Syntax and Symphony

At the risk of playing favorites, I am using another David Jauss essay to examine language and structure from a new perspective. In "What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow" there were a few constructs that really spoke to me. The first was about the variation of clauses and sentence structure as contributing to the content of the writing itself. As if I don't have enough to worry about in crafting characters, setting scenes, using imagery, developing plot, now the length and association of my clauses should be paid attention to. It's a wonder a writer can actually get anything down. But David Jauss, in his simple and elegant way, develops the concept so that I not only wanted to consider it, I wanted to play around with it. What struck me more, though, was the idea of "rhythmic mimesis", and music in language. Immediately, my mind went back to Jess Row's story "That Sheep May Safely Graze" and its use of music throughout. So what better piece of work to examine?


This required wandering around the house reading the passages aloud and marking them with a pencil. I cannot describe what an interesting and challenging exercise this was. I find it hard to believe I will be able to just read anything ever again. Stressed syllables are in blue and heavily stressed syllables are in black.


"The radio at that moment, was playing the third movement of Charles Ives's first string quartet, adagio cantabile, with its odd, stately movement between major triads and dissonant flatted fifths. It's inability to stay on track seemed to mock me. As I stared at it, that little divot of raw wood grew larger and larger; I felt that I could look into it and through it; that I might be swallowed up inside it, and that in there, from the other side, came screams of ceaseless pain. Without seeing it precisely, I knew what was there: a human face, a black man's face, pressed up against the other side of the wall, not three feet away from my own. And behind him were other faces, other bodies, packed in tight. In the space between the interior latex paint of that wall and the cedar shingles outside, I felt certain, were countless bodies, unable to move."(p. 316)


Notably, I have highlighted two parts in the last sentence where I considered the alternatives. If it had been the "paint of the wall" the emphasis would have shifted to wall, but what's important is that it's that particular wall at this particular moment in the protagonist's experience. The rhythm tells you that as much as the word itself. Similarly, I read "outside, I felt certain, were countless bodies" until I realized that the comma made the I felt certain an aside as opposed to the commanding idea. Thus no heightened emphasis was put on those three words. 


I had great aspirations of deconstructing Charles Ives's first string quartet in order to assess Jess Row's "rhythmic mimesis" but sadly, my life is too short and it would require an expertise in classical music I do not possess. But the first highlight passage now reads to me like I would expect the music to sound. Perhaps the author's commentary would enlighten the analysis.


In my own work, the rhythmic analysis was much more difficult, as it took great effort not to read over my lack of intonation by using voice. It is easy to read someone else's work objectively as it is written grammatically, and monumentally hard to read one's own without saying what you want to hear as opposed to what you did. I took one of the more graphic pieces of my newest story and tried to listen to its music. It was disappointing to say the least, so I reconstructed the same paragraph based on my (hopefully) more objective ear.


Before
I can't talk too much about the work I did there. Sometimes I dream about those cows moving in towards the first guy on the line, he's supposed to stab them right between the eyes, but his knife goes into an eye and suddenly I'm surrounded by cows with knives coming out of their eyes, there is blood everywhere and the animals are screaming. And when it wakes me, I'm fourteen again trying to get the courage up to get up and go to work. And some of the sons of bitches that worked there, you could see that they liked it. They got off on being able to slice up living things, especially pleased when the first guy hadn't done his part right and the animal was still alive on the line. But the fact is, it was because the owners didn't care about diplomas, or citizenship or- proof of age that I worked there. The money helped me suppress my horror.
Even a visual scan shows that the emphasis in my writing is unconscious. And that when I read it out loud (over and over) I realized that my lack of choice creates a rhythmic throbbing throughout this paragraph. Let's examine the second sentence. I used commas to create the run of the sentence, the sense of continuum that I thought (at the time) develop the sense of building drama, forward motion. Read aloud the rhythm doesn't vary much. Dum dum dum, Dum dum dum, Dum dum dum... with an occasional strong word like scream which elicits emphasis from the reader, whether the content warrants it or not. So I thought to try and move away from constant forward motion (a characteristic of all my writing, usually in first person present tense) and try to craft a rhythm that reads more like a nightmare might. 


After
I don't talk about the work. But I dream about cows. Anxious snouts moving towards the first guy; he's to stab them. As knife enters eye and then eye, multiple screaming cows manifest blood on walls floors bodies, making them indistinguishable. I'm surrounded by beasts. Back awake, I'm fourteen and sick to death. 


The sons of bitches working there? You could see that they liked it; slicing up things, more pleased when the animal was still alive. Fact is, I worked there because the owners didn't care about my age. 
Still the struggle continues, so I broke it down to a single sentence and played with the structure. "Knife enters eye and then eye; cows scream as blood manifests on walls floors bodies, making them indistinguishable." or "Knife enters eye and then eye as multiple screaming cows cover walls and floors and bodies in blood, making them indistinguishable."


Visually, either cluster of hard emphasis suggests a more impact full sentence. Of course, one has to worry about yelling at the reader, like writing in all caps. But the variation, in my mind, creates more of an interesting sentence with rhythm that approaches violence.

