No Idea of Order at Key West

In my sudden zeal to relive the heady days as an undergraduate English major, I came across this relic in my Norton Anthology:

Here we see a long-ago incarnation of yours truly, taking notes on Wallace Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West," most likely in Intro to Poetry, circa 1985. It's clear from the flat, dutiful quality of these notes that I was recording my professor's statements as he walked us through the poem. That is to say, I had literally no idea what he, or Stevens, was talking about. The interpretation of the poem was as incomprehensible to me as the poem itself. Yes, this is auditory. Yes, this is conditional. This is spiritual language. So what? I didn't understand how any of these concepts elucidated the poem, or vice versa. Thanks in part to the New Critical practices my teachers were steeped in at the time, the whole discussion became an echo chamber of abstractions.

The final proof of how lost I was lies in the title of the next poem, "The Poems of Our Climate," where you see my younger self filling in the o's. Now, I was not normally one to engage in this activity. In fact, I recall thinking at various times in my youth that filling in o's and p's and e's in printed text was a sure sign of idiocy. Yet here I am, not only doing that very thing, but carefully shading the o's for a 3-D effect. I had completely thrown in the towel on Stevens.

Rereading the poem now, I find both more and less here than these notes suggest. I'm certainly less intimidated by it, and can sort of relate to it without being able to articulate exactly what it's "about." And that's probably because I simply have much more experience, with poetry and with life. Also I don't have to write a paper about this, which reduces the anxiety level considerably; but if I did have to write one, I would likely spend a lot more time on the poem's aesthetic qualities, and how they create an experience that doesn't necessarily represent anything beyond itself. That is, poetry happens within the poem. It is not always, or at least not solely, a pointer.

With this hindsight, it seems critical that anyone teaching such poems in high school and college remember how increasingly distant our young charges' experiences and concerns are from those of a middle-aged white poet in 1935. How might we bridge the gap?

I think we could start with the advice Dean Bakopoulos gives in this marvelous piece from the NYT. Before even beginning to wrestle with a story or poem's "meaning," whatever we're trying to get at with that, first let students select sentences or phrases or words that move them. They don't have to know why these words speak to them, only that they do on some level other than pure logic. They might like the words, in fact, because they're confusing. They present a new, unfamiliar experience.

After a while, you might begin to introduce some context, like Stevens's particular interests and concerns, and some general concerns of his time and place and class and culture. How is this individual mind interacting with external ideas and questions, as well as with physical places and experiences like hearing and seeing and feeling?

I frankly have little experience teaching poetry, and find more experimental pieces much harder to deal with than this one. But it does behoove us, when we teach, to try to put ourselves in our students' shoes, remembering how little we knew, back in the day, about the lives of those to whom this poem speaks more readily.

Yes, pictures and music are sometimes better than words

I have a vague, troubling memory from my graduate school days. OK, more than one memory. Actually dozens. Hundreds. Oh, God, the flood of vague, troubling memories ... ! But the one that's troubling me today is the sound of my voice, intoning to a classroom full of undergraduate composition students something to the effect of: "Anything that cannot be articulated in words is not worth articulating." In my defense, I think I was trying to counteract certain students' desire not to write anything about what they had just read--or seen or listened to--because putting their thoughts into words would "spoil it." Which, all you students out there must admit, could also be interpreted as a cover story for laziness.

Nevertheless, I was young and (relatively) brash myself in those days, and given to pronouncements that now make me cringe. So let me say for the record: Words are not always the best medium of communication. They are the most practical, and practiced, medium, but there are many, many occasions when another form works better.

All of this is by way of saying that I bought my husband a copy of Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said for Christmas, and this particular edition came with this most extraordinary cover art by Chris Moore.

Of course, you also need to read the book beneath the art. As I understand it, this is one of the few novels by Dick that don't start out brilliantly (they all do, as far as I can tell), but then collapse spectacularly after about p. 20. This one makes it all the way through.

But if you want to experience the true spirit of 1970s science fiction, this cover art delivers, in a way mere words cannot. Take a look, and then tell me I'm wrong.

In fiction, voice is everything

I know I've said this before. But reading Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao just brought that lesson back home.

Your narrative voice not only creates the world in which your fiction operates, it defines the boundaries of that world. This doesn't just apply to what the narrator can realistically know or not know (this is especially an issue in the case of first-person narration, when the narrator is also an actor in the story). The even larger issue is what the narrator can and cannot do. And it's the nature of the voice itself that establishes those parameters.

In Wao, Diaz's narrator, Yunior, possesses a wide-ranging intellect, a powerful and outraged sense of history, a dark and hilarious sense of humor, and a command of many languages--not just English and Spanish, but academic-ese, science-fiction geek-speak, 1980s New Jersey teenager, and a bunch of others. Bakhtin would have really loved this guy.

The voice so energetic and captivating, we as readers will let Yunior take us anywhere. We'll read lengthy footnotes on the history of the Dominican Republic and long passages of what attendees at a lesser sort of workshop would criticize as summary (no, don't tell us what happened to Oscar's mother, show us!). Well, he does get around to showing eventually, but there's lots of telling first--and the telling is fascinating because of the voice. The story isn't separate from the voice; the voice is the story, and the story's requirements made the voice.

