Reading Style
Page 7
At the moment, though, there’s nothing doing: not in cardboard. Nobody wants me any more and yet, for the usual reasons, I continue to want cash. So, on a sodden Tuesday lunchtime, I’m forced to admit I’ve been driven to make the drinker’s most conventional mistake. I’ve started working in a bar.8
The second-person address “you” is self-consciously literary (the best-known example of second-person narration is probably Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, and it always gives a slight “stunt writing” feel), but the narrator reverts to the plainer “I” after that initial list-like compilation of job histories (this passage falls a good way into the novel as a whole). There are funny moments, including ones produced by that trick of repetition (“you have telephoned telephone owners to tell them about their telephones”), but the overall effect is relentlessly self-denigrating. The time of narration is also unusually slippery here: second-person continuous present-tense address in paragraph one, then a switch into the more straightforward first-person past tense in paragraph two before the disorienting leap of paragraph three, which omits the actual transition from past to present and plunges into the present tense of the current job on a Tuesday lunchtime when alcohol has already been consumed. The last paragraph is clearly going to work as a sort of hinge or joint: there is movement; the next stretch of narration will be attached to this bit and will strike out in a different direction. When I say that the next stretch will exist sideways to the previous one, I have in mind the contrast with a different form of narration in which the story feels less like a vector and more like a structure or model, with each piece functioning as a particular brick might serve in stabilizing an arch, set in the one inevitable place it can possibly belong. That is the feeling that many very good short stories give: it is not the only way a short story can be paced, but it is the kind of pacing that makes the stories of Nathan Englander or Yiyun Li attractive to me despite my general preference for longer fiction.
I have a lurking feeling that I have not yet persuasively made my case about how pacing works in short stories versus the novel, so I want to give two simpler examples that will perhaps clarify the point. I was very struck, some years ago, by the richness of style in evidence in the sentences of this extract from a diary Tobias Hill kept during his stint as a writer-in-residence at Eton. Here Hill has inadvertently allowed a pan of milk to boil over in the suite where he’s staying:
There is nothing seductive about the lactic mire of the electric oven. The Hodgson Guest Suite is indeed roomy, but it is cavernous and utilitarian, everything foursquare and scrubbed to the quick. “All the mod cons” is an estate agent’s way of putting it, too: all cons are present, but the mod is that of a bygone decade. Vinyl seats, flaked white goods, ironing board (though maybe all normal people have ironing boards; maybe it’s just crumpled writers who don’t). Marmoleum.9
“The lactic mire of the electric oven”: I like the phrase, it catches my eye, and yet I feel it’s the kind of stylistic flourish that detracts from the effectiveness of the prose as a whole. The diction is appealing, and yet there’s also something a little purposeless or show-offy, it doesn’t ring quite true: what is this passage for? It is unfair, perhaps, to complain of a diary entry’s seeming undermotivated; it is a perfectly reasonable practice of the genre to offer description for its own sake, and there is no expectation that a diary entry should have the momentum or propulsion of a short story or essay (nor yet the punch of a deliberately composed aphorism). But I can’t shake the feeling that the style is insufficiently called forth by the occasion; this may be related to the kinds of insecurity Hill attributes to himself earlier in the piece (he is the product of comprehensive education rather than public schooling, making Eton a potentially stressful environment), as if he exerts himself to produce these verbal flourishes partly out of a rush of social-educational anxiety, of thinking a little too much about how or what he’s supposed to be thinking.
In contrast to this passage which I have called undermotivated, I would instance a thematically similar extract from a short story by William Boyd, “The Things I Stole” (it is definitely presented as fiction, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t entirely “made up,” but the first-person narrator is rendered in a plausible and low-key fashion that gives the story the feel of a nonfictional personal essay):
I stole food at my boarding school. We were allowed a modest food parcel once a week (like POWs) from a local grocer: a few bananas, a box of dates, mini-packs of cornflakes—no buns or cakes, no chocolates, nothing that could be purchased from the school tuck shop where fizzy drinks, colas, biscuits and every tooth-rotting sweet the confectionery industry could serve up were on offer.