Point of View and Distance in Rara Avis by T.C. Boyle

David Jauss' essay, "From Long Shots To X-Rays" brought me back to my constant struggle with voice. And as my latest story is a retrospective first person narrative, I was interested in what he was saying about that choice. I have taken the traditional close first person approach. My protagonist is my narrator and she is looking back in time at events that have taken place. There is not much time distance between protagonist as actor and protagonist as storyteller, she is an adult, mother, wife in both. She does not exhibit any reflection, demonstrate any growth or change in character as the protagonist actor approaches the age of protagonist narrator. Jauss suggests that there is a range of distance available to a writer in a story within a viewpoint, and that use of multiple distances actually contributes to the story.

T. Coraghessan Boyle's story "Rara Avis", is a short jam-packed example of the protagonist narrator telling a retrospective story. Boyle, however, moves his omniscience around in a way that I have not done within my own story. I'm going to examine what this does to the distance between the reader and the protagonist.

The story starts at a great distance, pretending almost to be third person for the first three sentences which describe the bird on the roof of the furniture store. It isn't until the fourth sentence that the first person plural kicks in.

"We stood, thirty or forty of us, gaping up at the big motionless bird," (p. 106) And then adult narrator puts himself in place, and the reader alongside.

"I was twelve."(p.106) There is a distance between the adult narrator and the child the narrator was, and this is most strongly indicated by Boyle's choice of language. The story is told in the adult narrator's language throughout. The bird is recognizable as a woman or girl (an association reflecting the child narrator as an adolescent). And at first the boy cannot see the bird on the roof, until he comes around the store. Here the reader is limited to only the boy's sight so that we can experience the moment with him. "Then, I looked up." (p. 107)

Boyle then plays with point of view as the boy describes the collection of onlookers and where they come from and what they were doing before they arrived. It is the wide angle lens, seen as if from the bird's point of view on the roof but told by the adult narrator.The community coming together to look at the strange bird.
Clearly, the child narrator would not have been able to see and relay all that detail while looking up at the strange bird. And even the adult narrator is not remembering, but creating a scene based on his omniscient knowledge of all those individuals. Boyle then returns to the limited perspective of the boy.

"I glanced up and saw my father in the back of the crowd standing close to Mrs. Schlecta and whispering something in her ear. Her lips were wet. I didn't know where my mother was." The adult narrator and child narrator are tightly aligned now, because surely in the time that has passed he would have gained knowledge about where his mother was on that remarkable day. He also doesn't say "I don't know where my mother was." The adult narrator doesn't separate from the child in not knowing.

When the child narrator recounts the fire of six weeks earlier, the reader is again limited to what the child physically observed,( "I caught a glimpse of Janine." and "Wayne Sanders was white-faced.") and thoughts.

"I knew what they wanted to know. It was the same thing that my father demanded of me whenever he caught me—in fact or by report—emerging from the deserted, vandalized and crumbling house; What were you doing in there?

He couldn't know." (p. 108)

He goes to confession, and lies about his self pollution. Here the adult narrator and the child separate slightly so that the adult can observe that the words were "formal and unfamiliar".

The final section of the account returns to the bird, but it is later in the day, and we do not return to the wide angle lens. The viewpoint of the child narrator is limited.

"When I looked around again there were only eight of us left, six kids and two men I didn't recognize." The adult narrator doesn't explain or even conjecture about the men's existence.
So the adult and the boy and the reader are all in complete darkness together about the strangers. Fully united in our collective ignorance.

Again Boyle takes us from child narrator observing to child narrator thinking. "I wanted the bird to flap its wings, blink an eye, shift a foot; I wanted it desperately, wanted it more than anything I had ever wanted. Perched there at the lip of the roof, its feet clutching the drainpipe as if welded to it, the bird was a coil of possibility, a muscle relaxed against the moment of tension. Yes it was magnificent even in repose. And, yes, I could stare at it, examine it's every line, from it's knobbed knees to the cropped feathers at the back of it's head. I could absorb it, become it, look out from it's blinking yellow eyes on the street grown quiet and the sun sinking behind the gas station." (p.109) As the circle of the story has come around, the child is once again able to see beyond his own sight, he has become the bird, has returned to the omniscient viewpoint from the roof.

And then Boyle kicks the reader out of the story.

"It was then I understood. Secret, raw, red, and wet, the wound flashed just above the juncture of the legs before the wind died and the feathers fell back into place." (p. 109) The narrator and the child know something the reader is not privy to. If you were sitting with the adult narrator, you would be asking "what, what, what was the wound?" But it is a secret kept from the reader, something not to be known, like what happens in abandoned buildings, and where his mother is when Mrs. Schlecta has wet lips. And what kind of bird was it?

"I caught their eyes: they'd seen it too."(p.109) The strangers are suddenly given a point of view. Not "I knew they'd" seen it too, but they had. A statement of fact. The strangers, the adult narrator and the child all know what the reader does not. The knowledge is so important, that it changes the child, moving him from wanting to be the bird to wanting to kill it.

So Boyle sets up the reader.  Because the outset is so distant that the reader trusts that s/he will understand something that the child in the story does not. And yet, by the time the story completes, the adult narrator and child narrator are complicit in a mystery the reader doesn't understand. Betrayed!