The Rooms of Fiction

On the inside of the inside of the novel.

Novels inhabit rooms the way people do, which is to say absentmindedly or incompletely. Often, the novel’s figures hardly notice the spaces they’ve been furnished. How could it be any different for the reader? The bright packet of detail offered in passing is inadequate to the demands of vivid perception. Being habituated readers, we populate these vacancies, though this is akin to whistling in the dark. (A reader abhors a void.) When reading novels, I find rooms to be insubstantial things, like mists or mirages. They are provisional, forever subject to a process of mental revision. The inconsistencies that arise from a reader’s apprehension grant the novel a certain perceptual drift. A shifting, cubist structure arises from the indeterminacy. That the rooms of fiction don’t tend to disorient us nearly as much as the depictions of consciousness they contain speaks not to any inherent stability they might possess, but rather to the reader’s acclimation to a lived environment. We are too comfortable within these rooms, which deserve our scrutiny, even our suspicion. What I mean to say is that accepted space is a habit fiction can break, if we allow it to.

Édouard Vuillard, Interior, Mother and Sister of the Artist (1893)

In The Poetics of Space, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard posits the enchanted significance of rooms. It is his view that our perceptions of these spaces give shape to our inner lives, returning to us constantly in thought, memory, and dream: “Was the room a large one? Was the garret cluttered up? Was the nook warm? How was it lighted? How, too, in these fragments of space, did the human being achieve silence? How did he relish the very special silence of the various retreats of solitary day-dreaming?” This phenomenological sensation adheres to the works of art we experience throughout the course of a life. When I read Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), something I’ve done every year for over a decade, I am also once more navigating the Ramsays’ home on the Isle of Skye. Though hazy and unstable, the rooms are nearly as familiar to me as those I myself once lived in. Each trembles with the novel’s terrible promise: the deaths, the great emptying out, the little dramas of pique and triumph. Here the reading mind acquires a quantum capacity, shrinking through key holes and making use of rooms to leap across decades. My favorite novels offer frequent passage through these strata, plotting nodes in a recondite network. They function as an accordioned set of worlds, private maps of impossible dimension.

In the clipped, ecstatic lyricism of James Salter’s Light Years (1979), a painterly effect emerges from the descriptions of the Berland’s Hudson River valley home. It is permanently related in my mind to the hushed visual grammar of Intimism, the late nineteenth-century aesthetic movement marked by its fleeting visions of the domestic. (Dining Room Overlooking the Garden (1930), a painting by the Intimist Pierre Bonnard, adorns the cover of my battered North Point Press edition.) It is a grand novel of bourgeoise totems, glittering with the significance of their own eventual decay. Salter dramatizes the beautiful accumulation before death, each room its own glittering hoard. “I am going to describe [Nedra Berland’s] life from the inside outward, from its core,” the narrator tells us:

the house as well, rooms in which life was gathered, rooms in the morning sunlight, the floors spread with Oriental rugs that had been her mother-in-law’s, apricot, rouge and tan, rugs which though worn seemed to drink the sun, to collect its warmth; books, potpourris, cushions in colors of Matisse, objects glistening like evidence, many of which might, had they been possessed by ancient peoples, have been placed in tombs for another life: clear crystal dice, pieces of staghorn, amber beads, boxes, sculptures, wooden balls, magazines in which were photographs of women to whom she compared herself.

That formulation—“from the inside outward”—signals the intention of Salter’s inventory. With melancholy irony, he lays bare the Berland’s search for an object so beautiful, or a room so lovely, that it might renew the fallen world of their marriage. But their perfect rooms have become tombs. The material and spiritual abundance promised by postwar America has already turned to so much ash.