In my house there was a very rich Greek boy whose food parcel might have come from Fortnum & Mason, such was its size and magnificence. I and my coevals pillaged this boy’s food with no compunction (he was plump and cried easily). It was thanks to Stavros’s food parcel that I developed my enduring taste for Patum Peperium, Gentleman’s Relish, a dark, pesto-like spread made from anchovies. It is my Proustian madeleine—it summons up all my early pilfering. I can taste its earthy, farinaceous salinity now.10
This falls somewhere between Hill’s diary entry and Kennedy’s novel. It is “motivated” or purposeful in a way that Hill’s extract isn’t. But it doesn’t have the hinge-like quality of the passage from Kennedy’s novel either; there is movement of a kind (the last line I quote uses the tongue’s sense of taste to bring the past alive in the present), but the tact of the pacing feels to me more characteristic of short story than novel. We sense this to be a satisfactory little chunk of a construction that will probably, once we have read it in its entirety, give the feel of structural self-sufficiency; we don’t imagine that we are likely to be pointed in a wholly unexpected new direction.
One of the most unusual relationships to time in narration that I have ever encountered can be found in the fictions of Edward P. Jones, a writer for whom I feel an admiration mounting almost to idolatry. He has published only one novel, and that book shares many features with the short stories he has been composing over a much more extended period. His effects seem to work equally well in long and short forms, unlike, say, Yiyun Li, whose stories I find exquisite and memorable but whose novel The Vagrants lacked that sense of formal perfection and inevitability and didn’t offer anything that seemed sufficient compensation for their absence. When I reviewed his collection All Aunt Hagar’s Children for the Voice Literary Supplement in 2006, I could only say that Jones “writes as God might, were He to publish fiction”: he mobilizes a relatively unusual verb tense to embed the future in the past, and every single incident in his characters’ lives is simultaneously present to the stories’ omniscient narrator (who is also in this sense a kind of celestial census taker).11 The property called Patches’ Creek belongs to a woman who “fancied herself the richest Negro in Mississippi” but “would die not knowing there were five undertakers and one insurance company founder who were richer”; the battered but intact female protagonist of “Common Law” is “one and a half years from marrying Alvin Deloach,” “more than eight years from marrying Vaughn Anderson,” “just about thirty years from seeing her first grandchild come into the world,” and “more than forty and a half years from death.”12 With this orientation, Jones diverts the reader’s attention almost entirely away from the question of what will happen, a curious and moving technique unmatched elsewhere in contemporary fiction. It speaks to the sweeping aspirations of the realist novel that God’s notional omniscience should be the implicit model for talking about the narrative voice of Tom Jones or Middlemarch, but even omniscient narration in the novel is tied down to a specific temporal vantage point, and to a unidirectional flow of time from past to present; Jones transcends that limitation more fully than any other writer I can think of.
6
Late Style
The Golden Bowl and Swann’s Way
We develop unevenly as readers. I remember
feeling furious, at age fifteen, when the father of one of my brothers’ friends (a psychology professor at Temple) questioned my ability to understand the novels of Dostoevsky. It was not that he doubted my cognitive capacities; rather, he didn’t credit me with the emotional experience and maturity to really comprehend the matters with which Dostoevsky is concerned. I thought he was wrong then, and I still think he’s wrong now, though for somewhat different reasons. It is my observation that the novels of Dostoevsky (and, for different reasons, of Tolstoy as well) are peculiarly suited to the emotional and intellectual range of teenagers. The novels celebrate raw painful forms of emotion and emotionally intense forms of political and religious commitment that will resonate very fully with people between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. Of course, not all books open themselves up so readily at that stage of life. I remember reading two essays by Hume (one of them must have been “Of the Original Contract”) for Judith Shklar’s lecture course on political obligation, at age twenty or so, and finding them obscure, opaque, dare I say boring compared to the more obviously literary works on the syllabus (Richard II, Heinrich von Kleist’s Prince Friedrich of Homburg, Murder In the Cathedral); three years later, with a much fuller knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thought, the same essays had become extraordinarily lucid, not just comprehensible but magically clear, as clear and easy to read as I had found Orwell’s essays at sixteen. It was as though someone had pulled a trick on me and switched the texts: I could have sworn I was reading an altogether different sequence of words this time around.
