Article: Consider the various types of...
Consider the various types of monomaniacal ambition from which novelists may choose: the ambition to make something perfect, to make something new, to make something bulky, to make something strange or representative or truer than fact. Then consider the contrary sense of failure: nothing in fiction ever comes out exactly the way we'd planned.
But we can't help it--we writers think we have something to contribute. We are emboldened by vanity. And yet we are humbled by failure. Can a novel really provide, as notable writers have claimed, the best arena for the great debates of our time? Or is it instead a very small thing, as small as the devils who, in seventeenth-century England, were thought to hide inside the teardrops of the possessed?
In an effort to renew my passionate commitment to the art of fiction at a time when I was feeling the inevitable disillusionment, I made the contest between ambition and failure the subject of my new novel. Napoleon Bonaparte came immediately to mind, or rather, the little tyrant floated in the background of my thoughts as I began the initial work that precedes the actual writing. I started to watch and listen and gather relevant stories. I fixed my imagination on the ghosts who were taking shape as characters. Though I've spun other fictions about the different incarnations of obsessive ambition, this time I was especially interested in the effects of disappointment. What happens to the energy of thwarted ambition? Where do we go when we try to give up? What are the temptations of retreat? What are the perils?
An island is a good place to go when we want to get away from the world. The nineteenth-century victors in the war against Napoleon knew as much, so they sent their captive emperor into exile on the island of Elba-a mountainous island off the coast of Tuscany that was formed, according to local myth, when Venus's necklace fell and shattered. It is a beautiful, serene island, though overrun by German tour buses in the summer months. And it is still best known as the place from which exiled emperors escape.
I gave my fictional family, the Murdochs, the chance to leave behind the pressures of 1950's America. I sent them into exile on the island of Elba and set to work trying to understand what happens when individuals choose to live out of time, without risk, without ambition. And since narrative is like life, one thing leads to another. The drive to live in the world and make some sort of impression doesn't disappear. It takes new forms, exhilarating for some of the characters, destructive for others. And all the while, the teller of the tale, Oliver Murdoch, struggles with his own ambition to make something that is new and strange and truer than fiction can ever be.
Copyright © Joanna Scott