How does Diaz do it? I mean, aside from being brilliant. That helps. But as authors, we can all be more aware of what our story needs its voice to do. There is no law against summaries and histories in fiction; the law is to make them interesting--which you must do via the voice.

Now, not every narrative voice is as prominent as Yunior's; many authors take a more minimalist or transparent approach to storytelling. But those voices may not be as capacious--the straightforward, "I'm-not-really-here" narrative voice would, I think, have a harder time inserting long passages of history into a fictional narrative, because they'd come off as dry and boring. That's not to disparage the minimalist style; it doesn't seek the kind of capacity I'm talking about in the first place. But if you need greater range in your story, your voice needs greater range, too: so give it more bravado, more curiosity, more offbeat humor, more fury. The more distinctive the voice, the more places it can go.


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Writing about states of mind: the telling that shows

This Iris Murdoch lady can write. Did you guys know? I had never read Murdoch before, but picked up The Good Apprentice recently, and am, like, captivated. Yes, it comes with a blurb from Harold Bloom, but don't let that dissuade you. It is that somewhat rare bird, the truly entertaining philosophical novel. It's about a college student who accidentally kills his friend by slipping him LSD. It's also about the student's family--all deranged in varying degrees, but, like Dostoevsky's characters, they've earned their nuttiness by sincerely trying to understand how to live. It's engrossing, creepy, and quite often hilarious.

I've been revising my own novel frantically as I read Murdoch. I know writers differ on whether it's a good idea to read similar works while writing one's own. I've gone back and forth on this myself, but at the moment I'm firmly in the yes! read them! camp. There's the worry about possibly copying, or--more likely--trying to fit your work into what seems like the other writer's more successful formula. I actually don't think there's much of a risk of either, as long as you understand that your work is different. Whatever the other writer is doing has to be translated into your circumstances and idiom--it must, and will, become yours. I am looking to Murdoch, whose subject and themes are quite similar to those in my new novel, for ways to solve certain problems with pacing. I am not borrowing her prose or even her plot lines, but I am learning patterns and structures.

Specifically, there's the matter of portraying a character's state of mind. As literary theorists, notably Jonathan Culler, remind us, fiction is the one mode that gives us seemingly transparent insight into other minds--though those other minds are, necessarily, fictional (because it's a fiction that we can have access to other minds). Anyway. My question, as a writer is, how do you do that? What's the best way to represent another mind in action?

The dreaded "Show don't tell" mantra doesn't help here. You can show distress by having a character pace and run his fingers through his hair and mutter. You can have him tell another character he's distressed--but not in so many words, of course. But if you want to represent interior life, the life the character lives when he's alone--and I think you do, because otherwise your character is an automaton, simply a reactor to stimuli--you need another mode. You need a form of telling that shows.

Murdoch is a master of showing by telling. Here is just a sampling of Edward's thoughts, shortly after his friend's death:

If only he could have, somehow, somewhere, a clean pain, a vital pain, not a death pain, a pain of purgatory by which in time he could work it all away, as a stain which could be patiently worked upon and cleansed and made to vanish. But there was no time, he had destroyed time. This was hell, where there was no time.

The reason this passage (and pages and pages of similar passages) works is that it doesn't bore us with mere, abstract telling. The narrator shows us what's in Edward's mind by using the language and rhythm Edward himself uses when he's thinking. He's obsessed, so his language and thoughts are repetitive. He's overwhelmed, self-punishing and self-pitying, so his language is grandiose. At the same time, Edward is intelligent. He is the kind of character who strives to think through his problems, and he has access to concepts that allow him to do so in a sophisticated--if ineffectual--manner. (And his thinking should be ineffectual; there is no easy way to live with, or comprehend, what he's done.)

Reading Murdoch has opened my eyes to the possibilities of this kind of narration--the self-aware interior monologue, in which telling and showing merge. I think such possibilities offer themselves more easily once we learn to really respect our characters. We can give them the ability, which we ourselves possess, to wonder and marvel and obsess and worry inside their own heads. Let them seek truth, as we do, through them.


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Personification enlivens abstraction

Here's another thing writing teachers always tell us: Be concrete. Use words that create images in the reader's mind; make them feel or hear or see or smell something specific. (Smell is an especial favorite.) This dictum is a variation of the dreaded "Show, don't tell," and, like its counterpart, it has its merits. For example, concreteness leads to specificity, which is always a good thing, because specific details form the Lilliputian army with which you beat back the Giant Art-Killing Cliche Worm.

But, let's face it: abstractions exist. Language itself is an abstraction. Also, if a writer has any ambition beyond accurately rendering the physical experiences of daily life, she'll need to use some words denoting concepts, ideas, theories. Yet she doesn't want to end up with a dry philosophical treatise, drained of all life's blood. What to do?

Well, cleverly blending the abstract and the concrete is one way to go. Let's take a cue from Benjamin Black, the pen-name of John Banville in his thriller-writing mode. In Christine Falls, his main character, Quirke, is working his way through a bad meal in an overrated restaurant, while trying to extract some information from his brother-in-law. As Quirke mulls his interlocutor's evasive answers, Black tosses off this gem:

Quirke's palate recalled the salmon with a qualm.

