Is Some Fiction Written in Code?

Have you ever wondered what the author of a novel is really writing about?

In an article in the The New York Times entitled "Song of Inexperience," Vivian Gornick depicts E.M. Forster as writing with "a pen forever dipped in code."

It's a provocative notion.



Gornick's article is about reading Forster's novel "Howards End" a second time --  about 40 years after the first encounter -- and discovering it was not what she initially thought, having come to realize that Forster, a closeted gay virgin at the time he wrote the book, was telling a story of erotic relationships about which he knew nothing. But he had a sense of yearning that nonetheless informs the book below it's surface.

"It was as though the writing was speaking in code, the writer’s wisdom operating somewhere behind the prose rather than emerging from it," Gornick said, describing her second reading. Forster's arrested development  haunts the work and makes it moving, she maintained.

What follows is not necessarily what Gornick is talking about, but what she had to say about "Howards End" brings it to mind.

You read a story, enjoy the setting, get to know the characters, follow the action and eventually get to the end, which may initially seem satisfactory. But over time you experience a nagging feeling that under it all, the author was trying to say something else, or perhaps something more, but just what isn't clear. Looking back over it, you find a clue here and there -- perhaps something you just read through the first time -- but often the clues deepen the mystery rather than lead to a solution. It can be frustrating, it can be intriguing.

"I suppose all fiction is inescapably autobiographical in some sense," a friend who read my novella "Manhattan Morning" told me, musing over where the traits of various characters in the book might have come from. I suspect that while reading it, he couldn't help wondering what the book said about me, how to read the code, as it were.

Yes, there is some code there, but not to bait the reader. But if the book is in some ways a picture of me, readers will have to think of it in terms of a cubist portrait as opposed to anything particularly representational.