A One-Way Mirror to the Sea: How Whitman Prize became 001-054

I kept rewriting the novel because the prose had not yet become the novel I could see. I knew what the book could be. The pages weren’t there yet.

The ending was there. The final revelation was there. What kept changing was the road Whitman took to get there.

At first, Whitman existed largely as a single consciousness. The novel followed a writer trying to understand himself and the world around him. He was restless. He was imaginative. He wanted beauty. He kept running into people and institutions that seemed determined to tell him who he was and what he was supposed to become.

But I knew there was more going on inside him than the prose was showing me. Then I started breaking the rules, and made one character two characters, one voice into two voices that turned a straight narrative into a fragmented mirror of a single consciousness divided by ambition, talent, practicality, responsibility, legibility, and all the rest.

Once K began to speak, Whitman came alive. K wanted to protect him. K understood the dangers Whitman seemed determined to ignore. He knew when Whitman should smile, when he should shut up, when he should stop pushing. Whitman kept pushing anyway.

Together, they both understood something the reader has not. How a mixed-race black man named Whitman Kessler is interpreted by the world before he gets to interpret himself.

For me, the novel opened up from there.

Whitman was no longer simply a man being interpreted by the world. He was a man who had spent much of his life negotiating with another consciousness inside himself while everyone outside him was doing the same thing in a different way. Everybody had an idea of who Whitman should be.

The novel began to become more unruly because Whitman was more unruly than I had allowed him to be. He was more unruly because K is a lose canon. A wild spirit. He hassles Whitman, but at bottom he loves Whitman more than anybody in the world.

The novel Whitman was writing became more important, stranger. His character, Turing came alive. Whitman's speculation about the future of imagination and creativity began to reach back into Whitman’s own life.

Whitman discovers something about Turing I had not discovered in an earlier version. He is not simply Turing. He is Turing Model 001-054, who begins to behave strangely with the inner novel's protagonist, a literature analyst named Sebastian Vale.

Turing knows he cannot be free, not the way humans understand it. He cannot escape what he is. Yet he imagines freedom for Sebastian and finally sacrifices himself for Sebastian, making it possible for Sebastian to write a novel called Flawless, an act of rebellion against the system that had essentially outlawed all human creativity.

Whitman writes from instinct, not fully understanding what is coming from his subconscious mind.

He wonders, Who is more free? The machine that recognizes its imprisonment, or the human being who believes freedom means a hundred versions of the same life?

And then Whitman begins to see something in Turing that he had never quite understood about himself.

Whitman has always thought his pursuit of beauty was selfish. He wanted beauty because he felt as addicted to it as he had become dependent on Ketamine to take him to a place of beauty. He wanted to escape the mud and garbage and ugliness he saw around him and sometimes inside himself. His hallucinations failed him, filling him with the horrors of the world that resembled a Picasso mayhem.

The reflexive nature of the novel is born out by what Whitman's own character teaches him about himself.

What could a creator's imagination of a machine in the near future teach him about what he failed to imagine in his own life?

What if his longing to go beyond himself was not finally about his own private needs and desires? What was Turing telling him about all of us?

What if Whitman has been looking for beauty because beauty offers a way beyond the self?

Whitman writes Turing. Then Turing holds up a mirror to Whitman.

I kept pushing the novel because I wanted the prose to reach that.

Then comes a new character. I call him Elias Cole.

Elias is a Black writer, and the novel identifies him as such on the page.

As you know, Whitman is not identified that way.

I created Elias to accentuate Whitman's longing to be himself before he is categorized. People in Whitman’s life keep bringing Elias up. Melissa, his agent, speaks of Elias in a longing sort of way. Why can't Whitman be more like Elias? He learns that his best friend, Ryan, is reading Elias's brave new memoir, but he still has not read Whitman's first book.

He should be jealous. But he is less jealous than annoyed. Why can't people just let him be who he wants to be? He wants to write literary speculative fiction, in the vein of famous (white) writers like Atwood, Bradbury, and Vonnegut. Why does everyone seem to tell him, "I just don't see you that way?"

Toward the end of the novel, Whitman and Elias meet at a literary conference at Yale. They understand each other almost immediately.

