Crafting Readers

Items

• What the Bird Saw / "The Goldfinch"
  This rug approximates an aerial farmland view for Fabritius’s painted goldfinch as an attempt to embody Theo’s (and the bird’s) story, rather than just witnessing it. Though reading invites real emotion, it remains markedly distinct from actual experience; the practice of crafting The Goldfinch attempts to bridge this gap by considering the same story through a new medium. The latch-hooking method of repeatedly securing individual yarn segments mimics the endurance of Tartt’s narrative style, attempting to replicate the reader’s experience of the novel by simultaneously requiring attention to detail and patience for the big picture. Both reading The Goldfinch and latch-hooking a rug are lengthy endeavours that invite the reader or crafter to bask in the process instead of rushing to an end. GRACE VEUGELERS ON WHAT THIS CRAFTED OBJECT TEACHES US: A quality that I have always appreciated about reading as a medium is that, if I am attending properly to a story, I cannot attend to anything else. I prefer to read slowly, to return to previous pages and passages, to steep my mind in the author’s reality. Yet, when reading Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, I initially struggled to lose myself. I felt intensely aware of my act of reading and of my opposition to her protagonist, Theo. As I faced the novel, I resolved to read recklessly instead. In reaction to Tartt’s barrage of sentence fragments and tangential observations—which resisted my rereading—I would parade myself forwards, even as my understanding might falter. Amazingly, this surrender worked. Donna Tartt emerges as an exception to the general incidence of reading as an act of control (Harrison 39). She pulls her readers along, using some clever combination of incomplete sentences and ideas, endless lists, and colloquial semantic constructions to make each word beg the reading of the next. The story, I found, made more sense if I never stopped reading. Literary critic Rob Jacklosky describes Tartt’s incessant use of lists as “intoxicating” (122) not only in establishing the world, but in generating a “hypnotic, lulling” (122) effect. While my earlier approach had me spinning over details of “gilded cupids, gilded commodes and torchieres, and … the reek of turpentine, oil paint, and varnish” (Tartt 151), trying to commit each detail to memory, a concession to her persistent style granted me a comparatively robust sense of Hobie’s workshop setting. In short, I had to trust that meaning would emerge from the totality of the text. Certainly, summation is essential to any novel, but its effect felt more potent in Tartt’s writing because her constituent parts refuse to stand on their own. If I felt particularly moved by some event in the novel, I could rarely pinpoint the effect within any one sentence. As the novel opens, thirteen-year-old Theo visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art with his mother but loses her in an explosion. The reader’s suspicion that she has died accumulates over pages as Theo moves through the wreckage, swipes Carel Fabritius’s eponymous painting, and hurries home; but there is no discernible line of text that tips from possibility to certainty. The moment when Theo opens his door to social workers and understands “that [his] life, as [he] knew it, [is] over” (Tartt 86) arrives with finality, not shock. Similarly, knowing that he has stolen an invaluable painting haunts both Theo and the reader. Like Chekhov’s gun, it sits wrapped beneath his bed in Las Vegas or stashed in a storage facility in New York, so the moment of reckoning does not surprise readers with a swift arrival but with the introduction of an unforeseen issue. The expected danger—that Theo would be discovered with Fabritius’s goldfinch in his possession—is replaced by the realization that his childhood friend, Boris, lifted the painting from him and spent years illegally trading with it on the international market. Where a direct line of narration might invite readers to stop and sit in horror, Tartt’s relentless prose demands that we read more quickly so we might watch disaster crest and continue. Critic Chloe Harrison acknowledges this urgency as exacerbated in moments of uncertainty because, though we hurry onward in pursuit of it, Tartt withholds overt confirmation of plot events (40). Instead, she resigns her readers to the same cycles of doubt, denial, and horror that plague Theo. Originally published in 2013, The Goldfinch won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, but audience reception nevertheless seems largely divided by Tartt’s style. Some dismissed The Goldfinch as “children’s literature” (qtd. in Harrison 39) or more suited to film—therefore suggesting that Tartt misunderstands the medium of written fiction (qtd. in Harrison 38). Conversely, I appreciate Tartt’s style for nurturing a unique sense of experiencing the story. I might hope that the reading of any story emphasizes process rather than completion; but for Tartt’s lengthy novel, a dedication to the reader’s experience is especially necessary. That her novel unravels beneath a narrative microscope is not inherently