Читать книгу Meander, Spiral, Explode - Jane Alison - Страница 11
ОглавлениеBefore flying overhead to view spirals, meanders, or branching patterns in stories, I want to look at text close-up: how it feels to travel word-by-word as the narrative unfurls around you. This is the first way we move through a story: one-way motion, word after word until the end. Narratologists call it movement on the discourse or textual level. (Discourse comes from discurro, to run back and forth: think of your eyes reading lines on this page.) Other movement takes place inside the content of the story: what happens, whether things happen chronologically or are tangled and must be unraveled, whether you move less through events than through ideas, and so on. These storyworld movements can be more complex than the word-after-word transit and form the large patterns we’ll look at soon. First, that one-way trip.*
A physical way to envision the trip: think of swimming along a river. Stroking, kicking, floating, you’d feel or see the water’s chills and warm plumes, its siltiness or clarity, when it burbles over pebbles or grows still, when it’s tangled with greenery, when it sparkles or flows through shade. Moving word-by-word through a story is analogous: we “see,” “hear,” “feel” what we read as we flow forward, line after line.
Fine for a metaphor, but how do writers create those primary sensations of speed or sluggishness, transparency or murk, that a reader meets in our medium? What actually are the elements of our medium? Most craft books say that the “elements of fiction” are character, plot, place, etc. But I want to go down to true elements, the tiniest particles a reader encounters: letters, phonemes. These gather to form words, which line up as sentences, which clump in paragraphs or crots (prose stanzas, stanza being Italian for “room”), everything flowing over white space. With all of this we create the medium, or texture, through which a reader moves.
Text and texture are joined at the feet, for both come from texere.
Although we first absorb printed letters or words as pictures, we also “hear” them: neural activity registering sound is about the same whether a word is read silently or aloud; a part of the brain called Broca’s area generates the “sound” of a word internally. So, reading, we see a picture and “hear” a sound, and in both cases we experience the word in time. (The sense of a word, its clarity or cascade of connotations, naturally also affects how long a word feels to us.) In English, the sounds of letters and syllables are so varied that their length isn’t as measurable as scored notes of music, but we still sense differences among them. The letter t is quicker than m; bit is quicker than bite. We see and hear the difference in length between tot and tomb, between tot and tomatillo. We might also see and hear commas, semicolons, question marks, periods—the tribe of punctuation—and the spaces between marks. All of these take portions of time. So, types of letters, lengths of words, friction or fluidity among them, repetition, pauses or liltings within our inner ear signaled by commas or question marks: these are our elementary particles, the visual, auditory, and temporal units with which we first design.
On to the sentence. Even a one-word sentence fragment can take surprising time and open up space in our minds, if that word is long or has long sounds, as of course does a very long sentence. Something fascinating about sentences is that when I’m in the thrall of one, I’m held in its temporal and spatial orbit; it begins and ends when it must, holding and directing me until ready to let me go. I move slowly through tricky syntax; luxurious language makes me linger; or I warily await a final word that will snap the whole into sense.
For more on sound and syntax, see Ellen Bryant Voigt’s beautiful Art of Syntax. Now, though, some examples. Look at this two-part paragraph in David Foster Wallace’s “Forever Overhead.” The story’s about a boy sensing new things in himself on his thirteenth birthday—and learning alarming facts about time:
And dreams. For months past, there have been dreams like nothing before: moist and busy and distant, full of yielding curves, frantic pistons, soft warmths and great fallings; and you have awakened through fluttering lids to a rush and a gush and a toe-curling scalp-snapping jolt of feeling from an inside deeper than you knew you had, spasms of a deep sweet hurt, the streetlights through your window blinds cracking into sharp stars against the black bedroom ceiling, and on you a dense white jam that lisps between trembling legs, trickles and sticks, cools on you, hardens and clears until there is nothing but gnarled knots of pale solid animal hair in the morning shower, and in the wet tangle a clean sweet smell you can’t believe comes from anything you made inside you.
The first two words form not a sentence but a fragment (“there have been” is understood), yet the single word dreams lingers long in my mouth and skull. Then that 132-word sentence is fabulous as it meanders, flows, rushes, explodes, and finally stills in a pool of reflection. These two are different animals, ant and giant squid, each with its own motion and life span. So, a fundamental way to design narrative is to work with a range within our smallest units, from syllable to word to phrase, clause, and sentence, much as you’d plant a garden with different leaves: pixelated baby’s breath, spike of aloe, palm.
Another way to design on this level is to play with sentence patterns. You see and hear the boredom of a row of sentences starting with “the”; ditto when all sentences follow the same syntax: subject-verb, single clause. Here, by subtle contrast, is the opening of Raymond Carver’s “Why Don’t You Dance”:
In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard. The mattress was stripped and the candy-striped sheets lay beside two pillows on the chiffonier. Except for that, things looked much the way they had in the bedroom—nightstand and reading lamp on his side of the bed, nightstand and reading lamp on her side.