When Whitman pushes back against the way literary culture sorts writers, explains them, turns imagination into category and market, Elias comes in beside him. He talks about creators being compressed from every direction—by what they are expected to create, by what the market thinks it can sell. In our world, even machines now decide whether a writer is human enough to have written his own work.

One man stands on the page as a Black writer. The other does not. Yet they recognize something in each other that the reader cannot fully account for. And as other people continue to react to Whitman in increasingly strange ways, that unanswered question grows: what are they seeing in Whitman that the reader has not yet been allowed to see?

As I kept pushing all of this, I began to understand that the novel itself had to break rules.

It had to be unruly.

The unruliness is not in a Cloud Atlas sort of way, where the novel leaps across centuries, settings and genres, or in the way of novels like Pale Fire or House of Leaves, where the form itself becomes the disruption.

It is unruly at the level of consciousness.

Whitman moves into K. K moves into Whitman. Whitman creates Turing. Turing begins to explain Whitman back to himself. Other consciousnesses enter. The line between the creator and what he creates becomes less secure.

Like I've said, the interaction reminds me of a double pendulum, in which a singularity of the predictable suddenly starts to misbehave, and the result becomes a sort of dance, something like choreographed chaos.

The book moves between literary realism and speculation because Whitman moves between them. It moves between what is happening and what Whitman imagines is happening because K imagines what is happening.

I don’t think a novel about this man could finally behave itself.

It is about a creator discovering who he is through what he creates.

And all along, Whitman keeps returning to an image he does not fully understand once he imagines it: a one-way mirror to the sea. He hears it. He thinks about it. He writes toward it. He cannot explain what it means.

For much of the novel, when Whitman imagines himself—especially when he hallucinates—he cannot escape the mud, the garbage, the distortion. He keeps reaching for beauty, but his unconscious keeps giving him ugliness. The sea, the hills, the lone tree against the sky are always somewhere beyond him. He thinks the beauty is somewhere else.

And then, there is the fate of K. K had been with Whitman since childhood, the voice that watched the room, read the danger, told him when to smile, when to shut up, when to make himself understandable enough to survive. He could be cruel, vain, funny, controlling, but beneath all of it he had always believed he was protecting Whitman. And then, at the very moment Whitman finally rejects the Whitman Prize, walks out of the airport, rents a blue Mustang and starts driving west, something in K changes. For the first time, he sounds frightened. Where are we going, Whit? What is going to happen to us? The voice that had always known how to keep Whitman safe no longer knows where Whitman is taking them. By the time they reach the Continental Divide, Whitman has finally heard Sarah correctly, finally heard the question she had actually asked him all those years before. And K understands before Whitman does that his work is finished. At the top of the Divide, after a lifetime together, he says goodbye: Goodbye, Whit. You’re on your own, love. K does not disappear because Whitman defeats him. He leaves because Whitman can finally go on without him.

At the end, he finally reaches the sea. He has crossed the country, crossed the Continental Divide, left K behind, left the prize behind, and arrived at the edge of the map. He still does not fully understand the image that has followed him there.

Then he meets Alice.

For a moment, he thinks he is hearing Ailia again. The old voice returns: You gave me a voice, then you put me in a cage. And then Whitman hears something new: I put myself in a cage.

He asks Alice who she is. She tells him her name. He tells her about Ailia, about the character who had meant so much to him, about the voice he thought he had heard. Alice looks toward the sea and says, “That is my one-way mirror, Whitman. As you can see, there are no cages here.”

That is when the image begins to open for him. The one-way mirror he has been writing toward is no longer an abstraction. It is there in front of him: himself, the sea, the world beyond the categories and judgments through which he has learned to imagine himself.

He starts to leave. Alice stops him. She offers him coffee.

“How do you like it?”

“I like mine with a touch of cream.”

She looks at him, then at the patch of blue opening in the sky.

“That’s beautiful. The color of you.”

And only then does the image fully reveal itself. Whitman has spent the novel searching for beauty somewhere beyond himself, while his own unconscious kept returning him to mud and garbage. At the sea, Alice shows him what he could not show himself. The beauty he has been looking for has included him all along.

The ending did not change. The final revelation did not change. What changed was how Whitman got there.