Jigsaw Puzzles and Writing

Margaret Drabble’s The Pattern in the Carpet starts out as an exploration of the history, development, and popularity of jigsaw puzzles. It progresses into a long disquisition among other topics on childhood, board games, card-playing, needlecraft, Roman mosaics, collectibles, and aging. Putting together jigsaw puzzles is intimately connected in her mind with reminiscences of her maiden Aunt Philly and her growing up in a town situated on the Great North Road in England. Her narrative takes many side paths to reach its conclusion in which she clarifies the similarity of doing jigsaws to writing books.

I warmed immediately to Drabble’s point of departure in her ramblings because I also have fond memories of working jigsaw puzzles when I visited my Aunt Irene first in girlhood and then as an adult when she lived alone in retirement.  In childhood, I received Christmas presents of jigsaw puzzles and remember putting them together (usually by myself because my parents and siblings did not share this pleasure) on the dining room table while the television played in the background.  I set my Kindle ebook to text-to-speech and mounted my exercise bicycle to enjoy Drabble’s book. I did this to divert my mind from thinking while I pedaled, “Is this work-out over yet?” My strategy worked and time sped, believe it or not, pleasurably on the bike.

Avid jigsaw puzzlers know that the frame is assembled first; next colors are sorted in separated groups; then a section is worked from the border that appears most promising; from there the picture is built. Drabble does not immediately draw comparisons between her career as a prolific novelist to jigsaws. The drift of where the direction of her meanderings is going is put together rather like a jigsaw puzzle slowly unfolding. A clue to her meaning can be unraveled in her title, which she leaves the reader to decipher, because nowhere in the book does she explicitly unpack the reason for her choice of title. What are the reasons for the words pattern and why carpet? She does not discuss carpets in her book, but carpets are a frame too placed on the floor; they are all of a piece, that too must be woven together by numerous threads to form a whole. The carpet suggests a journey, as in the magic carpet to adventure and perhaps an unknown destination to be revealed as the flight continues. Drabble writes her book as a journey along which she pauses and observes many sites, objects, and phenomena. Similarly, the jigsaw is a pattern that only reveals itself at the end of the journey in its making.

Drabble comments that jigsaw puzzles provide a welcome relief and refreshing diversion from the intensity of writing. Both require pattern-making  and a working out of meaning from disjointed fragments, an order out of chaos, with the difference that jigsaws are visual, physical, involving manipulation of color to achieve pattern. It’s a shift from the verbal to the non-verbal. She acknowledges that activities like crocheting and knitting achieve that same change of pace for the writer. Having worked two 1000-piece puzzles in the last few years as well as being an obsessive knitter, I share Drabble’s experience of their beneficial effects.

I like to describe novel-writing as a long journey into night. Putting a jigsaw puzzle together is often a long journey into night as it is not unusual to stay up until 2:00 o’clock in the morning finding that obstinate last piece to insert in a glaring gap. The motif of the journey becomes abundantly clear at the end of the book when Drabble writes: “The concept of life as a journey, a pilgrimage, a quest, a ladder, or a spiral track may be attractive to some, but to me the notion of a goal is not.” I believe that Drabble did not have a definite goal in mind when she started her book; she reveled in the journey as she wrote, exploring every alley and corner as she went along. For Drabble what has meaning is the journey itself, the endurance on the path, both the indignity and the dignity of her Aunt Philly’s dying in the nursing home. The persistence in completion of the jigsaw puzzle is laudable. She goes on: “In the larger pattern, all the solitary journeys combine, and we arrive together. The jigsaw, with its frame, is a simulacrum of meaning, order and design.” Startlingly, she ends by stating books too attempt to make a pattern and fail.  The last sentences of the book read: “The admission of failure is the best that we can do. It is a form of progress.”

The puzzle remains. Drabble’s meaning is not entirely clear. Maybe this is by design. I must pause and think, ponder the meaning. And that underscores the journey again. The process of seeking and forming the pattern is what makes us unutterably human and what makes jigsaw puzzles and writing similar. The process of writing itself has a way of creating a pattern unpredictable at its beginning, taking unexpected turns in the middle, and revealing a goal in the end that was not there.