On Meaning It

Some works of Kahlil Gibran

The Madman, The Forerunner and The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran

It’s hard to describe or to impersonate Kahlil Gibran, and goodness knows I have tried. It’s hard to justify The Prophet’s becoming one of the bestselling books of all time, except to read it. Not only because it is so poetic, so lyrical. That goes almost without saying. But also because it’s at least attempting to be morally serious and we in the twenty-first century lack moral seriousness. No one is willing to give it to us, drowning in first Generation X and then millennial cringe. No one wants to be morally serious, to take things seriously. And then, after a generation or two of lacking sincerity, people realise they no longer know what it means. When they try to be morally serious, they realise they no longer can.

I can’t endorse what Gibran said, necessarily, because he believed in and wanted to transmit many things I don’t believe in myself. Things I think are specious. But as a conveyor not just of ideas but of mood, I can’t think of many better. We have pale imitations of his style and manner, pseudo-poetic cast-offs. We have some obviously and profoundly deficient would-be clones. And then there is the real thing, quite distant from us in time and in tone, and there’s simply nothing like it. Nothing to compare.

Many have tried to write about The Prophet, but I would rather talk to you instead about The Madman and The Forerunner. I would not be honest if I said they were anything other than an inspiration pour moi. Why? In part, it’s a question of form.

Anyone who has, as I have had, experience with agents and publishers will say that, more than anything else, they are intolerant of ambiguity. They see the world in categories, in big subject headings, as a series of mutually exclusive things. And they reason only by analogy. Is this like a Nigel Slater book written by Tom Clancy? Is it Sarah Waters as written by Dion Fortune? They dislike the idea that something might not be related to something, or anything, else. And they dislike quite profoundly the idea of discontinuity, of a collection of short things united only by the name on the cover. Unless that name is very, very famous. And I’m willing to bet that yours is not.

Formal invention and ambiguity each make them get nosebleeds. Such things make them cry.

Gibran managed to tell what are, in reality, a series of highly independent and disconnected fables, but to link them together in the most tenuous and sardonic possible ways. Each of his stories about animals, for example, is briefly tied together by having been part of a lunatic’s vision. Each tale of men or poets or philosophers, of queens and tigers, and so on. Each of these separate things is somehow related. Trust me.

But rather than spoil many of these short stories and poems — there would be no fun in that — I want to tell you about attempting to produce something similar.

The fable as a form leads itself to cockiness and overconfidence. It is hard to do, hard to make interesting, hard to make meaningful. Yet the first-time writer of fables is not aware. Any story involving animals or people could be a fable of a kind, if there appears to be a moral lesson implied or stated by the end. That’s what the first-time writer thinks. There’s the overconfidence I mentioned above.

We grow up reading fables, or rather having them read to us. We think we know what they’re about, and can do them ourselves. In precisely the same way, as children learn about acrostics in primary school, unkind praise will convince them they’re really poets. And so many a wannabe may sit down, certain that this tale of the chickens in the farmyard, or this discussion between the fox and the wolf, will really get to the heart of something big, will be a fable worth the name. And they will be disappointed, humiliated. As likely as not.

I’ve written fables for various fictional projects and ideas I’ve had over the years, and more often than not, I have found it easy and convenient to duck out of being all that serious, of leaving yourself in proper contention. By this I mean that, when push came to shove, I generally said that this or that fable did not actually come from my pen, but was instead the creation of a character of mine. Someone too proud of their own literary gifts. Or someone hit on the head. It’s satire, it’s pastiche, it’s all knowingly false and ironic.

Gibran, for all his grasp of irony, never hid in a coward’s fashion behind anything like that. He had his tricks of form, of course. Those framing narratives and tales that gave his works shape and theme. But when he wrote The Prophet, when he wrote the best and truest parts of The Madman and The Forerunner, he meant it. That’s very plain to see.

When I read back my own attempts at fables, attempts at comparable poetry, I think of how hard it is to mean something when you’re copying something else. How hard it is to do it right.

There’s a story the American writer David Frum told of a prize-winning poet or novelist who, when short of cash, penned a trashy romance novel. He’d read a few of them. Thought he knew the form, and could fake it. Write something fast and sell it for some easy money — not quite free of shame, but free of significant regret. Anyway, when this man did so, he had his perfectly competent manuscript returned by genre publishers. One of them wrote an enclosed note. ‘You have to meant it,’ was the gist of that letter.

That’s why Gibran, at least for my money, rises so far above all of his imitators, including me. He meant it. So few of the rest of us ever do.