On the Structural Impossibility of Beginning at the End

Calvino was drawing on a napkin when I arrived. Not doodling — drawing with intent, a series of nested rectangles, each one slightly off-center from the last, so the whole thing looked like a window viewed through progressively drunker eyes. He didn’t look up. He was wearing a linen shirt that seemed to belong to a different season than the one happening outside, and he had ordered something involving sparkling water and lemon that he hadn’t touched.

Heller was late. This turned out to be a position he held on principle.

“Being late to a meeting about writing,” Heller said when he finally sat down, dropping into the chair like a man who’d been standing in a line somewhere and had only just been released, “is the only honest way to arrive. If you’re on time, you’re conceding that the meeting matters. If you’re early, you’re saying it matters more than the thing you were doing before. Being late says: I was doing something else and it was probably more important, but I came anyway, because I said I would, and I’m a man who keeps his word, which is the stupidest quality a man can have.”

“You could also simply be late,” Calvino said, still drawing.

“I could be. But then I wouldn’t be able to explain why I’m late, and the explanation is the best part.”

I had a table at a restaurant in Rome that served food so plainly it felt like a correction. White plates, bread that tasted like bread. The kind of place where the waiter does not describe the specials because the specials are the same as yesterday and yesterday they were the same as the day before that and this fact is not a failure of imagination but a statement about the nature of good food, which does not require novelty.

“I want to talk about telling a story backward,” I said.

“No,” Heller said.

“He hasn’t finished,” Calvino said.

“He doesn’t need to finish. Telling a story backward is a gimmick. It’s what you do when the story going forward isn’t interesting enough to sustain attention, so you scramble the sequence and hope the reader mistakes disorientation for profundity.”

“That is one way to use reverse chronology,” Calvino said. He put down his pen. The nested rectangles were finished. They looked, I realized, like a form — the kind with boxes you fill in, each box slightly smaller than the last, each one asking for information that was a subset of the box before it. Name. Last name. First letter of last name. The sound the first letter makes when spoken by someone who doesn’t know your name. “There is another way.”

“Tell me the other way.”

“Backward chronology reveals what forward chronology conceals: the apparatus. When you read a story from beginning to end, you experience cause and effect as natural. This happened, therefore that happened. It feels like life. But when you read it backward — when you see the effect first and then the cause — suddenly the machinery is visible. You see that the ending was built. That someone laid the pipe.”

“That’s exactly my objection,” Heller said. “I don’t want the reader to see the machinery. The machinery should be invisible because the machinery is the joke. In Catch-22, the joke is that the system works perfectly. Every rule makes sense. Every regulation follows from the one before it. The logic is airtight. And precisely because the logic is airtight, it’s impossible to breathe inside it. If you show the machinery, you’re saying: look at this clever thing I built. I don’t want the reader to admire the trap. I want them to be inside the trap and not know how they got there.”

“But this story is fifteen hundred words,” I said. “We have fifteen hundred words.”

They both looked at me as though I had announced that dinner would be served on a single plate, shared.

“Fifteen hundred words,” Heller repeated.

“Roughly.”

“That’s not a story. That’s a memo.”

“A memo can be devastating,” Calvino said, and there was something in his voice I hadn’t heard before — not defensiveness exactly, but the tone of a man who has spent his career being told that constraint is limitation. “A memo from the right office, about the right subject, with the right signature at the bottom. Some of the most frightening documents in history have been under a thousand words. Deportation orders. Termination notices. The note someone leaves on the kitchen table before they disappear.”

“I’m not arguing that short things can’t have weight,” Heller said. “I’m arguing that what I do requires space. The circular structure — where you come back to the same scene and each time it means something different because you know more — that needs room. You need the reader to forget they’ve been here before, and then to remember, and the forgetting takes pages.”

“Unless,” Calvino said, and he picked up his pen again, “the reverse chronology does the work of the circle. Consider. In your circular structure, the reader arrives at a scene, passes through it, moves forward, and eventually returns to discover that the scene meant something different than they thought. The revolution of the circle provides the revelation. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“In reverse chronology, the reader arrives at a scene, and then — instead of moving forward to eventually circle back — moves backward to the scene before it, which is the scene that caused this one. And then backward again, to the scene that caused that one. Each step backward is a revelation. You don’t need the circle because the regression is the circle. You’re not going around — you’re going down. Through the layers. Through the pipe.”

Heller was quiet for a moment. He tore a piece of bread in half and ate one half and put the other half on Calvino’s plate, which struck me as either a gesture of intimacy or an act of territorial aggression.

“Here’s what worries me,” he said. “In my books, the language of the system is the joke. The military says ‘he was a crack shot’ and they mean it as a compliment and it’s a death sentence. The insurance form asks ‘are you now or have you ever been deceased’ and it’s a real form with a real box and someone has to check yes or no. If we’re going backward, the language of the system has to work in both directions. The form has to be funny the first time you read it, and then when you find out what it was really for — when you go back one step and see why the form exists — it has to be funny in a completely different way. A worse way.”

“Yes,” Calvino said. “The comedy must deepen as we retreat.”