There is something to be said for waiting to read a given book until one is truly prepared to plunge into its depths. I read Moby-Dick on my own, the summer after my first year of graduate school (a year in which the book that most struck me with the force of revelation was Paradise Lost, which, strange to say, I had never read before); I had previously avoided Herman Melville’s novel on the mistaken belief that it was a sea story along tedious and vaguely Conradian lines. (I have always been immune to Joseph Conrad’s charms, though I make an exception for The Secret Agent, which, along with Dostoevsky’s Demons and James’s The Princess Casamassima, seems to me to capture perfectly the ways in which the later decades of the nineteenth century eerily anticipate the romance of terror in the first decade of the twenty-first.) Nothing could have been further from the truth: like the opening books of Paradise Lost, Moby-Dick is electrifyingly strange, mesmerizing, lovely (I now saw where Pynchon had gotten so many of his effects). I loved Moby-Dick so much that part of me was angry that nobody had told me sooner how genuinely great it was, great in the colloquial sense rather than the canonical one, although it might be that if I’d encountered it sooner, I wouldn’t have been so well primed to fall in love with it.
It is George Eliot and Henry James, I think, out of all the great canonical English-language novelists, who are better read in one’s twenties or beyond rather than in one’s teens. I remember reading Middlemarch the summer I turned sixteen and finding it worthwhile but very slightly tedious for reasons that had nothing to do with length: I had devoured Bleak House almost in a single sitting a few years earlier and would drink down War and Peace over a few addictive days two summers later, but Middlemarch felt sticky, slow, ponderous. The same thing goes, only even more so, for The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl. The German critic Theodor Adorno, writing of Beethoven’s late style, observed, “The maturity of the late works of significant artists does not resemble the kind one finds in fruit. They are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged. Devoid of sweetness, bitter and spiny, they do not surrender themselves to mere delectation. They lack all the harmony that the classicist aesthetic is in the habit of demanding from works of art, and they show more traces of history than of growth.”1 Like Beethoven, Henry James is often said to have a “late” style: a way of writing sentences that would become increasingly baroque to the point of being sometimes bizarre, laying bare the conventions that governed his earlier works in a fashion that renders the late novels deeply strange. Part of that transformation is attributed to James’s adoption, late in his career, of dictation as his main mode of composition, a practice that allowed his sentences to spiral into ever-more-intricate constructions whose complexity is more readily parsed by eye than ear but that owes much to a cognitive dimension opened up by means of the speaking voice. His biographer, Leon Edel, notes that the sound of the spoken voice is very strong in James’s later manner, “not only in the rhythm and ultimate perfection of his verbal music, but in his use of colloquialisms, and in a greater indulgence in metaphor.”2
First published in 1904, The Golden Bowl was James’s last major novel, and its sentences display a virtually unprecedented subtlety and complexity, indeed to a degree that many readers have found maddening. James performed extensive revisions on the typescripts of his novels, including a massive wholesale rewriting of his entire oeuvre for publication in the famous New York Edition: an authoritative, multivolume edition of his own fiction. He wrote a preface for the republication of The Golden Bowl in that edition that gives some clues as to his concerns, and I will single out two particular points from it before plunging into the thickets of the novel itself for what it shows about how language mediates perception and what possibilities exist for the notation of various forms of cognition in sentences and paragraphs. I should warn the reader in advance that partly because I follow James’s difficult novel closely, and perhaps for other reasons as well, this chapter is probably the hardest to read in the entire book, and it will not represent a failure of spirit on the reader’s part to skip ahead to the next one.
