The Story Only You Can See (...So Far)
What a museum security guard can teach us about dedication to our writing practice.
Let’s talk about Danielle Oteri’s “Secrets of the Unicorn Tapestries.”
This Paris Review essay came up on my radar a few days ago, and I’ve been thinking about it off and on ever since. In one sense, it’s about Oteri’s experience working at The Cloisters, the museum at the northwestern tip of Manhattan where the Unicorn Tapestries, which date back to fifteenth-century Europe, have been displayed for nearly seventy-five years. On that level, one of my favorite details in the story is an anecdote Oteri tells about serving as an occasional tour guide:
“I jabbed my pointer finger at the hunter about to stab the unicorn in the rear end, then to the almond-shaped gash the unicorn tore with his horn into the side of the dog. I pointed to the rose forming from the dog’s bloody wound, a detail I had never even noticed until an eighth-grade boy asked me about it. Stunned that I hadn’t seen the rose before, I asked my boss, a twenty-five-year veteran of the museum, if she had. She hadn’t, but told me it wasn’t worth considering as it had never been mentioned in any of the official scholarship on the Tapestries.”
That last line gets at what I consider a key element of Oteri’s essay—the tendency we often have to willfully blind ourselves to stories that contradict our familiar ways of seeing the world, even when it’s possible those stories could take our understanding of their subjects in new and interesting directions. How important could a facet of a work of art be if none of the art historians had ever bothered commenting on it, right?
At a structural level, I also love how this detail foreshadows the central narrative drama of the essay. It’s not too long after this that Oteri introduces us to Howard Comeau, a former high school Latin teacher who became a security guard at The Cloisters and, over the years, was prompted by his curiosity to go beyond the “canonical” history of the tapestries, diving into medieval history in his spare time until he had developed a working theory of the true allegorical meaning of the imagery throughout the tapestries.
Of course, rather than welcome Comeau’s potential insights, the academics ignored him, and rebuked him for talking to museum visitors about the tapestries, which were supposed to be the provenance of the curatorial staff, not the security team. The sustained rejection, however, did not deter Comeau from pursuing his distinctive vision, always on the lookout for a new piece of information that could help pull his story together.
I’m sharing this story with you, and I want you to read it all the way through, because it’s very likely that you, should you get to a stage where you want to take the fruits of your writing practice and share them with other people, may run into the same sort of unwelcoming response that Comeau faced. And you will need to have the same faith that he had, the same willingness to persevere, to hang in there until you find someone who is willing to give your story (fiction or nonfiction, prose or poetry) a chance.
This isn’t always easy, especially if you’ve nurtured dreams of becoming rich and famous by creating a story so universally admired that everybody wants to run out and buy it. That’s nice when it happens, but you can’t count on it happening. Instead of connecting with the largest possible number of people, I believe you need to aim simply to create the truest possible story you can, trusting that it will resonate with some people, if you can get them to pay attention to it.
Which is always a hard part of the process, if not the hardest.
Literary culture, like academic culture, is becoming less insular and more diverse, but it can still be awfully insular, and awfully frustrating. This is also true of commercial publishing to some extent—and one day I should really dig into the false distinction we make between “commercial” and “literary” fiction, but we’ll set that aside for now.
It is almost certain that you will face rejection, and more than a little of it, before you achieve any success in book publishing, if you do. (If you are one of the fortunate ones who does not, congratulations and enjoy your blessings!) You need to be able to face that rejection with the kind of faith that Harold Comeau had in his ability to look at the world and see something that nobody else had seen that was actually there, to know in your heart that what you’re writing is (materially and/or emotionally) true.
Read the essay, and learn from Harold Comeau—and learn from Danielle Oteri, who was willing to learn from him.
(The image at the top of the newsletter is a detail from The Unicorn is Found, one of the tapestries, which I found at Wikimedia Commons. As a faithful reproduction of a public domain artwork, the image is likewise considered to be in the public domain in the United States.)