First off, the personification here ratchets up the interest right away. Having Quirke's palate "recall" the salmon gives an otherwise dull and largely abstract concept, one's "palate," a life of its own, literally. We've all had this experience of unwillingly retrieving a bad food experience (I'm not talking about the more dramatic, literal possibilities here)--and having the palate do the honors, rather than Quirke himself, creates that involuntary dynamic.

The second word that benefits from this treatment, in this same sentence, is "qualm." This is another word that can't really attract any interest on its own. It's part of a cliched phrase, having qualms about x, and although it's an amusing-sounding word, it can't overcome this history by itself. But, again, it's the palate that has the qualm, not Quirke, and this makes all the difference. When something that we assume can't have a qualm (or whatever) is shown to do so, the all-but-dead word comes back to quivering life. The "qualm" now sounds like a little spasm of the throat or tongue, and is funny and vivid and very close to our own recalled experience.

So, personification of abstractions is one way to infuse them with specificity. You can't overdo personification, of course, or it will quickly grow preposterous--but it is a way of mixing the abstract and the concrete, so that you can use abstractions without floating off into the high desert of pure theory.
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In praise of the writerly surprise

I've been dipping into George Saunders's essays in The Braindead Megaphone. I've always admired Saunders as a writer of the kind of surreal, hilarious, and deeply sad fiction I wish I could come up with myself. But man, can he rock an essay.

I suppose that what makes his fiction great is something he also does--less often, and therefore perhaps more strikingly--in his nonfiction: He surprises us. I don't mean that his work is startlingly good, or shockingly original, though that's true. I'm talking about these little explosive surprises that he drops in, mid-sentence or mid-paragraph, that make you stop and go, Wow.

Case in point, from "Thank you, Esther Forbes." This is a celebration of Saunders's childhood discovery of Johnny Tremain, and with it, the fact that fiction did not have to be awful:

Before Johnny Tremain, writers and writing gave me the creeps. In our English book, which had one of those 1970s titles that connoted nothing (Issues and Perspectives, maybe, or Amalgam 109), the sentences ("Larry, aged ten, a tow-headed heavyset boy with a happy smile for all, meandered down to the ballfield, hoping against hope he would at last be invited to join some good-spirited game instigated by the other lads of summer") repulsed me the way a certain kind of moccasin-style house slipper then in vogue among my father's friends repulsed me.

Who on earth would think of comparing the mediocre prose in a 70s children's fiction anthology to a moccasin? But the thing is, I think we all make leaps like this. Only for must of us, these leaps remain in our subconscious. We'd never articulate them to ourselves or others, because it feels ridiculous that we get the same feeling--the creeps--from reading a stupid story as from looking at someone's slippers. Neither of these things should give us the creeps in the first place, right? The fact that both do is beyond wrong, even a little shameful. Yet it's true. I instantly recognized this feeling of getting the creeps from an apparently, indeed strenuously innocuous story. It's the insistence on innocuousness that causes the creeps to descend.

Later in the same essay Saunders drops a much more shocking bomb, quoting the bureaucratic prose of an SS officer on how it's better to leave the lights on in the gas chamber before turning on the jets, to keep "the load" from screaming and pushing against the door. Good God. Is it really a straight line from the story of the tow-headed boy, through the slippers, to this grotesque evasion of responsibility for mass murder? Well, Saunders suggests, kind of. An inauthentic relationship to language is no small matter. It means you can distance yourself from what you say, and what you think you mean. Using language well--giving it its full due--means taking responsibility.

Much better, then, to be honest about how a bad story reminds us of a house slipper, in that both made us feel deeply weird. That kind of honesty is a small salvo in the fight against the bureaucratization of the soul. Plus, when you say it out loud, it turns out to be so right, it's hilarious.



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Must the Great Novel be large, sprawling, frantic, and a bit of a mess?

No, I didn't disappear under a pile of fennel, but of work...which is like fennel, in that it is tough and large and sometimes hard to cut through, but very good roasted.

In addition, I have been racing to finish Roberto Bolaño's 2666, because I took it out of the library, and although I can renew it for another three weeks, there's a certain shame in that, a certain failure, and so I read and read most of last weekend, instead of working on my own stuff. OK, so I'm still not quite done. And I don't want to be done. This is a book that I'm going to miss when it's over, even though a great deal of it is concerned with war and murder, especially the mass murders of women in Ciudad Juárez, but also of Jews in World War II. In fact there is, at one point, an almost relentless cataloging of murders, a kind of theme with variations, that goes on for hundreds of pages, while various police officers, politicians, and reporters weave in and out, trying and failing to understand, and sometimes disappearing themselves. Yet, these depictions of atrocities never feel exploitative or sentimentalized; as a reader I felt a tremendous weight of confusion and sorrow, which, oddly, made me unable to put the book down.

The preface and afterword explain that 2666 was Bolaño's last work; he wrote it while becoming increasingly ill, and he knew he was dying as he was finishing it. This no doubt added a certain urgency to the prose, perhaps a certain wildness and willingness to plunge into depths that the rest of us either fear too much, or don't know. In addition there is a raggedness and repetitiveness to some sections, which Bolaño might have edited out, had he been given more time. Then again, his other work suggests polish and brevity were not his concerns. And in 2666, hearing of a friend's preference for "short, neatly shaped novels,"* one of the characters muses:

Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench.