“Not deepen. Curdle.”

I said I thought the word count constraint actually served this. Fifteen hundred words. Five sections, maybe six, each one a step backward. No room for the reader to get comfortable. No room for the writer to explain the joke. Each section arrives, delivers its payload, and then the next section takes it away and replaces it with something earlier and worse.

“Earlier and worse,” Heller said. “I like that as a structural principle. Every scene is earlier and worse than the one before it, which is to say: every scene is closer to the beginning and further from hope.”

“But the beginning must not be the worst,” Calvino said. “This is important. The very first scene — the chronological beginning, which the reader reaches last — must not be the darkest. It must be the lightest. A person doing something ordinary. Filling out a form, perhaps. Applying for something. Not yet inside the machine. The reader reaches this scene last, and the lightness of it is unbearable, because the reader knows everything that will follow, and the character knows nothing.”

“That’s not Catch-22 logic,” Heller said. “That’s dramatic irony.”

“It is Catch-22 logic inside out. In your novel, the character explains his own entrapment in the language of the system. He says ‘I can’t get out because the only way to get out is to already be out.’ Here, the reader explains the character’s entrapment to themselves, because the reader has already seen the end. The reader is the one who knows the catch. The character, in the first scene — the last scene the reader reaches — is the only free person in the story. And the reader is the one who is trapped.”

Heller put down his bread. “Say that again.”

“The reader becomes the one who knows too much. The character is free. The reader, having traveled backward through every consequence, is imprisoned by knowledge. They want to warn the character. They cannot. The page will not allow it.”

“The page is the system,” I said, and I felt something shift — the particular vibration of an idea arriving that belongs to none of the people in the room but could not have existed without all of them. “The page is the bureaucracy. The page says: you may read forward or backward but you may not intervene. The character’s freedom is guaranteed by the character’s ignorance, and the reader’s suffering is guaranteed by the reader’s knowledge, and the story — the form, the fifteen-hundred-word form — is the mechanism that keeps them apart.”

“Now he’s got it,” Heller said to Calvino.

“He has part of it,” Calvino said. “The other part is that the form itself — the story as form, as document — must be playful. It must be light. The sentences must move quickly, with pleasure. The reader must enjoy reading about a system that is destroying someone. That enjoyment is the trap. The reader laughs and the laughter is complicity.”

“Every comedy is complicity,” Heller said. “That’s why comedy writers drink.”

“You drink because you’re American.”

“I drink because I’m a man who spent three years writing about war and discovered that the funniest parts were the parts where people died, and the parts where people died were the funniest because there was nothing else to do with death except make it absurd, because death taken seriously is just religion, and religion taken seriously is just bureaucracy, and bureaucracy taken seriously — ”

“Is your entire body of work,” Calvino said.

“Is my entire body of work. Yes. Thank you for finishing that sentence in a way that I would not have.”

I asked about the metafictional element. If on a winter’s night — the reader as character, addressed directly, implicated. Could we fold that in? A story going backward that knows it’s going backward? That addresses the reader as complicit?

Calvino considered this. “In fifteen hundred words, the metafiction must be structural, not verbal. We don’t have room for the narrator to turn to the reader and say ‘you are reading this.’ But we can build the form so that the reader’s act of reading — of turning the page, of moving from section to section — is itself the mechanism of the trap. Each section heading could be a form field. Each transition could be a bureaucratic instruction. ‘Proceed to Section 3. Note: Section 3 is prior to Section 4 in both chronological and administrative terms.’ The metafiction is in the architecture, not the prose.”

“I hate that,” Heller said. “I also think it might work. Those are not contradictory statements.”

“In your novels, they never are.”

“In my novels, contradictory statements are the only kind that are true. A man is brave because he’s afraid. A regulation protects you by making protection impossible. A form requests information that the form itself prevents you from having. If we’re going to do this — backward, short, the page as bureaucracy — then the contradictions have to carry the weight. Every section has to mean one thing and also the opposite thing, and the reader has to hold both meanings at once, and the discomfort of holding both meanings is the experience of the story.”

I wanted to ask about the ending — which was the beginning, which was the last thing the reader would reach — but Calvino had picked up his sparkling water and was looking at the nested rectangles on his napkin with the expression of a man who has solved something he didn’t know he was solving. Heller was eating the bread he’d put on Calvino’s plate, which Calvino either hadn’t noticed or had decided to let pass as a form of collaboration.

“The title,” Calvino said. “What will we call it?”

“Something bureaucratic,” Heller said. “Something that sounds like the heading on a form.”

“Something that tells the reader what they’re getting and simultaneously prevents them from getting it.”

“That’s every title I’ve ever written,” Heller said. “That’s what a title is.”

I said I’d think about the title. They both looked at me as though I’d announced I’d think about breathing. The waiter came. Calvino finally drank his water. Heller ordered wine and then changed his order to coffee and then changed it back to wine, explaining that the act of changing one’s mind was more satisfying than either beverage, and that what he was really ordering was the experience of indecision, which the restaurant was providing free of charge.

The rectangles on the napkin were still there when we left. I pocketed it. It felt like the first draft of something.