Play within Play

One of the big problems that I see in Drum is the fact that Jade spends so much time alone. She wallows in her wine at her apartment, she ventures out alone, always alone to the store, work, Kauai and sites therein, and finally Lopez Island, where she may or may not be discovering her life partner.

I believe this impulse to show Jade alone so much of the time is based on my own proclivity to be alone with myself. I am someone who spends large parts of my day completely alone; I'm quite comfortable being alone and perhaps this has rubbed off on Jade. Perhaps she is just a little too comfortable, sitting in her apartment, occasionally taking a call, a visitor, but never seeking out companionship. This, I now think, is one of Jade's critical failures as a person, and because of this, I think it's important not to limit her time alone in the book, but to emphasize it.

By heightening her reclusive nature, (and it dawns on me now to bring back Cordelia's mother, Francine, who is agoraphobic) she can be seen to be trapped within herself and her gradual realization of this contributes to her fear. Jade fears herself, fears what she might do or say in the world, for it is against the archetypical symbol of her lost brother that she compares herself. She feels that she can in way measure up to the standard that he represents.

The problem, then becomes how to emphasize this fear, how to show it to be the debilitating factor of her life. I believe this question is linked, and necessarily so, to the other critical question: how is Jade's fiction to be introduced? This is more a technical question than it is of plot. Jade spends all this time alone because she is writing a book, stories to sort out the mystery, but the story we see is her unfolding alongside; this is the ironic resonation of Drum.

I think there are contemporary models out there for introducing this fiction within the fiction. I'm thinking, though, of the play within the play in Hamlet in which a certain logic is posited for the benefit of the reader. Through the play, we can deduce Hamlet's struggle--see it more clearly--and alas, this is the reason for it. In similar fashion, Jade's fiction must serve the story--her story. I have everything she writes. I just need to "insert" it, without it feeling like an insertion. "Sailing South" the story that opened the first Drum, for example needs to find a home, an inevitable home, in the plot, preferably near the beginning.

The challenge is to introduce Jade's imagined scenario without disrupting the flow of her own story. OR, maybe the challenge is to introduce Jade's imagined scenario for the purpose of disrupting the flow of her own story. Hmm.

Time to go to work and mull this about a bit.