Aug 062016
 

Margaret Nowaczyk

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Just a little intro: A few months ago Caroline Adderson wrote to me about a student of hers who had just produced a stunning short story based on my exercise model in “How to Write a Short Story: Notes on Structure and an Exercise” in my book Attack of the Copula Spiders. Caroline was right about the story, and I am delighted to publish it here.

But it’s not the first successful story written off that exercise. I am gradually collecting some great examples. So look at “Shame” by Benjamin Woodard and “Gunslinger” and “Angel of Death” by Casper Martin to get an idea of the range of styles and subject matter that can evolve from a simple prompt.

dg

 

Bentley watched Adèle pass without a glance at the hydrocephalic skeleton of a five-year old child hung on a yard-tall metal pole, alien-headed, lights glaring on its glass case. She entered the next room down the corridor that curved to his right. Der Narrenturm, The Tower of Fools – not very PC back in the 17th century, were they, Bentley thought. The Museum of Anatomy and Pathology in the old psychiatric ward of the Vienna General Hospital was housed in a round, four-story tower separated from the main building by an expanse of lawn. The physical specimens of contagion and birth defects in two-hundred-year-old glass jars filled with murky fluid only compounded the barbarity of the place. Bentley had to admit that as far as medical horrors go it was a fitting setting – thick, whitewashed brick walls separated tiny cages of rooms on the outer wall, a circular corridor surrounded an inner courtyard where he imagined the less affected inmates had been allowed to take air. He had expected the place to reek of formaldehyde, like the pathology departments in all the hospitals where he had worked, but the building was odorless, sterile.

He didn’t want to come, not at all, but from the moment she learned about it Adèle became obsessed. Once here, she went from room to room, her eyes drawn from one specimen-containing jar to another – she never did anything half-way. Studying, work, sex. Having a baby. In the Contagion Room Bentley was reminded of the story Adèle told about the plasticine models of a syphilitic she saw as a child a French venereology clinic. The new nanny her mother had hired made Adèle promise not to tell anybody as she pulled her into the dark hallway and up the steep, wooden staircase. When the woman disappeared into the examining room, Adèle – curious, and a precocious reader – went from display case to display case, and made out the words letter by awful letter. Gumma, congenital syphilis, primary chancre. She was six years old. She had not been able to sleep for months afterwards, the speckled fetus and the caved-in nose floated in front of her every time she closed her eyes. Fifteen years later, during a medical school lecture on sexually transmitted diseases she darted out from the lecture hall, her chair clanging to the floor. Bentley found her in the quadrangle, sucking on a cigarette. “I’ve seen those before,” she choked out before the story tumbled all out.

But today she marched past them. Two rooms later she stood, transfixed, and stared at a preserved baby with its intestines floating outside its abdomen, its little fingers interlaced as if in prayer, put in that position by some well-meaning – or was it morbid? – mortician, and slumped forward, its nose flattened against the glass of the jar. The look on Adèle’s face must have been the look the child Adèle had – mouth slack, eyes darting about the specimen, taking in all the gruesome details. An anencephalic newborn in a jar behind her stared at Bentley from beneath half-closed eyelids.

He knew that he wouldn’t be able to sleep that night.

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A few days after she ran out of the lecture hall Adèle dragged Bentley into Fairweather’s at Yonge and Eglinton. A rack in a back corner held a clutch of cocktail dresses, their cheap-looking fabrics glimmered in the bright ceiling lights.

“Ooh, can you imagine anything worse?” Adèle sung out.

Bentley eyed the dresses.

“I gotta try them on!” Lemon yellow, violent pink, green, and neon mauve tumbled off the rack into her arms and she disappeared into the fitting room.

“Stupid cheap zipper,” floated over the partition. “How’s this?” She flung the curtain aside and twirled out in the green dress. It cinched her around the waist, the straps drug into her shoulders; even though she was slim and toned she looked like a boiled ham in a netting. On a bed of stewed Boston lettuce. And yet, she was still beautiful.

Bentley pumped his index finger in his open mouth and made gagging sounds. He reached for the zipper. She weaseled out of his arms and ducked back behind the curtain. Soon she popped out in the neon blue.

“This color does nothing for you.”

“The color? What about the cut? Those flounces! Whoever came up with this deserves to die a long-drawn out death in the seventeenth circle of hell. Drowned in tears of women who had to wear this horror.”

“There were only nine circles of …” he begun, and Adèle rolled her eyes.

“I know that,” she said.