I do think this novel is that other kind, imperfect and torrential. In my opinion, it's right up there with The Brothers Karamazov and Moby-Dick. It has the same vast scope, the same existential cri de coeur at its center, the same rage to comprehend--to encompass and understand--the entire range of human experience. Interestingly, the novel is not much concerned with God or religion, at least not overtly. Literature seems to replace God as a transcendent, unifying principle. Now, normally I don't approve of novels whose theme is writing (and whose main characters are writers), because they suggest that the author simply can't imagine people with professions unlike his own--which is a blatant failure of the writer's task. However, in this case, writing is the ultimate human quest for answers. The writer, as Bolaño has made clear in any number of works, is a detective. He is not, if he's doing it right, some kind of cloistered, disengaged commentator, but a seeker of truth, a religious pilgrim, outlaw, and professional wrestler rolled into one.

But is it true that an authentically great novel must be of this type--big, messy, overtly trying and ultimately failing to embrace everything? My own preference is, in fact, for such novels, though I have never attempted one myself (as yet). Still, this might just be a personal preference. Or is there a reason that the beautifully crafted, smaller "gem" of a book really does fall short of greatness? Does the perfection of craft represent a failure of intellectual or emotional ambition? Should the writer always bite off more than she can chew, or do battle with monsters she can never hope to catch or tame?

*I am quoting from the Note to the First Edition by Ignacio Echevarría.

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An adverb of note

From time to time I like to say something nice about adverbs. Stephen King has said the road to hell is paved with them, and no one knows the way to perdition better than King. And it's true that writers often employ adverbs for the sole purpose of shoring up weak adjectives or verbs--at which task they are destined to fail every time. However, the rare, weird, unexpected and yet perfectly fitting adverb is cause for celebration.

Today's example comes from Roberto Bolaño's 2666:

Then came an assembly of Germanists in Berlin, a twentieth-century German literature congress in Stuttgart, a symposium on German literature in Hamburg, and a conference on the future of German literature in Mainz. Norton, Morini, Pelletier, and Espinoza attended the Berlin assembly, but for one reason or another all four of them were able to meet only once, at breakfast, where they were surrounded by other Germanists fighting doggedly over the butter and jam.

I absolutely love the "doggedly" there. Of course, I don't know what word was used in the original Spanish, or even if the sentence was constructed in the same way: credit for the adverb must be shared between Bolaño and his translator, Natasha Wimmer. The word just gives the sentence an additional little twist, like fine-tuning a guitar string, that nudges the whole scene into sublimity.

The test of an adverb's necessity is whether the sentence would be the same or stronger without it, and/or if you can find a verb (or, sometimes, adjective) that incorporates the adverb, and becomes more powerful for having consumed it. The image of Germanists "fighting over butter and jam" would still be kind of funny and recognizable. Perhaps "squabbling" or "skirmishing" could be substituted for "fighting," which is not an especially vivid word in itself. But I can't think of a better way to convey the ritualized, determined, petty, hilarious, and hopeless nature of the fight depicted here than with "doggedly." The word gets a boost from the previous sentence, which reflects the relentless march of conferences at which the fight is played out over and over.

But adverbs are the Bigfoot (Bigfeet?) of grammar. They should appear rarely, and be rare and weird themselves. Spotting one should be memorable, and something to tell your friends or blog about.

For the love of the flawed novel

From Emily St. John Mandel's review of Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker on The Millions:

[I]t seems to me that there’s something magnificent about sprawling and ever-so-slightly flawed novels.

It seems so to me, as well. Part of what I love about The Brothers Karamazov, for instance, is the sense that its author, genius as he is, is just barely in control of his material. His writing often has the feel of a man trying to wrap his arms around a large bag of demonically possessed squirrels. The source of his novels' grandeur is struggle, reflected in his characters' existential anguish. His greatest success, like theirs, is not in overcoming anguish but in giving it voice--sometimes seemingly by accident, as in convoluted prose, rushed scenes, and characters who appear and disappear for no evident reason. I suppose if the whole novel was nothing but these kinds of accidents, we'd call it a promising first draft, or simply a mess. But these flaws coexist with clearly defined conflicts with stakes even larger than life and death, masterful set pieces, and characters whose flesh and blood we come very close to actually touching. The flaws, in fact, make these successful parts even better: they roughen the edges of the masterpiece, making it a visceral experience.

In contrast, I love Marilynne Robinson's Gilead in a very different way. As my previous commentary on it shows, I experienced it as a Work of Art that more or less drove me to my knees. It inspired awe, and had the heft of cathedral tunes. As an artistic achievement, I think it deserves mention in the same breath as Brothers Karamazov, but on an emotional level I'm less drawn to it, because it is not flawed. There is no badly worded sentence, no misstep in the (admittedly much simpler) plot. The artist is in complete control, and there is something vaguely off-putting about that. Maybe because I suspect I can never achieve that level of mastery myself. Or maybe it's because consciousness itself is messy and surprising. As Annie Murphy Paul explains in Sunday's NYT editorial, a recent analysis of MRI data

concluded that there was substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate interactions with other individuals — in particular, interactions in which we’re trying to figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a map of other people’s intentions “theory of mind.” Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage this capacity, as we identify with characters’ longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers. 