Out of modernity came the literature of the sick room, as if our new enfeeblement required a commensurate setting. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915) offered the image of an evening “like a patient etherized upon a table,” forever entwining modernism with a convalescent century. Beckett’s voice, issuing from the eponymous figure central to Malone Dies (1953), speaks out from a bed within a hospital room that has somehow merged with his addled character’s mind. Malone’s illness requires its own stark space, a cell in which the meaning of suffering is made legible through the emptiness of its own expression. (This does not preclude him from trying.) Kafka’s fictions, too, are intimately bound up with the spatial—Gregor’s bedroom-prison in The Metamorphosis (1915); Klamm’s unreachable rooms in The Castle (1926); the anxious fastness of The Burrow (1931)—that the complaints of his journals feel somehow familiar, as if we’d stepped into yet another of his fictions:

I want to write and there’s a constant trembling in my forehead. I’m sitting in my room which is the noise headquarters of the whole apartment, doors are slamming everywhere. …Father breaks down the door of my room and marches through with the bottom of his bathrobe dragging behind him. Valli shouts through the foyers as if across a Parisian street, asking if father’s hat has been brushed. The front door makes a noise like a sore throat.

Looking further back, the garret offered the proto-modernists their own theater of humiliation. It is in the attic room that the Underground Man first emerges, paranoid, alienated, consumed with an ill-defined intensity. To avenge himself against the society that rejects him, he required only his disaffection and the confines of an attic. The narrator of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890) occupies a “broken-down coffin of a room,” a tiny space in which he rehashes petty skirmishes, slights, and revenge fantasies against his fellow townspeople. The cramped confines compel him toward the close and unbearable scrutiny of secret wounds. The room comes to resemble his febrile brain: claustrophobic, dimly lit, and inhospitable. (Later in the novel he spends the night in a jail cell. There is little discernible difference between the two spaces.) Hunger touches on Hamsun’s own experiences as a tenant. In an 1898 letter to the publisher Johan Sørensen, he wrote that he was living in an “attic where the wind blows through the walls; there is no stove, almost no light, only a single small pane in the roof.” Out of such rooms boiled the discontent that would define a significant path for the nineteenth century novel.

Gerard Dillon, Self-Contained Flat (1954)

The Professor in László Krasznahorkai’s Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming (2015) is a descendant of those hermetic ruminants. Occupying a hut on the edge of a provincial town, he attempts to eradicate the possibility of thought from his mind. That hut—“completely feral, impenetrable, and abandoned to its own fate”—shares many of the same features as the Underground Man’s garret. But what makes Krasznahorkai’s dwelling unique is the expansive, nearly cosmic vision it contains. Where Hamsun’s narrator turns inward, almost treasuring his intimate storehouse of affronts, the Professor’s angst can only be expressed through a limitlessness that annihilates the self. “The world is nothing more than an event, lunacy, a lunacy of billions and billions of events,” he proclaims, “and nothing is fixed, nothing is confined, nothing graspable, everything slips away if we want to clutch onto it.” Throughout Krasznahorkai’s fictions, there is this pleasing sense that he requires a fastness of paranoia and personal delusion—be it the Professor’s hut, the bar in Satantango (1985), or the apartment in War & War (1999)—to constrain the vertiginous expansion that occurs therein.

Though a different sort of stylist, the Australian novelist Gerald Murnane shares something of this paradoxical approach. When the narrator of Inland (1989) stares across the fractal geographies of his mind—an overlapping vision of the Australian interior, the American prairie, and the Hungarian Alföld—their magic depends on the impossibility of their ever being reached. They are contemplative landscapes, explored in the mind from a place of serenity or desire. The room, then—in this case a library—is an essential component of the endless Murnanian grass. It is the portal to a private dreaming. His most famous novel, The Plains (1982), in which a man attempts to make a film about the enigmatic people of an interior plain, is exemplary in this respect. Having failed to understand the plainsmen and their inscrutable culture, the narrator is called to the great house of a potential patron, where he wiles away years in various artistic failures. He is never more ridiculous, more defeated, than when he flings open the curtains that cover the view of the plains at the end of his sparsely attended lectures. Defeated by the actual, he makes his way ever further toward the possible. For Murnane, this is a form of wisdom. Any obsession worth the name relies finally on a sense of constriction to fulfill its promise. Often enough this is what the rooms of fiction offer the reader no less than the writer: call it the freedom of enclosure.