Oulipo made this transformation visible, explicit, putting the scaffolding on the outside, “almost exactly like lobsters,” he told his girlfriend—who at that point began asking around discreetly for therapist recommendations—but what fiction was innocent of it? What is a novel, he demanded, if not the illicit transformation of something unfathomable into a three-hundred-page-long series of puzzles that admit of solutions? What is alliteration? A puzzle, a solution. Assonance? A puzzle, a solution. Metaphors, similes? Puzzles with solutions. The Aristotelian unities, Freytag’s triangle? The illicit transformation of writing into puzzles! Repetition, rhythm, internal rhyme? Puzzles writers set for themselves and then solve, he told his girlfriend, and later told me. What does it mean to be influenced by George Saunders or Lydia Davis? he demanded. Simply this: that you’ve transformed the unfathomable act of writing into a Saunders-shaped or Davis-shaped puzzle, he explained. What is enthralling plot but a puzzle, precise description but a puzzle, accurate dialogue but a puzzle, the communication of feeling but a puzzle? The attempt to give pleasure to a reader, he said: a puzzle with a determinate solution. One can read an entire novel, even a canonical novel, even all canonical novels, without coming across any actual writing, just puzzle after puzzle, formulated and solved. “What,” he asked me, “would genuine writing even look like? What would it look like? It is, at this point, not at all clear.” He’d even read his beloved Kafka that morning and heard nothing, he said, but click, click, click, click, click, click. It was the sound, he realized, of Kafka whacking away at the frozen sea within with his famous little axe.
He and I fell out of touch not long after that. Our friendship, the health of which had always varied in inverse proportion to the health of our respective manuscripts—the more fucked our novels-in-progress, the better our friendship, and we were best friends when our novels-in-progress felt most fucked—couldn’t survive the fact that I had started to accumulate pages, despite my own compulsion (only a little bit less extreme than his) to manually justify my text in Microsoft Word. For years I didn’t hear a word from him. Then, two weeks ago, he e-mailed me. Subject line: “Your book.” Apparently he’d obtained a galley somehow. I realized from the sudden pounding of my heart and head as I clicked on his e-mail that, even now, no literary judgment mattered more to me than his. But even though his e-mail, which I read through my fingers, was extremely long, the longest e-mail I had ever received by a factor of seven or eight or nine times, and even though every word of it concerned my book, not one word of it concerned the content of my book. He had nothing to say about the writing—not a word. But the book’s formatting, he wrote, and he wrote this in a thousand different formulations, was almost unbearably beautiful, and whoever had typeset it was a genius.