With its irruptions, dead ends, and coffee and blood stains, the map of Dostoevsky's mind looks far more like mine than Robinson's does. Hard to believe, since her work is set in twentieth-century Iowa and Dostoevsky's in tsarist Russia. But there you go.

What is vocabulary for?

Back in the day, when there were no iPads and we did our homework on the backs of shovels using lumps of coal (boy, did teachers hate grading papers then), we once had to do the following assignment: Write a story about something you did yesterday. Then rewrite it, replacing as many "little" words as possible with "bigger" words. This was an exercise in stretching our vocabularies. I can't remember what grade this was, possibly third, or maybe fifth (it couldn't have been fourth, as I had a particularly memorable and colorful--OK, frightening--teacher that year, so I would remember that). Anyway, I distinctly recall hearing another kid reading one of her improved sentences, which came out: "My friend and I purchased each other Christmas gifts." I have remembered this sentence all these years, because of how it grated on my pedantic little ears. What, I silently wondered, was wrong with "bought"? Swapping it out for "purchased" made no useful difference in meaning, and it wrecked the grammar of the sentence besides. But the kid had done the assignment correctly, and so was praised.

Now, I'm not saying this exercise was a terrible idea--it was just an exercise, and even a rather inventive one. But it did convey the idea that the purpose of using "big" words (two syllables are better than one!) was simply to sound more impressive, more educated. I honestly think that this is still what most students believe when they are made to study "vocabulary" for various tests. I once worked on a vocabulary CD-ROM whose selling point was that it spat words randomly at the user, and he or she racked up points by selecting the correct meaning for each one before time ran out. Now, it isn't news that context makes it a whole lot easier to learn new words, and that a richer vocabulary develops most efficiently, and least painfully, through extensive reading. But the question still remains: Apart from getting through all those damned tests, is the point of improving one's vocabulary really just to sound educated? To impress potential employers and mates with your great big verbal display?

A much better reason--which only occurred to me rather recently--is that language is a set of tools. The more words you have at your disposal, the greater the precision of those tools. If you know only the word "buy," you have a hammer, and you have to use it on everything from a rock to a Ming vase. If you know "buy," "purchase," "acquire," "obtain," etc.--and understand the subtle differences they make in different contexts--you have a scalpel, or a laser beam, or a pair of tweezers, or a brush. Words are for finding and expressing meaning in the most accurate way possible. They're for refinement. A large vocabulary gives you not only options, but a sense that there are options. Maybe you can't even think of the right word immediately--but knowing that it, or at least something close to it, exists will make you pause and work on that particular thought or sentence, until it says what you need it to say. The thought, the sentence, and civilization itself are all better for that effort.

A non-fiction sentence I happen to like

Since we've been on the subject of sentences lately, I thought I'd say a few words about one I just came across. It's the first sentence in the opening chapter of David Rains Wallace's Chuckwalla Land: The Riddle of California's Desert:

The desert's stark reticence challenges comfortable notions that we humans occupy the apex of benign, reasonable processes that have unfolded especially to produce us.

At first glance, this is not an especially stunning sentence. It doesn't really start the book off with a bang (though there is a prologue that begins with a shorter, zippier line). It also contains some fairly abstract, generic terms like "challenges" and "notions" and "processes" that in other hands could have made the sentence deadly dry.

So why do I like it? First, the striking phrase "stark reticence" at the beginning creates a lot of goodwill for proceeding through the rest. The phrase personifies the desert, and it's always nice to have an active presence for the reader to attach to right off the bat. Moreover, it brings together two terms that I, at least, am not used to seeing together. It makes me think the writer is precise and inventive, without being overly showy about it. The vividness of that phrase spreads over the relatively dull words in the rest of the sentence, and the dull words, in turn, end up setting the phrase off more. The dull words keep the prose from becoming purple, an especial risk in nature writing.

Second, although it's a somewhat long sentence, there is only one comma. As a sort of Johnny Appleseed of commas myself, I appreciate this particularly. But it's not just a matter of leaving commas out. The sentence is constructed in such a way as to not need them. It's a sentence about qualification--in fact, the whole thing is one big qualification of humanity's sense of itself at the end of the evolutionary chain. Qualifications usually beget commas. However, Wallace has obviated this problem by correctly identifying the subject of the sentence as the desert, not humanity. In other words, the sentence mirrors its point: we're not at the apex after all--not in this book, anyway.

With the true subject properly named and situated, the rest of the sentence can unfold according to the book's overall argument. And it really does seem to unfold. As we move forward through its smooth, nearly comma-free terrain, complex ideas peel away and bring us--at last and ironically--to "us." Here we are, except we don't know where we are anymore. Now we are in position for a guided tour through the "enigma" of the California desert.

(No, I haven't finished the Pynchon cinder block yet; thanks for asking.)

Should we try to write like Henry James?

For the last year or so, I've been doing a series on my blog called "Borrowed Fire,"* in which I read works of classic literature and try to draw out lessons for contemporary fiction writers. All the books are available on Project Gutenberg. For the past few months I've been working my way through Henry James's The Turn of the Screw.

