Much of life, according to the sage wisdom of Bucks Fizz, relies on making your mind up. But those of us stuck in a quandary may find a kind of kinship with some of the 19th century’s greatest ditherers. Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov will resonate with many in need of a duvet day:
The moment he woke up, he made up his mind to get up right away … and really get to work on the problem. For fully half an hour he lay there, tormented by his decision, but then he began to reason that he would still have time for everything even after his cup of tea, and that he could just as well have his tea in bed … After tea, he actually raised himself into a sitting position.
Anthony Trollope’s novels, meanwhile, are full of characters zippy enough to get out of their beds, but torn by the difficulty of making choices once they have done so. The Gen-X hero of Benjamin Kunkel’s 2005 novel Indecision, flapping over New York menus and girlfriend “alternatives”, proves curiously less sympathetic.
Self-help gurus would urge all of them to seek clarity. As Pete Davis perkily puts it in Dedicated, his how-to manual offering a “practical path to joy”, we should exchange a culture of “infinite browsing” with a “case for commitment”. Some 700 years earlier, Dante was similarly down on latter-day channel-hoppers. At the gates of the Inferno, swarms of gadflies surround those slackers who, in their previous life, didn’t even have the gumption to properly commit a sin.
Many writers feel more kindly towards grey areas. Samuel Beckett pulls his characters “to and fro in shadow”, unable to decide which world they inhabit: “Was I sleeping, while the others suffered?”, asks Waiting for Godot’s Vladimir: “Am I sleeping now? … I can’t go on! … What have I said?” The critic Leslie Hill characterises Beckett’s work as “radically indecisive” – not shirking responsibility, but ethically responsive to the need to revise and remake our place in the world.
There is, of course, a distinct difference between indecision and a decision not to take sides. Set in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, Anna Burns’s Booker-winning Milkman explores this kind of radical refusal. Her narrator, known only as “middle daughter”, holds a kind of middle ground between expected forms of partisan commitment, feeling for the places that are neither “us” nor “them”. She tells of her “maybe-boyfriend”, and “the maybe territory of not knowing” – of her love for the edge of things, for sunsets, and for “reading-while-walking”. It’s a maybe-ness that plays out in this piercing account of “the sorrows, the losses, the troubles, the sadnesses” and in the wandering texture of Burns’s sentences, curving through the page as if resisting a target.
Some works betray a loss of confidence from the first page. “One may as well begin,” as EM Forster’s Howards End puts it with a shrug, as if it might have been better to begin elsewhere – or not at all. Others hand over the narrative steering-wheel even earlier. BS Johnson’s The Unfortunates offers a kind of avant garde choose-your-own adventure story, with rearrangeable sections in a box, while Ali Smith’s How to Be Both has two front covers, leaving the reader to decide which half to broach first.
Some acts of wavering are contagious. Echoes of the Dane’s “To be, or not to be” can be caught in TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock: “I am not Prince Hamlet nor was meant to be”; “Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?”. And a touch of Eliotic FOMO persists in Anita Brookner’s exquisite Hotel du Lac, a work which transforms a halting maybe-end of an affair into something as sharp and bitter as a winter morning.
For poet Zaffar Kunial, indecision is a more joyfully iffy business. His 2018 collection, Us, revels in in-betweenness, as shown in the title poem:
If you ask me, us takes in undulations –
each wave in the sea, all insides compressed –
as if, from one coast, you could reach out tothe next; and maybe it’s a Midlands thing
but when I was young, us equally meant me
The poem forges a seeming love letter in a tentative hand:
I hope you get, here, where I’m coming from.
I hope you’re with me on this – between loveand loss – where I’d give myself away, stranded
as if the universe is a matter of one stress.
Us. I hope, from here on, I can say itand though far-fetched, it won’t be too far wrong.
Perhaps this is the kind of heartfelt hesitation we might learn to live with.
