For many writers, nothing is more exciting than seeing in some work of fiction, be it a short story or a novel or a play or even a movie, a metaphorical commentary on the creative process itself. In The Art of Intimacy, for example, a craft book from Graywolf Press’s series on writing, author Stacey D’Erasmo analyzes William Maxwell’s novel So Long, See You Tomorrow (which I’ve written about on this blog before) as a commentary on the process of creating empathy in a work of fiction. In the same way, a Henry James passage about building a bridge becomes a metaphor for structuring a novel, while Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 becomes a metaphor for close-reading texts. One of my college English professors would teach every Shakespeare play as a commentary on the art of playwrighting—Hamlet, for example, was really a writer trying to find the proper motivation for his main character, while Iago was really a director guiding his actor Othello through his lines. Even film isn’t exempt from this type of analysis, as many have described both Christopher Nolan’s Inception and Ben Affleck’s Argo as commentaries on the process of filmmaking—in Inception, the dreams are essentially films of different genres, designed to elicit emotional responses in the dreamers/viewers, whereas in Argo, the process of rescuing the hostages unfolds very much like the fake film the characters are producing, complete with a climactic tension-filled escape.
My personal favorite, though, of this type of story is Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Secret Miracle,” first published in 1943 (and reprinted in the Penguin edition of his Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley). Much of Borges work is a postmodern commentary on some creative or intellectual process, whether about linguistics (“Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”), literary fame (“Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”), or mapmaking (“On Exactitude in Science”)—but only “The Secret Miracle” captures that rare emotional reality of what it’s like to be a writer, the loneliness, the despair, and ultimately, the primary reason any of us even bother (and all of this in only five pages).
The story is set in Prague in 1939 and centers on forty-year old Jewish writer Jaromir Hladik, who is arrested by the Nazis and sentenced to be executed. Hladik is first terrified, then sad that he’s not been as successful a writer as he hoped (“like every writer,” Borges’s narrator notes, “he measured other men’s virtues by what they had accomplished, yet asked that other men measure him by what he planned someday to do.”). In particular, he laments that he never finished his current project, a verse drama entitled The Enemies, which he believed would redeem the mediocrity of his past work.
The verse drama, set on “one of the last evenings of the nineteenth century” in a library in Prague’s castle district, centers on the Baron Romerstadt, who is visited by various courtiers whom he believes to be his enemies. As the play progresses, though, it becomes increasingly surreal, with characters dying, disappearing, resurrecting, etc., until it’s revealed that the Baron is actually mad and that what we’re witnessing is his “circular delirium,” an infinite loop he “experiences and reexperiences.” Linear time, therefore, is an illusion, and what we’re reading/watching is not reality but an artificial construct of the main character’s mind.
As the day of his execution draws near, Hladik despairs and, wanting badly to finish writing his verse drama, prays to God, begging for one more year to complete it. “In order to complete that play, which can justify me and justify Thee as well, I need one more year. Grant me those days, Thou who art the centuries and time itself.”
Then, on the day of his execution, when the firing squad has lined up and is about to fire, everything freezes, except Hladik’s thoughts—and after a few days of time pass, Hladik realizes that God has granted his wish and “performed for him a secret miracle: the German bullet would kill him, at the determined hour, but in Hladik’s mind a year would pass between the order to fire and the discharge of the rifles.” And so, Hladik takes this time to compose, in his head, the rest of his play:
He had no document but his memory; the fact that he had to learn each hexameter as he added it imposed upon him a providential strictness, unsuspected by those who essay and then forget vague provisional paragraphs. He did not work for posterity, nor did he work for God, whose literary preferences were largely unknown to him. Painstakingly, motionlessly, secretly, he forged in time his grand invisible labyrinth.
Hladik finishes his play just as the year ends, and when time begins again, the rifles fire, and he dies.
Each time I read this story, I’m indescribably moved by the ending. What should be a tragedy, a man being executed, turns into a happy ending because of his inner life, which doesn’t follow the rules of time and allows him to experience fulfillment just before his death. In this way, the story’s ending is very similar to Tobias Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain” (which most fiction writers are familiar with from classes)—a man is shot, but in the moments before his death, he reexperiences an instance from his past.
“The Secret Miracle,” though, is more emphatically about the life of a writer. Most of us may not be facing death like Hladik, but many of us likely recognize the regret he feels, his despair at the smallness of his literary life and his desire to write something more meaningful than what he’s so far written. His epiphany, then—that he was not writing for posterity or for God, but only for his own mind—can be a lesson to us too. Each of us when we write is simply forging our own “grand invisible labyrinth”—and as Borges shows us, even if we forge it only for ourselves, what we create can still be meaningful.