Now seems as good a time as any to talk about James's language, and whether writers today can learn from a style that seems particularly outdated.

I probably first read Turn in high school. I have a vague memory of my English teacher, who was blessed with an ominous, quavering voice, intoning about the sexual nature of the threat. I have a stronger memory of being bored and frustrated by the story, because it was supposed to be so incredibly scary--but I could not get through the prose. If the story was supposed to keep me on the edge of my seat, why did it take the narrator *forever* to get the simplest point across? If she was terrified by her experience, how did she have the mental capacity to even construct such long, involved sentences? Yes, the story is told in retrospect, but wouldn't it have been better to make it more immediate, so that the narrator's reactions could be more visceral and (therefore) believable? The whole thing seemed pointless. You know, maybe back then people managed to get scared while wading through giant blocks of baroque language, but James just puts us to sleep.

I'm going to go ahead and assume that lots of readers have a similar response to Turn, at least the first time through. The whole literary endeavor seems to run counter to horror, at least to what we now think of as horror. Thanks especially to movies, horror is a sensory experience, not a verbal one. Lots of screaming, lots of gruesome visuals and crunching, but light on talking and reflecting. If you are writing for an audience seeking this type of experience, you'll get nowhere borrowing from James. Just go with "Oh, God...Oh...God," and lots of one-sentence paragraphs.

But I've come to believe that retrospect is a great place to tell a scary story from. For one thing, there's the problem posed by memory itself. What do I really remember? What have I forgotten due to the trauma of the experience? Maybe I've gone crazy, and none of this really happened. Or maybe it's going to happen again, even though I've been free of those awful apparitions--I think--for all these years. A story like Turn, you see, is never over. So the process of writing it, instead of being a clumsy device ("The vampire is coming through my door right now, his foul breath is upon me, but I must keep writing...must...aaaggghhh...") becomes a necessary part of the story.

The narrator of Turn is trying to make sense of her memory, to recollect the experience in as much detail as possible, while constantly questioning the accuracy of those details. What if she hasn't got them right? What if she has? Either way, the implications are terrible. Writing itself becomes a type of horror, a compulsion the writer can't resist but also can't bear to face. It's not just the shock of the experience that frightens the writer, but realizing all the aspects of what it's done to her, and what it is still doing to her. She is, to this day, bewildered.

It produced in me, this figure, in the clear twilight, I remember, two distinct gasps of emotion, which were, sharply, the shock of my first and that of my second surprise. My second was a violent perception of the mistake of my first: the man who met my eyes was not the person I had precipitately supposed. There came to me thus a bewilderment of vision of which, after these years, there is no living view that I can hope to give.

James's kind of horror isn't simple. It's a complicated experience, which is confusing even in recollection. But the confusion is rendered with precision--the kind of precision only an acute loss can bestow. The above passage is the moment that "bewilderment of vision" sets in. The narrator has lived at least long enough to write the story--but from this point on, she is lost (in the wilderness), and she knows it. That's the horror--watching herself become lost.

So should we try to write like Henry James? Or to put it another way, could anyone in our time write a story like this, in this manner? I think it would be well worth trying, even using James's style, giving shadings to shadings. Possibly the memoir format could work here, only it's a fictional memoir...and instead of redemption at the end, portray the growing recognition that there is no way out of one's own memory--real or not.

*"Stolen Fire," as in stealing fire from the gods, was--appropriately--taken. Also the idea of writers "borrowing" from others, especially from those to whom we are supposed to feel inferior, appeals to me. It puts us on a more equal footing--Fyodor, can I borrow a cup of sugar / method for creating suspense? Henry, that's a great tone on you--could I try it on sometime, and maybe wear it out to dinner?

The pressure of other languages

I see one of Stanley Fish's all-time favorite sentences is by Nabokov. As much as one may want to argue with Fish--just because--it's pretty hard to argue with Nabokov as a sentence god.

It's hard to say exactly what makes this and many, many other Nabokov sentences so richly beautiful. But years ago, I heard a talk by Doris Sommer on bilingualism and literature, and she suggested that the pressure of Nabokov's native Russian behind his English has something to do with it. This is also perhaps one reason why so many non-native speakers of English end up expressing themselves far more eloquently that those of us who grew up taking it for granted. In Nabokov's case, there are often masked definitions of words in Russian behind those in English, which give a subtle twist to the English meanings. Moreover, there are different sounds, rhythms, syntaxes (sin taxes?), etc., that Nabokov's ear hears, and then sort of suppresses, as he writes. You could say there's a Russian harmony, or harmonics, to the English main melody.

Interesting that the sentence Fish selected is actually about the pressure of the past welling up into the present--and all the different forms that pressure can take. It mutates, and won't be denied.

Macho minimalism

From Adam Haslett's review of Stanley Fish's new book, How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One:

Though never explicitly political, The Elements of Style is unmistakably a product of its time. Its calls for "vigour" and "toughness" in language, its analogy of sentences to smoothly functioning machines, its distrust of vernacular and foreign language phrases all conform to that disciplined, buttoned-down and most self-assured stretch of the American century from the armistice through the height of the Cold War. [....]

