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.