“The Only Meaning of the Oil-Black Water” by David Eggers was first published as part of a collection in 2005. The aspect of this rather brilliant story that is pertinent to this discussion is that Eggers weaves through it a kind of meta-commentary on the art of story-telling itself. He anticipates and forestalls the interpretive strategies of the reader, beginning in the first paragraph.
“Pilar was not getting over divorce or infidelity or death. She was fleeing nothing. She flew to Costa Rica one day[…] because she had time off and Hand, her longtime friend, was there, or near enough. There is almost no sadness in this story.”
In saying that there is (almost) no sadness in the story Eggers implicitly criticises the notion (which we are taught in high school) that stories are concerned with conflict, external or internal to the characters, and that the story is concerned with successful resolving this conflict. By saying that there is no sadness in the story Eggers is throwing down the gauntlet, attempting to demonstrate that a story can still be interesting when there are no obstacles for the characters to overcome.
Pilar has arrived in Costa Rica with the intention of having a fling with Hand. The story describes an episode in Pilar’s life, encapsulated by her arrival in Costa Rica and her departure from the beachside town in which they have stayed. Pilar has had such ‘casual’ encounters before and knows almost precisely the trajectory the relationship will follow. She is too hyper-critical and too protective of her own independence to permit the relationship to develop into anything more serious; to ensure the reader entertains no doubt about this, after a long passage in which Pilar considers a number trivial reasons why she and Hand might not “want to continue having sex”, Eggers breaks in to announce “This story is not about Pilar and Hand falling in love”.
Continually through the story Eggers disrupts its aura of realism. Sometimes he includes passages in which personified things or animals, such as clouds and treetops, enter into dialogue with each other. These snatches of magic realism do not illuminate any deeper themes but rather seem incidental, tangential to the story. Sometimes he addresses the reader directly. For instance, a number of horses feature early on (they graze just outside the hotel). The reader might wonder if the horses possess a deeper significance. Eggers disappoints our expectation by announcing that “The horses had no symbolic value.” During her time in the beachside town, Pilar and Hand visit bars and go scuba diving; they spend a lot of time surfing. Eggers justifies this by saying, “This story is equally or more about surfing. People are no more interesting than waves or mountains.”
Eggers thus assumes an antagonistic stance towards to his readers – at least to those readers who come to the story with fixed ideas of what literature should be, or assume that it must possess deeper meaning. One promising way of explaining the formal qualities of literature is to suppose that it poses questions and then answers them. Eggers attacks this standpoint by implication:
“If there were a question that needed to be answered in this story it would be not one but many, and would be these: How can a world allow all of this? Allow these people to live so long? To travel all these miles south, to a place so different but still so comfortable, and that place, meet again? To allow them to be naked together for the first time? What would their parents think? What would their friends think? Would anyone object? Who would plan for them? How many times in life must we make decisions that are important but will not hurt anyone? […}”
The story does not address these questions. On first reading they seem irrelevant to the story; on second reading they seem relevant but in a particular way. The questions do not point to an underlying theme or message; they gesture outside the text. The story requires, Eggers implies, an interpretive stance that is speculative, subjective, what I have elsewhere described as a horizontal rather than a vertical criticism. Eggers is asking the reader to go beyond the text to the World that lies outside it.
In one respect, a lot happens in “The Only Meaning of the Oil-Black Water” but, in another more important sense, nothing happens. There is no real conflict, no serious arguments, no Joycean epiphany. Surprises occur but nothing that touches Pilar’s or Hand’s core selves. The sexual encounter happens almost precisely as Pilar has envisaged it and leads nowhere. Everything in the story is inconsequential.
And yet, despite all this, the story is interesting. It is interesting for several reasons. The central scenario is interesting because the idea of hassle-free, inconsequential sex is interesting. For most people, sex always comes with complications – yet we continue to believe there are people out there who can enjoy such relationships. Second, the setting, with its varied, colourful, local and visiting fauna, is interesting. The story comes across partly as extremely well written travel writing. Third, the style is interesting. The secret to good style is the piling up of detail on detail, and in this Eggers succeeds very well.
Fourth, the story is interesting precisely because it confronts the reader’s expectations. Its negative stance towards interpretation has the ironic effect of opening up a space in which the reader can form his own opinions. And although I said that the story contains no Joycean epiphany, it comes close. Pilar, considering the idea that God might be immanent in all things, discards this idea, deciding that the sea-water means nothing more than itself.
“It was oil-wet water, and it felt perfect when it kissed her palm again and again, would never stop kissing her palm and why wasn’t that enough?”
The story’s insistence that the things it describes have no significance beyond their surface, its celebration of nature and the physical body, together with its reminders that it is ‘only’ a story, means that it has no secrets it keeps from the reader. Its meaning is wholly recuperable.