The terse, declarative sentence in all its masculine hardness routed the passive involutions of a higher, denser style. (James, from "The Altar of the Dead": "He had a mortal dislike, poor Stransom, to lean anniversaries, and loved them still less when they made a pretence of a figure"; Hemingway, from "A Way You'll Never Be": "These were the new dead and no one had bothered with anything but their pockets.") As a result, pared-down prose of the sort editor Gordon Lish would later encourage in Raymond Carver became our default "realism." This is a real loss, not because we necessarily need more Jamesian novels but because too often the instruction to "omit needless words" (Rule 17) leads young writers to be cautious and dull; minimalist style becomes minimalist thought, and that is a problem. [Bold type mine.]

Speak it, brother. The imperative to cut, or pare (a more precise evocation, somehow), too often means shaving away the great weirdnesses of thought and emotion that make literary fiction what it is. Cutting as an aesthetic practice can mean hacking through the jungle rather than exploring, or even getting lost--which takes just as much fortitude, if not more. (Ask Werner Herzog, not a minimalist.)

Style and content are not separate. Style and content and process and structure are all of a piece. Some stories will bring about their own cutting, in due time; but others won't even come into being if we cling to minimalism as a principle. It feeds the dreaded editor-in-your-head, who won't let you say what you want to say in the first place, and is no doubt a product of Cold War-era psychology anyway.

The sentence as found object

It 's been weeks since I first read Louis Menand's commentary on Hiding Man, Tracy Daugherty's new biography of Donald Barthelme. But I still get a shot of adrenaline every time I read this part:

In the production of found-material art, the painter has an obvious advantage, and Barthelme was aware of the problem. [....] The visual artist can deal with almost every kind of material, even sound, but the writer deals with only one kind of material: sentences. The solution, therefore, was to treat sentences as though they were found objects.

We rarely experience sentences this way, because we're trying to look through them to the things they represent, just as, in traditional easel painting, we look through the canvas, as though it were a window, onto the world it represents. That's the kind of looking and reading that modernism was committed to disrupting.

Back when I thought I was a visual artist, I was most interested in found-object art. I was drawn to the opaque, disruptive scrap, and to artists like Rauschenberg, with whom Barthelme worked as a museum director and magazine writer. But when I started writing fiction--probably because of my academic background, along with the still-current fashion for minimalist realism--I kept aiming for the window model. And failing. For whatever reason, I'm just too fond of strewing around clunky, inappropriate sentences that mar the view.

I hasten to point out that I'm talking about deliberately clunky writing in this case. But one solution for clunky writing is to go with it, build a voice out of it, rather than trying to beat it back. There might be a reason it's happening, other than pure authorial ineptitude. If you're going to go this route, however, you have to do a good job of being clear, or at least deft, with your sentences when you need to be. Show you're aware of the clunks and are controlling them, for a purpose.

I've found it incredibly liberating to contemplate fiction as collage--not on the paragraph or section level, but on the sentence level. This creates a really fascinating set of challenges. In addition to managing deliberate badness, one has to create some kind of satisfying arc, something that serves the function of plot without necessarily being plot. Barthelme does this brilliantly, in a story like "The Zombies," for instance. Somewhere underneath all this bland chatter and fake / real folklore there's a conflict, resolution, and denouement. I can't quite point to where they are, but I sense them. It's like a plot inside-out.

The mush-mouthed among us

I used to think that George H. W. Bush stumbled over his words when he was lying. Somewhere not terribly deep inside him (because he was not terribly deep), he felt that what he was saying was wrong--and indecent. The structures of grammar and common morality, somehow intertwined, were fighting him at those moments. This was before I had plumbed the true evil of the Bush family, so I may rethink that theory. However, as many have already noted, Sarah Palin and W. also share the gift of garble. And they speak most clearly and forcefully when they are lying ("thanks but no thanks," etc.). So what's happening? Is it sheer stupidity, a lack of contact with sentence structure in general which one gets by, say, reading?

A few years ago someone (I can't remember who, unfortunately) observed that W. stumbled most commonly when speaking about caring for others ("Is our children learning?" "I know how hard it is to put food on your family"). These notions either brought up some kind of weird emotional blockage, or else were so foreign to him that he could not even use the language. As for Palin, I don't know for sure. But I think the issue is foreignness. Anything not directly related to Sarah and her quest for power is simply baffling. Other people? Other countries, opinions? Newspapers, you say, with, what did you call them? writers...? Does...not...compute....

The language of choice

At MyDD, Natasha Chart writes an eloquent post addressing the Repub's newfound feminism. (She also makes some nice comparisons between Repub positions and the many things Jesus had to say about compassion.)

Chart points to several examples of progressive language in the R's lines about Palin. I suspect she is partly kidding when she says this: "as irritating as the zealotry of the newly converted always is, I'm glad to see that they're starting to come around."

I want to take a closer look at one statement, because I think it's not just a matter of "coming around" (no matter how hypocritically). It's also a problem of linguistic alternatives:

"We're proud of Bristol's decision to have her baby ..."

As many have noted, the language of choice is on full display here. Feminists have fought for decades so women can freely choose parenthood *if and when we want it.* But how would this sentence work if the Palins' true ideology lay beneath it?

