Reading Style

by Jenny Davidson

  I can think of a few recent novels that offer “mouthy” pleasures—the almost physical sense, in the reader’s body, of each word and sentence being formed for one’s sensory delectation—without compromising the traditional narrative pleasures of long-form fiction. James Lasdun and A. L. Kennedy, for instance, both seem to me to work equally effectively in the short story and the novel formats. But my best example of a contemporary long novel that offers not just the deep pleasures I associate with nineteenth-century realist fiction (David Copperfield, Middlemarch) but also the “mouthy” pleasures of a Davis or a Lutz is Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. I find the narrative consistently and mesmerizingly perfect in its diction, immensely satisfying in the exact placement of the words even as the sentences are also effectively tractional, load-bearing:

  Mingus fished in his lining for his El Marko, a Magic Marker consisting of a puglike glass bottle stoppered with a fat wick of felt. Purple ink sloshed inside the tiny screw-top bottle, staining the glass in curtains of color. Mingus drew out a safety pin and stuck the felt in a dozen places, pinning it out he called it, until the ink bled so freely it stained the light skin at his palm, then the green cuff of his oversize jacket. Dylan felt a quiver of the pleasure he associated with his father’s tiny brushes, with Spirograph cogs and skully caps.7

  A hyperawareness of language runs throughout this paragraph, which follows the protagonist Dylan’s consciousness very closely: it is Dylan who is struck by the vivid phrase pinning it out, Dylan who notices and marks to himself in language these physical objects with their striking double existence in language and in the world itself. One of the things I like most in this novel is its portrait of Dylan’s awful friend Arthur Lomb, his ally in an as-yet-ungentrified 1970s Brooklyn where two white boys painfully stand out. Arthur Lomb’s speech is transcribed in all of its cartoonishness:

  Only thing that matters is the test for Stuyvesant. Just math and science. Flunk English, who gives? The whole report card thing’s a joke, always was. I haven’t gone to gym class once. You know Jesus Maldonado? He said he’d break my arm like a Pixy Stix if he caught me alone in the locker room. Gym’s suicide, frankly. I’m not stripping down to my underwear anywhere inside the four walls of this school, I’m just not. If I have to BM, I hold it until after school. (124)

  Mel Brooks’s funniest film is The Producers, then Young Frankenstein or Blazing Saddles. Terri Garr is hot. I feel sorry for any kid who hasn’t seen The Producers. My dad took me to all the humor movies. The best Panther is probably Return. The best Woody is Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. (126)

  This sort of extended monologue, though, which allows the reader to locate Arthur Lomb (he is always called by his full name) on the taxonomic map of human personality and to judge him as harshly and precisely as he tabulates and judges cultural products, leads into an extraordinarily humane and perceptive reflection about Dylan’s relationship to his impossible friend:

  Positioning, positioning, Arthur Lomb was forever positioning himself, making his views known, aligning on some index no one would ever consult. Here was Dylan’s burden, his cross: the accumulated knowledge of Arthur Lomb’s smug policies on every possible question. The cross was Dylan’s to bear, he knew, because his own brain boiled with pedantry, with too-eager trivia ready to burst loose at any moment. So in enduring Arthur Lomb Dylan had been punished in advance for the possibility of being a bore.

  The first sentence employs two triplets—the word “positioning” appears three times, but its third use also represents the first term in a second threesome (“positioning,” “making,” “aligning”). The sentence would feel quite different if Lethem had chosen to use a semicolon or colon after the phrase “positioning himself”; the comma is less judgmental in this case than either of those other punctuation marks. Each successive sentence unfolds with a similarly sharp sense of how the comma can be used to capture the texture of thought: “Dylan’s burden, his cross”; “with pedantry, with too-eager trivia.” Then, after three sentences in which phrases proliferate, comes a final sentence of straight summation, a sentence that lacks any punctuation other than the period at its end and that can be thought of as existing in a relationship to the preceding block of text that would be marked, if it were all one long sentence, by a colon, the colon being the form of punctuation that most clearly puts one set of things in apposition to another. This invisible or notional colon offers a counterweight to the earlier colon and its despairing identification of “the accumulated knowledge of Arthur Lomb’s smug policies” as Dylan’s cross. The passage’s effectiveness depends to a great extent on the shape and cadence of the sentences rather than on the incorporation of “mouthy” nouns; that affinity with the mouthy is more clearly on view in the previous passage I quoted, with words like “puglike,” “wick” and “sloshed” and the evocative listing of colors and artist’s tools. In short, Lethem is able to mobilize a wider range of effects than either Davis or Lutz, and The Fortress of Solitude maintains a storytelling momentum that invites the comparison to nineteenth-century realist fiction (Dickens, Honoré de Balzac); it is finally a limitation, I think, however much it attracts me, that Lutz and Davis appeal to the reader by way of the emotional privation conveyed in the bald sequence of words grounded in the mouth.