First of all, James notes in the book “the still marked inveteracy of a certain indirect and oblique view of my presented action.”3 By “inveteracy,” James refers to a trait that is ingrained or deep-rooted, habitual, and the unusual word choice is highly characteristic of his style more generally, as is the hint of archness in the locution “a certain.…” Amplifying this point further, James observes that he prefers to see the incidents of a story “through the opportunity and the sensibility of some more or less detached, some not strictly involved, though thoroughly interested and intelligent, witness or reporter, some person who contributes to the case mainly a certain amount of criticism and interpretation of it.” Again, the syntax is highly rhetorical, the tag some giving the sentence energy as the verbal momentum builds, then repeated to give the sentence a second kick after it has built to the nouns witness and reporter; the term case, too, suggests that there is something forensic or medical about the story. Another way of describing this habit, some lines further on, is to say that the novel “remains subject to the register, ever so closely kept, of the consciousness of but two of the characters” (4): register is a noun here, of course, implying the sort of record maintained by a shopkeeper or any other kind of chronicler or historian, but its use in this context brings with it the echo of the associated verb, in which we “register” things precisely because they come into our consciousness. Thus we can see a sort of “working backward,” in which James tugs “register” back from its metaphorical usage as a relatively common verb to its root meaning as a noun, thereby showing us something new about the very language we use to pin down and conceptualize the phenomena of perception.
The other point I want to mention from the novel’s preface concerns the relationship between written and spoken language, language taken in through the eye versus the ear. In one sense, James can be thought of as a highly writerly literary stylist, one whose sentences may be more effectively decoded by the powerful eye than by the emotionally sharp but less cognitively acute ear (at least it is commonly conceived to be so). James, though, explodes that distinction as nonsensical, despite the fact that the language he uses to make the point would present to most auditors a challenge beyond comprehension (even the sharpest-eyed reader may need to move the eyes several times over some of the phrases here—“viva-voce,” by the way, simply means “by mouth” o
r “by word of mouth,” and is also used in the British educational system to describe what Americans would more likely call an oral exam):
It is scarce necessary to note that the highest test of any literary form conceived in the light of “poetry”—to apply that term in its largest literary sense—hangs back unpardonably from its office when it fails to lend itself to viva-voce treatment. We talk here, naturally, not of non-poetic forms, but of those whose highest bid is addressed to the imagination, to the spiritual and the aesthetic vision, the mind led captive by a charm and a spell, an incalculable art. The essential property of such a form as that is to give out its finest and most numerous secrets, and to give them out most gratefully, under the closest pressure—which is of course the pressure of the attention articulately sounded. (20)
James likes the trick of apposition, joining by a comma two words or phrases that are thus deemed equivalent (“the mind led captive by a charm and a spell, an incalculable art”) even as the exact nature of the equivalence cannot be specified. Sounded, these sentences do not soar in the elegant, unclotted forms associated with elocution or classical rhetoric; they wind back upon themselves, making what is open secret and vice versa.
The Golden Bowl is full of objects: the American father and daughter, Adam and Maggie Verver, who are two of the novel’s four main characters (the other two are the Prince, whom Maggie will marry, and Charlotte Stant, who will marry Adam), are in Europe to purchase beautiful objects for the American museum Adam has made his monument, and the novel’s title immediately directs our attention to the artifact that will become the instrument of knowledge and revenge. The episode in which the golden bowl is initially discovered represents the culmination of the novel’s first book. It is a condensed and telling scene in which Charlotte and the Prince (the pair of whom Fanny Assingham has wishfully asserted, to her curious husband, that “nothing” has taken place between them, “except their having to recognize that nothing could” [76]) converse intimately in a highly idiomatic Italian that they assume gives them absolute privacy but that turns out to be fully comprehensible to the antique shop’s owner.