--"We're proud that Bristol was forced to stay pregnant and give birth at age 17."
--"We're proud that we have taught Bristol that there is never a choice when it comes to pregnancy."
--"We're proud that Bristol never had a choice in this matter."

Notice how unloving the parents now sound. It's impossible to be "proud" of a girl who has no autonomy, no choice. Bristol doesn't sound like a person here, but a prisoner, a mere receptacle for sperm and her parents' tyranny. Few parents could be proud of being that cruel, that dehumanizing. In fact there's no way to make this kind of statement in anti-choice terms and come off as anything other than monsters--who, at best, kept their daughter profoundly ignorant (hence the pregnancy in the first place), or, at worst, forced her into giving birth in order to save their own reputations.

The statement shows the Palins do love their daughter--because they gave her a choice.

The Bigfoot Discovery Project

Last Sunday Trev and I visited the Bigfoot Discovery Museum in Felton, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. It is an exceedingly interesting place and well worth a visit. I was a little overwhelmed. The most exciting thing to me was a first-edition copy of Roger Patterson's Do Abominable Snowmen of America Really Exist? That's the academic in me: I was so taken with the sight of book that I ignored the casts from the Patterson bigfoot site on the shelf just below. No bigfoot hunter I! Anyway, it's impossible to overstate the fascination that the Patterson-Gimlin film and the story of its making have had for me over the years. Robert Michael Pyle's wonderful book Where Bigfoot Walks has a good overview, and this Wikipedia article goes into more loving depth--including the tidbit that Bob Gimlin, who will be in Felton for the BDM's festival next Saturday, acknowledges that the film might have been a hoax, though he was not in on it. Anyway, read the whole article and see if you don't get obsessed.

While we're on the subject of me being a dweeb who misses the bigfoot for the book: I see on the BDM site that they have mitigated the singular / plural problem I've always wondered about. Supposedly there are many Bigfoots, or bigfeet, or whatever, but "Bigfoot" suggests that, like the Highlander, there can be only one. However the BDM uses a lower case "b," and seems to employ "bigfoot" as a collective noun that's the same as its singular form, like "deer." Problem solved; and in the process the monster is converted to a more-or-less regular forest critter. (I suspect certain style guides have already instituted this preference. When I published my article in Tin House, I noted in my bio that I was writing a novel about Bigfoot--and the editor, lc'd the "b." At the time I thought it was a mistake, but it turns out they were ahead of me.)

Two small proposals for reconfiguring thought

Here are two words I am going to try not to use anymore:

1. Pig (or ape or shark or any other animal name) as a derogatory term. Pigs are fine animals. But even if they weren't, who are we to judge them? Better to call a poorly-behaved pig a human; except there's really no such thing as poor behavior in pigs, just behavior that is less convenient for those trying to imprison and kill them. And that is, actually, good behavior.

2. Nonbeliever or unbeliever for atheist. Even "atheist" has a negative prefix, which gives the impression of absence and nihilism. This built-in absence makes it easy for theists to claim "they have no morals, no conscience, nothing to aspire to"--when in fact we believe in a great many things, including reason, imagination, progress, beauty, wonder, brilliance, mystery, and even the sacred. The fact that there are no good alternatives for "atheist" shows the extent to which theists have controlled our language. I do not, however, find much power in the term "Bright" as proposed by Dawkins and Dennett. (It does have the advantage of being every bit as smug as "believer" or "Godly" is for others.) I'm a believer, but not in God.

A matter of language?

Trev and I went to the monthly all-day sitting with the Everyday Zen sangha. I'll perhaps comment later on how these sittings, instead of making me more mindful the next day, make me incredibly foggy. I suppose the word for that is "tired," but it's more like my brain is simply not engaging. Anyway, I'm better today.

Norman Fischer's dharma talk was on atheists, especially Daniel Dennett, and their quarrels with "believers." Norman said the argument seemed to him "beside the point"--that we all have religious inklings (Dennett says we are naturally selected to be religious), and the issue really is the language we use to express those feelings. So "God" for one person might be, perhaps, "wonder" for another person. However, Norman also suggested that the language, or concept, of an authoritarian guy on a throne, manipulating us from above and outside, is not a helpful one. We all have to avoid "clamping down" on our concepts, which is what makes us intolerant and judgmental and destructive.

I tended to agree. When people ask me if I believe in God, I always want to ask, "What do you mean?" Guy on a throne? No way. But do I have a sense of the sacred, of something larger? A sense of wonder and awe at the universe? A sense of responsibility toward all creation, even without a creator? Yes. I'd like to think I feel responsible because I care about my fellow beings, not because I'm afraid of punishment or because I want a reward. I think that's called being an adult, and I would like to be one some day.

I'm very glad Dennett and Dawkins and PZ Meyers and all the other atheists are kicking up a ruckus, and by the above definition I'm one of them. On the other hand, I'm not always sure what they're arguing against. If it's the guy on the throne, though, count me in. That guy, even if he exists, should be resisted unto death, and beyond.*

*Update: Here's a helpful post from Tristero, which tells me I need to read my New Atheists more thoroughly. Yes, they're fighting Throne Man, and therefore I cast my lot with them.
But the language here really *is* a problem. "Atheist" seems to me to cover too much ground. As does "God," possibly.