Processing Passage
I just finished reading the novel Passage, by Connie Willis, and I thought it would be a great topic for a post here. Both thinking about the content of the novel itself, and the context of people’s online review responses.
I will try my best to refrain from spoilers. For those of you unfamiliar with Connie Willis’ writing, she is an award-winning novelist, considered to be mostly in the SciFi genre. In general, she uses science fiction to access aspects of our human experience that otherwise feel hidden. I believe this is the sixth novel of hers I’ve read. I plan to read more.
Non-spoiler synopsis
A brief overview of a complex novel. A psychologist and a neurologist – and dare I say, a third character, a lay devotee/interested writer, as well – team up, in some manner of speaking, to investigate Near Death Experiences (NDEs). NDEs are what people go through when their bodies go into a non-responsive state, nearly dead, but then return to life. As “synchronicity” would have it, the New York Times just wrote an article about an organization for people interested in these experiences.
The three investigators in Passage each have their biased initial perspectives, and therefore agendas in approaching their collaboration. They are in a city hospital setting. The hospital itself is a patchwork labyrinth, constantly shifting in a way that often feels like it is a character itself.
The researchers explore the information given to them by people who have experienced NDEs. They try to extract meaning from their words, and for the neurologist, from brain chemical and activation patterns. Joanna, the psychologist, quickly becomes caught up not only with the NDEs but with the people themselves. When adequate research participation becomes a problem, she volunteers herself as a participant and becomes analyzer and analysand.
What starts off as an intellectual exercise gradually becomes more potent and vital. The characters feel it, and this changes how they act. Not necessarily for the better. As the tension builds and Joanna reaches a possible meaning for NDEs, there is a twist. The twist ramps up the stakes. It also adds extra layers to the structure of the novel, which I will explain briefly now.
Passage as a structure
Across the novel, people are running around trying to communicate with each other. They move around the hospital and the community; they move around the contours of the mental imagery of NDEs. This includes historical spaces such as the Titanic, and so movement runs across time as well. They move ideas back and forth between them. This communication is also happening with the reader. Just like the characters, we think we know what’s happening; then we don’t. We understand more, or less than the characters, and what is understood as fact one moment may feel absurd the next.
Each character is linked to others in a communication web, stretching across time and space, and of course out of the novel into the reader. Creating a vast web of signals and messages that bend, stretch, and fracture as they travel.
How people tend to respond to novels
Many people react with judgments. Either direct judgements – ‘I enjoyed it’ or ‘I disliked it’ – or indirect, placing judgements on emotions. Such as, ‘I felt bored’ or ‘I felt excited,’ and therefore liked it or disliked it.
How I respond to novels
I make some of those judgments too, I guess. But I tend to not put much stock in them. I stay with the effect. How am I feeling? What is the book making me think about? How is it affecting how I understand the world? What am I learning from it?
Contextualizing reviews
I don’t often read reviews, but when I finished Passage, I was (am) so caught up in the mood of the novel that I wanted to read more about it to stay in it.
Of course, any work is going to get a wide range of criticism. But there were some common themes. One was appreciation of Willis’s deft handling of complex material, and ability to create compelling characters. Multiple people commented that another writer may not have been able to pull off such a difficult endeavor.
Many, many people complained about the length, which was attributed to repetitiveness. Many suggested that it should have been edited down by 200-300 pages (the edition I read clocked approximately 780 pages in all). They suggested that this would address the two main flaws cited: many passages that felt repetitively boring; and some characters with flaws that began to grate.
What I find interesting about these reviews is how much I can agree with the points while feeling very differently about what I take from that.
Boredom: The value of repetition
Willis has a device she uses repeatedly in many of her works. She has a character come to a definitive-feeling conclusion: an a-ha moment. Only to recognize, moments later, that they are wrong. Sometimes, this happens repeatedly. In a novel like Passage, where she is tackling a complex, layered human experience with so many unknowns, it’s natural for this to happen over and over. And over. And over.
In Passage, where the communication of signals and messages is the topic, Willis doesn’t stop there. The repetition extends to interactions, as well. The young girl Maisie’s “you can’t go yet, I have one more thing to say.” The girl’s mother refusing to admit any negativity to breach her outward composure. The lay devotee-writer’s relentlessness in leading each exchange with anyone back to the same religious dogma. (And in consequence, Joanna’s efforts to go any extra distance to avoid him.) The neurologist’s persistent dismissal of each experience of meaning as just temporal lobe stimulation. And in parallel, the psychologist’s persistent bloodhound-like amplification of those same experiences as literally meaningful.
Similar to other reviewers, midway through the novel, I felt myself getting both bored and fed up. Bored by some of the repetitions in the smaller characters. And fed up with Joanna’s insistence on tracking down the accuracy of every little thing she saw in her induced NDEs to historical record. I found myself inwardly shouting, ‘You know that’s impossible for you to be literally traveling through time; and that can’t be the point. Why are you wasting your time and energy?’ As if I could communicate to her.
The impact of repetition
Willis was gradually, deftly ramping up each effect, just like classical composer Maurice Ravel does in Bolero. I watched each character struggle with the same issue, over and over. Fail to communicate in the same ways, again and again.
Here is where putting aside judgments paid off. My mixture of boredom and feelings of frustration and fear (another emotion Willis was ramping up) connected me to what many of the characters were feeling. And set me up for the plot twist. Like that final sequence in Bolero, where the melody goes off the rails and enters madness. We had already gotten, intellectually, the message of what the NDE represents. The plot twist brought a chaos and desperation that brought home, not intellectually but emotionally and physically, the message about what the NDE is.
In a way, it was like passing the NDE, at least Willis’s interpretation of it, on to me. I watched all the main characters, who I now care about, feel the desperation to hear the message and continue to miss-hear or just miss it altogether.
There were still 300 pages left in the novel.
But I could no longer put it down until I finished. Until the messages arrived at their destination, however frustratingly ambiguous.
What I learned from Passage: The many meanings of “passage”
For novels nowadays, there’s often little patience for setup. The writer is expected to be able to hit the ground running from page one. There’s a sense that this is somehow “better.” That novels in the past were less refined and had unnecessary material before ramping up the action.
This impatience, and it’s effect on literature, makes me sad.
By being patient, by accepting my frustration, my fear, and yes, my boredom, I think I received more messages from the novel. I took more from it.
I reflected on how I repeat myself. The frustrations I feel, the situations where I feel I’m not being heard, and how human this is. And all the messages that I’m unknowingly missing, day after day. How hard it is to find new ways of speaking and listening that truly reach each other. And how vital, even life-or-death, these messages can be.
It makes me curious about what made the lay writer so dogmatic. It makes me question what my flitting around in repetitive activities day-to-day amounts to. To question my role in sending and receiving messages.
Conclusion: “Passage” is…
Passage is the literal view of the NDE. It is the metaphorical journey of the NDE. Passage reflects the sending of messages between characters, and the conveyance of meaning between them. It is the signals inside our brains, flowing in millions of directions each moment. The signals also pass between us, and between communities, and between worlds. It is the sending of messages from writer to reader. Signals also pass across time, and culture, and across the flow of the universe. The time I spent reading the novel. And the passage of my life: who I reach, who I fail to reach, who reaches me, who fails to reach me. What meaning will pass from this writing to you?
We also speak of death itself as a passage: someone has passed. They are both gone and still present, still in the act of passing through. It is as much an ongoing process as an event; never truly over, perpetually repeating itself. I appreciate that Willis recognizes this and uses the structure of Passage to deliver this message.