  4

  The Acoustical Elegance of Aphorism

  Kafka, Fielding, Austen, Flaubert

  It is possible that I have read Pride and Prejudice as many as fifty times. At eight or nine, I had a battered mass-market garage-sale paperback, its cover depicting a supercilious blonde bonneted Elizabeth Bennet looking slyly away from Mr. Darcy, their appearances puzzlingly at odds with the film stills included inside from the 1940 Hollywood adaptation with Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier. I was young enough not to understand the extent to which Austen wants us to notice Mr. Bennet’s shortcomings as a father (the absurdity of Mary’s aspirations to philosophy also mostly passed me by), but that didn’t prevent the novel from becoming at once a love object and an object of obsessive scrutiny. It might be that I learned more about sentences and forms of narration from Pride and Prejudice than from any other source. I remember the excitement of teaching the novel, as a graduate student assistant, in a Penguin edition that gave me almost the illusion of reading the book for the first time. I have taught it seven or eight times since, and written about it at regular intervals, but each time I reread it, I notice at least one thing I have never seen before, a striking formulation or a curious juxtaposition or an unresolved ambiguity.

  Austen’s prose is remarkable in being at the same time supremely stylized, crafted, controlled and also exceptionally productive of identification and empathy; indeed, her novels produce an intensity of author-love (and sometimes author-hate) that makes them unusually difficult to teach, if the goal is to consider the workings of sentences and paragraphs, modes of narration and authorial voice. A novel such as Emma, though the precision and ingenuity of its language may periodically stop the reader short, invites reading by the scene or the chapter or the volume: reading in gulps. What happens when the kind of very close reading demanded by the prose of Lutz or Davis is leveled on sentences that are on the face of things far more evidently tractional and load-bearing than most of the ones I have looked at so far? “Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.”1

  Emma’s opening sentence could almost be the beginning of a real-world fairy tale; perhaps only the verb “seemed” and the ostentatiously positive sequence of traits (“handsome, clever, and rich”) hint that there will be some satirical or ironic undermining of the premise so straightforwardly asserted. (Austen famously promised in a letter, writing of this novel’s title character, that she intended to create a heroine “whom no-one but myself will much like.”) The narrative continues in this w
ay:

  She was the youngest of the two daughters of a most affectionate, indulgent father, and had, in consequence of her sister’s marriage, been mistress of his house from a very early period. Her mother had died too long ago for her to have more than an indistinct remembrance of her caresses, and her place had been supplied by an excellent woman as governess, who had fallen little short of a mother in affection.

  Sixteen years had Miss Taylor been in Mr. Woodhouse’s family, less as a governess than a friend, very fond of both daughters, but particularly of Emma. Between them it was more the intimacy of sisters. Even before Miss Taylor had ceased to hold the nominal office of governess, the mildness of her temper had hardly allowed her to impose any restraint; and the shadow of authority being now long passed away, they had been living together as friend and friend very mutually attached, and Emma doing just what she liked; highly esteeming Miss Taylor’s judgment, but directed chiefly by her own.