His side, her side.
He considered this as he sipped the whiskey.
The first sentence is grammatically simple, with a single subject even if it takes two verbs: he poured . . . and looked. It also begins with a prepositional phrase rather than the subject. With two independent clauses, the second sentence is compound, a step more elaborate: the mattress was stripped, and the sheets lay beside two pillows. The third sentence, like the first, begins with a phrase but steps farther up the scale in being complex, with main and dependent clauses: things looked much the way they had. Next comes no sentence at all but a fragment repeating two phrases from the sentence above—his side, her side: the structure mirrors the split bed. Then we start back down the scale of single-compound-complex-fragment with another complex sentence: he considered this as he sipped. This is a crisp way to create texture via sentence variety, even in Carver’s spare prose. Just break down each of these sentences to be syntactically simple (and complete), in subject-verb formation, to feel the dulling effect:
He poured another drink in the kitchen. He looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard. The mattress was stripped. The candy-striped sheets lay beside two pillows on the chiffonier. They’d looked much like this in the bedroom. A nightstand and reading lamp had been on his side of the bed. A nightstand and reading lamp had been on her side.
There had been his side. There had been her side.
He considered this. He sipped the whiskey.
You lose a lot if you run from complex sentences with their depths, the way they pull one time zone or idea into the light and let another sink. Things looked much the way they had in the bedroom. That bedroom, that marriage, that love: all gone. What’s here now are relics on the lawn and this man at a window, looking.
A complex sentence can not only take longer to wade through but can almost be a mini-story. Here’s one from Nicholson Baker’s Mezzanine:
From the men’s room came the roar of a flushed urinal, followed immediately by “I’m a Yankee Doodle Dandy” whistled with infectious cheerfulness and lots of rococo tricks—most notably the difficult yodel-trill technique, used here on the “ee” of “dandy,” in which the whistler gets his lips to flip the sound binarily between the base tone and a higher pitch that is I think somewhere between a major third and a perfect fourth above it (why it is not a true harmonic but rather perceptibly out of tune has puzzled me often—something to do with the physics of pursed lips?): a display of virtuosity forgivable only in the men’s room, and not, as some of the salesmen seemed to think, in the relative silence of working areas, where people froze, hate exuding from suspended Razor Points, as the whistler passed.
This is its own cosmos! Truly designed—and look at that menu of punctuation. (Try writing a page-long sentence using every kind. And why not every letter?) Even though the main action’s over in the first line—from the men’s room came the roar—you’d be missing an amusement park of a sentence if you didn’t read on. A different effect comes in a sentence that also gives its main action at the start but then rolls on and on with a series of paratactic (“and”) phrases tumbling forward. Here’s one from Jamaica Kincaid’s Mr. Potter:
And the dew was vanishing quickly from the presence of the early morning sun, and the dew rose up, forming a picture of thin, worn-out old curtains, shielding a landscape filled up with sea and sky and ships with masts and boats for rowing and canoes and men who will fall overboard, never to be heard from again, and women with trays of fruit on their heads on their way to market, and children who are completely absorbed in the child’s world that is made up of powerlessness and pain and the margins of joy, and wet clothes hung on a clothesline, and goats bleating and cows crying as they are milked or just before they are slaughtered, and policemen marching to their station at the governor’s house, and the governor just getting out of bed, and the hen laying an egg and the egg being scrambled and then being eaten between two slices of bread and the bread was made by the baker Mr. Daniel, and Mr. Daniel was descended from men and women brought from Africa many years ago and made slaves, and Mr. Daniel, in blissful ignorance, had become a Seventh-Day Adventist.
And here’s the opening sentence from Joyce Carol Oates’s Black Water, based on the Chappaquiddick horror:
The rented Toyota, driven with such impatient exuberance by The Senator, was speeding along the unpaved unnamed road, taking the turns in giddy skidding slides, and then, with no warning, somehow the car had gone off the road and had overturned in black rushing water, listing to its passenger’s side, rapidly sinking.
Am I going to die?—like this?
Oates’s syntax—her speedy paratactic clauses, modifying phrases that add neat packets of information, and a veto on commas between adjectives—races as fast as the Senator’s car.
How about sentences that try to reflect human thought, with its fumblings, pauses, corrections? Look at this from B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, in which the narrator returns to the town where his friend Tony lived; as he walks through town, his thoughts wander:
Perhaps they had a doctor to me on Saturday morning, the next day, yes, I remember they did, I was counting my pulse rate, knew what it was normally, then, do not know, now, no. . . . June was out for Saturday, perhaps all day, certainly for lunch, for lunch Tony came in and said he was cooking fish fingers, he said they tasted okay if they were fried, a curious thing to remember, all memories are curious, for that matter, the mind as a think of an image . . .