a flaw. One of her characters, Horst, even describes Fabritius’s painting as being guilty of the same because with a “step closer … it falls apart into brushstrokes” (Tartt 721). Tartt spotlights her self-awareness, acknowledging art as both “the thing and yet not the thing” (721). For Fabritius: This is not a bird. And for Tartt? Perhaps, this is not real life. This possibility brought me to a conundrum I have often faced: that as powerfully as a story can move me to emotion, it inevitably falls short of experience. Though Tartt does a careful job of unfolding her story with a steady stream of fragments that reflect the onslaught of real life, I struggled to connect with Theo. I could empathize with the loss of a loved one, the strife of adolescence, the loneliness of growing up, but I could not embody those emotions unless I was actively living his life. His pain remained his own. Elaine Scarry offers this insight: “to have great pain is to have certainty; to hear that another person has pain is to have doubt” (7), calling attention to the inevitable limits of empathy. There is no substitute for experience, so my inability to resonate with Theo as a character—to know that the context of emotion and circumstance necessitated every ill-conceived decision he made to lie, run, steal, do drugs, or sell fraudulent antiques—was not a failure of writing but a consequence of it. Tartt could only bring me as close to experience as her form allows, so the project of crafting a rug in conversation with the novel provided another step closer. I resolved to latch-hook a rug because I thought the repetitive process of securing each individual yarn segment might mimic the endless trudge of Theo’s life. Like Tartt’s novel or Fabritius’s painting, the rug forms from parts that are unimpressive and insufficient on their own. Unlike when I read Theo’s story, the making of the rug required my participation and experience, not just observation. The crafting required tactile involvement, and the responsibility of the final product fell to me, swallowing more of my time than I would care to admit. As with The Goldfinch, though, this time granted me the space to move into and out of different perspectives. On some days, the slow speed of reality frustrated me; I implored my hands to work faster like I had implored Theo not to spend another (and another) day drinking away his youth in Vegas. At other times, the sequential movements of hooking each piece “[lulled]” (Jacklosky 122) me as Hobie’s patient lessons on furniture restoration had. In every instance in which I managed some parallel between rug-making and reading, I could understand Theo’s emotions in a more intimate way simply because, in the context of crafting, they became my own. My experience with crafting lacked the community that dominated earlier rug-making practices, as many people typically contributed to gathering and preparing materials as collaborative weavers (Fleming 110), or at least as good company while others worked. I supposed that, in lieu of loyalty to rug-making tradition, my process adhered more to Theo who, also, should not have been so alone. Nevertheless, understanding that the major manipulation and meaning of a hooked rug lies in the pattern (Fleming 110), I made the cautious decision to contradict all of my previous efforts to empathize with Theo. I must acknowledge that The Goldfinch is his story, and the fictional Theo cannot possibly know the effort I have dedicated to understanding him, but, even still, Theo struck me as fundamentally unsympathetic. As intent as he was to “obsess over people” (Tartt 34), in adulthood Theo hardly let his observations inform considerate actions. He was a dishonest employee to Hobie, a dull husband to Kitsey, and an abductor to the painting; so, feeling some minor defiance, I instead considered the perspective of the goldfinch for my rug. The grid canvas limits patterns to geometric designations; and though N.M. Gibbins proposed that crafters might mathematically accomplish more precise angles by skipping certain boxes, I found myself unwilling to risk empty space. However, in imagining an aerial view of farmland for Fabritius’s bird—were he not chained—I felt that the constraints of the medium suited me well. Given that the goldfinch spends the entire novel as a powerless subject to others’ actions and, to me, was only as real as Theo, my consideration of him was as valid as the energy I expended in trying to empathize with Theo. In every stage of my reading of The Goldfinch or of hooking my rug, I both made and unmade my peace with Theo. I realized that, with a seemingly constant source of pages to read or yarn pieces to secure, the ending could only be one thing. Tartt describes the process of growing up as a “state of becoming” (Seaman 8), which is defined by constant change; and similarly, I found the process of rug-making to be a mess of repetition, always different yet always the same. Perhaps the lesson to learn from my endeavours to both witness and experience Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch is that life, like reading, can be best enjoyed not through any single moment or outcome but by experiencing it as you live.