  I’m interested here in the tension between the narrative sentences and the aphoristic ones—between sentences of acoustical elegance and ones that are primarily tractional and load-bearing, to use Lutz’s terms. These paragraphs are primarily load-bearing, filling in background and contextualizing the character with a sketch of her family history; the diction is precise without being explicitly satirical, although it verges here and there on irony, particularly in the last line of the penultimate paragraph. Austen offers a sharp judgmental summing-up in the phrase “Emma doing just what she liked,” then unpacks Emma’s choices into an opposition that is structurally reminiscent of satire, if not actually satirical, delineating a dynamic tension between Emma’s “highly esteeming” the governess’s judgment while being “directed chiefly by her own.”

  It is the next paragraph, though, whose rhythms and structure will become markedly aphoristic: “The real evils indeed of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself; these were the disadvantages which threatened alloy to her many enjoyments. The danger, however, was at present so unperceived, that they did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her.”

  The broad summing-up in the first sentence is not a satirical judgment as such, though the lurking irony is heightened by the precise and unusual word choice “threatened alloy” (the precision itself, not just the slightly surprising use of “alloy” as an abstract noun rather than as the more familiar verb, signals that something is happening beyond what’s said). The final sentence, though, undoubtedly has the ring of satire. It’s not a symmetrically balanced sentence in the classic manner of the eighteenth-century British couplet (“Good nature and good sense must ever join; / To err is human, to forgive, divine”)—it ends with a preposition-plus-pronoun pair (“with her”) that unseats the whole thing. The word “however” sets this sentence on the other end of a see-saw from the one that precedes it, and its shorter length does not preclude its having an equivalent or greater amount of pull than the one it follows. The notion that Emma’s disadvantages “did not by any means rank as misfortunes with her” at present sets up the likelihood of a future in which this state of affairs will be inverted, a future made possible in the sentence precisely by the narrator’s shift into an aphoristic mode.

  What exactly do I mean when I say aphorism? One way of defining the term is to give a few of the “maxims,” though the terms maxim and aphorism are not always interchangeable, of the seventeenth-century French writer François de La Rochefoucauld. La Rochefoucauld’s formulations are sharp, cynical, abbreviated, with a satirical dynamism that springs from the unexpected and often highly ingenious coupling of terms: “Hypocrisy is the tribute which vice pays to virtue.” Here is Jonathan Swift’s translation of another of La Rochefoucault’s maxims: “In the Adversity of our best Friends, we find something that doth not displease us.”2 The rubric of aphorism covers a whole family of associated forms, all relatively brief and gnomic, from the self-explanatory folk proverb (“Haste makes waste”; “A rolling stone gathers no moss”) to William Blake’s troubling and enigmatic proverbs in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (“Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead”; “The cistern contains: the fountain overflows”) or to Franz Kafka’s lovely and elusive Zürau aphorisms. La Rochefoucauld may provide the template for the aphorism—sharp, cynical, interested in human nature—but my favorite aphorisms of Kafka’s serve less as sharp assertions about human nature and the human world than as self-contained elliptical parables, their feel not satirical so much as mythic:

  Leopards break into the temple and drink all the sacrificial vessels dry; it keeps happening; in the end, it can be calculated in advance and is incorporated into the ritual.

  The animal twists the whip out of its master’s grip and whips itself to become its own master—not knowing that this is only a fantasy, produced by a new knot in the master’s whiplash.

  The crows like to insist a single crow is enough to destroy heaven. This is incontestably true, but it says nothing about heaven, because heaven is just another way of saying: the impossibility of crows.3

  Strikingly, although things happen here (parables often have a narrative component), these small chunks of prose are not chronologically structured stories—the tense is that of a habitual or ongoing present, lending a timeless quality (legendary rather than historical in its associations) to the worlds they create.

  The Oxford English Dictionary defines an aphorism, in the first place, as a definition or concise statement of a scientific principle, and by extension as “any principle or precept expressed in few words; a short pithy sentence containing a truth of general import; a maxim.” The maxim or aphorism is a self-contained form (Kafka’s short parables are not set into longer narratives; they stand on their own), but an aphoristic sentence can also punctuate or give piquancy to a longer paragraph of prose. Henry Fielding relies extensively on this technique. When Squire Allworthy decides to take in the illegitimate foundling Tom Jones and raise him as his own child, his sister, Mrs. Bridget, orders a suitable nursery to be set up, something she cannot do without complaining that “for her part, she could not help thinking it was an encouragement to vice; but that she knew too much of the obstinacy of mankind to oppose any of their ridiculous humours” (alluding to the supposed obstinacy of her brother, Allworthy, perhaps the sweetest-tempered character in the book):