Then there is the space around text (or, in this passage, interrupting it to make bubbles of wordlessness). A pool of white surrounding a raft of words rests the eye and creates the time-space for a reader to draw connections or ponder. Marguerite Duras uses white space in an especially designed way in The Lover, which I’ll talk about later; Dinty Moore has a fine essay on the uses and misuses of white space called “Positively Negative”; Nigel Krauth and Simon Barton also have much to say on the kinetic and semantic properties of space.
Super-short paragraphs and line breaks can aerate prose, throwing light into density, giving the reader space to think. They also create dynamism, letting the eye swing to the left more often, each swing shifting the thought. Here’s the opening of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, about a woman who might be the last person on earth:
In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
Somebody is living in the Louvre, certain of the messages would say. Or in the National Gallery.
Naturally they could only say that when I was in Paris or in London. Somebody is living in the Metropolitan Museum, being what they would say when I was still in New York.
Nobody came, of course. Eventually I stopped leaving the messages.
To tell the truth, perhaps I left only three or four messages altogether.
I have no idea how long ago it was when I was doing that. If I were forced to guess, I believe I would guess ten years.
Possibly it was several years longer ago than that, however.
And of course I was quite out of my mind for a certain period too, back then.
These mini-paragraphs, some a single line, are being typed by Markson’s narrator as she struggles to assemble what she knows of the world, to draw a thread between it and herself with language. She’s having a solo dialogue, a desperate thinking-through. But with no way to check the “truth” of anything she thinks, she helplessly begins to weave a new net of “knowledge” from ever flimsier fiber. She’s a lone, last Penelope, weaving and unraveling meaning as she types—a process we feel at the start of each line, each fragile warp or weft.
In her novella Days, Dorthe Nors also imagines a female narrator writing a personal account of solitude; she keeps a cryptic diary of daily lists as spare as bone. Yet they gradually reveal her inner and outer worlds, through both what they give and what they leave out, an unnerving emptiness around each line. Here’s the first day:
1. So much for that winter,
2. I thought, looking at the last crocuses of spring;
3. they lay down on the ground
4. and I was in doubt.
5. Chewed out an entire school because a single sentence bugged me
6. and drank my hot chocolate, sweet/bitter.
7. Worked,
8. considered traveling somewhere I never imagined I’d find myself
9. yet stayed where I was
10. and banged on my neighbor’s wall,
11. was in doubt, but sure,
12. was insecure,
13. stood still by the window,
14. let my gaze move from running shoes to wool socks
15. and lay down on the bed.
Compare those spare, lonely passages with the quicksand of Sebald or Knausgaard, where there’s no breath of white space for days. Akin to this literal textual density—what we see on the page, how much relief we get—is the degree of resolution in what is actually being said: the density of detail or association. On one end of the spectrum could be Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel; here is its opening:
Sam woke around 3:30 p.m. and saw no emails from Sheila. He made a smoothie. He lay on his bed and stared at his computer screen. He showered and put on clothes and opened the Microsoft Word file of his poetry. He looked at his email. About an hour later it was dark outside. Sam ate cereal with soymilk.
Not only are the sentences short, simple, and mostly subject-verb, but the vision is low-resolution. With no grit or detail beyond a brand name, this writing (deliberately) has the texture of a cartoon or emoji. It’s as flat as the screen Sam stares at.
Now consider another passage from Baker’s Mezzanine. Here the narrator describes a tie, as everyday a subject as Lin’s:
it was made of a silk that verged on crepe, and its pattern was composed of very small oval shapes, each containing a fascinating blob motif that seemed inspired by the hungry, pulsating amoebas that absorb excess stomach acid in Rolaids’ great dripping-faucet commercial, and when you looked closely you noticed that the perimeter of each oval was made of surprisingly garishly colored rectangles, like suburban tract houses; an order so small in scale, however, that those instances of brightness only contributed a secret depth and luminosity to the overall somber, old-masters coloration of the design.
This single sentence winds far longer and more intricately than Lin’s seven short ones, offering elaborate phrases and clauses that give it different depths (this is in fact the second part of a longer, colon-split sentence). Several of Baker’s words have four or five syllables, while no word of Lin’s has more than three. Baker makes more texture with his detail and range of vision, from a microscopic look at amoebas to an overhead view of the suburbs; from lowbrow Rolaids to Old Master painting. These two references themselves carry different cargoes of imagery and tone, and that Baker pairs them gives his sentence even more texture, like moving from a hard plastic surface to velvet. Both Lin’s and Baker’s passages treat minor content. Yet their different kinds of words, syntax, and associations—style and sensibility, you can say—create strikingly different textures. Further, Lin’s passage narrates, making the storyworld advance in time, while Baker’s describes: a portrait. And this takes me to the subject of movement in time.
* I won’t address the use of explicit visual devices such as varied typography, or photographs and other graphic images embedded in the text, even though all of these can add to or trouble how we absorb or make sense of the language. See works cited by Simon Barton, Glyn White, and Nigel Krauth. Some thoughts on the uses of space and gaps will appear, but mostly I’m interested in patterning on the contentual level of text, not the graphic.