  With Reflections of this Nature she usually, as has been hinted, accompanied every Act of Compliance with her Brother’s Inclinations; and surely nothing could more contribute to heighten the Merit of this Compliance, than a declaration that she knew, at the same Time, the Folly and Unreasonableness of those Inclinations to which she submitted. Tacit Obedience implies no Force upon the Will, and, consequently, may be easily, and without any Pains, preserved; but when a Wife, a Child, a Relation, or a Friend, performs what we desire, with Grumbling and Reluctance, with Expressions of Dislike and Dissatisfaction, the manifest Difficulty which they undergo, must greatly enhance the Obligation.

  As this is one of those deep Observations which very few Readers can be supposed capable of making themselves, I have thought proper to lend them my Assistance; but this is a Favour rarely to be expected in the Course of my Work. Indeed, I shall seldom or never so indulge him, unless in such Instances as this, where nothing but the Inspiration with which we Writers are gifted, can possibly enable any one to make the Discovery.4

  Mrs. Bridget’s own original pronouncement—the words that prompt this authorial digression—is not allowed the dignity of aphorism. She utters a stream of commonplaces, and by giving them in the third person, the narrator minimizes the chance of Mrs. Bridget’s formulations posing any threat to the authority of his own aphoristic style. The commentary of the subsequent paragraph begins with an observation that leads into a declaration about human nature that will be unfolded and elaborated in the succeeding sentence. This is classic irony, in the sense that the words work to establish a meaning opposite to what’s
said: rather than heightening the merit of compliance, such grumbling would more properly detract from it. Not content to leave the point at this, the narrator regroups and reformulates the argument in less sharply ironic and more broadly comical terms: Fielding uses repetition and listing (“a Wife, A Child, a Relation, or a Friend,” “with Grumbling and Reluctance, with Expressions of Dislike and Dissatisfaction”) to ramp up the joke, lest the reader be in any danger of missing the absurdity of the conclusion.

  The subsequent paragraph represents an even more grandiose detour on the narrator’s part, and the authorial persona here in many respects has less in common with the usual sort of first-person narrator than with the wide-ranging summing-up voice of third-person omniscient narration. The narrator doesn’t mean it ironically when he says that few readers can be supposed capable of making this observation themselves—he’s more delusional than that, and the observation not so “deep” as he supposes, with irony emerging from Fielding’s orientation toward the narrator rather than from the narrator’s toward the reader. His boast of “Inspiration” and his assertion of brotherhood in a group designated as “we Writers” harks back to the voice of the projector/hack writer who narrates Swift’s brilliant and disorienting prose satire A Tale of a Tub. The legacy of the generation of writers that included Swift and Pope would remain very strong not just for Fielding but for Austen as well, though her novels were not written until the early years of the nineteenth century, roughly a hundred years after the beginning of Britain’s Augustan age: Augustan because of the ways (in literature and politics) it reminded participants and onlookers of the Rome of Horace and Juvenal under the rule of Augustus. Britain’s own period of empire, prosperity and power was deemed a second Augustan age not least because of the fact that satire had come to be considered the dominant—perhaps even the most prestigious—literary mode. The great writers of this period learned from La Rochefoucauld and other seventeenth-century French writers (Nicolas Boileau in particular) their mastery over irony, antithesis and the pointed form of the rhymed couplet. Satire ceased to be the dominant literary mode as the century progressed, but the sounds and rhythms of satire continued to inflect all sorts of prose as well as poetry. Even the social thought of Enlightenment giants like David Hume and Adam Smith can be seen as having a fundamentally ironic or paradoxical cast of thought, at the level of the sentence as well as of the broader arguments: Bernard Mandeville’s notorious satire The Fable of the Bees, whose subtitle was Private Vices, Publick Benefits, was loathed by Adam Smith, but Mandeville’s basic insight about how the vice of luxury at the individual level contributes to prosperity at the national level motivates some of Smith’s own economic thought as well.