The next dress, the mauve, made her pale, freckled skin look like she had secondary syphilis. He bit his lip as he remembered Adèle’s shaking voice.

When she disappeared into the fitting room for the fourth time he was ready to walk out and never come back.

“Did you have to try all of them?” he asked long after they left the store. Something in his voice made her stop and look at him.

“I thought it was funny,” she said.

“You have no sense of proportion.” He stomped off, leaving her standing alone at the entrance to the subway.

The following morning, he waited for her at the same spot – she was late. He had studied way past his bedtime to make up the time, and was feeling grouchy and unkind. But he couldn’t go a morning without seeing her. He waved when he saw her in the crowd.

“Ready for the gynie exam?” Adèle asked when she reached him.

Bentley looked up at the trees just coming out in leaves – greenish mist hung around the branches. No apologies from Adèle, ever. A sparrow trilled and went silent over their heads.

“I’m totally not,” Adèle said. “This fertility crap. I have to put up with it every month, I don’t want to study it, too.”

“I thought procreation was every woman’s passion,” Bentley said carelessly. Adèle’s cheeks went brick red.

“I’ll have you know that I am not constantly thinking about babies and nursing and lactating and gestating and bringing life into this world and whatever other cliché crap you chauvinist misogynes think women are about.”

“Sex?” Bentley asked just as Adèle inhaled to continue. He wiggled his black eyebrows like a beetle. Adèle snorted and punched him in the shoulder.

“Hah! I am like a guy in that respect, eh? Men think about sex…”

“…every eight seconds,” Bentley finished with her.

Adèle laughed and leaned into him, her head on his shoulder. His penis stirred and thickened – obviously he was one of those men.

“You must have gotten too much testosterone exposure during your fetal life,” he said. He kept his arm around her shoulder the rest of the way to the hospital.

The first time he saw Adèle she was dancing on a chair at their med school orientation party. She wore autographed boxer shorts from an upper class man, the prize token for the scavenger hunt; a wide grin – all teeth – split her face, thick brown hair parted in a bob on the right. As she shook it off her face her eyes met Bentley’s and she winked at him, her face an invitation. Bentley felt his face grow hot.

They were sleeping together a month later. Bentley, virginal, realized right away that Adèle was much more experienced than he would allow himself to imagine. Her lipstick on his penis – kissing it, biting it, sucking it she smeared the crimson on the pearly pink of his shaft and foreskin. He pushed aside thoughts of the unnamed men, their greedy hands, their probing tongues and dicks that knew Adèle better than he did.

He realized then that he would never let go of her.

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What are we doing here, Bentley wondered as he followed Adèle into another low-ceilinged room. And another. She had to see every last atrocity, every last crime nature committed against itself in forming these monsters. Teratogenesis – the study of monsters – he remembered from their genetics lectures. She shouldn’t even be here – after all those miscarriages what could be going through her mind, for god’s sake. What was she thinking as she stared at the specimens – better no baby than one of those? All that blood she had lost with the last miscarriage, she almost needed a hysterectomy. It took her months to recover but still she wouldn’t allow a transfusion. She was still hoping she’d get pregnant after five years of tests and fertility treatments.

He loved her so much.

That night, after he rolled off her, Bentley lay supine on the king-size hotel bed, arms splayed. The neon sign from the cafe across the street flickered blue shadows across the curtains.

“I want to try IVF.” Adèle rubbed her face in his hairy chest, a greying patch extending from nipple to nipple. “This… this isn’t working.”

“This?”

“I’m not getting any younger.” She had turned thirty-six this past January.

“I’m not good enough?”

Adèle lifted her head and stared at him, unblinking.

“That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?” Bentley always lowered his voice as his temper rose.

I had all those miscarriages.” Her voice sounded wet. “We still don’t know why I can’t carry a baby to term.”

She rose from the bed and stood by the window, her body dark against the sheer curtain. Outlined in blue, the curve of her hips and butt, broad as if made for bearing children, made him want her all over again. He grabbed her waist and pushed her face down onto the bed.

“I’ll show you,” he hissed through his teeth as he lowered his face beside hers. Adèle turned her head and Bentley saw her perfect profile. A tear streaked down across her cheekbone. He kissed it, tasted salt. His body sagged.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

Adèle squirmed beneath him, turned over, and wrapped her arms around him, scissored her legs across his buttocks.

“Don’t ever leave me,” she said.

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The next morning Bentley woke up with an erection. Something tugged at his consciousness. A nagging, unpleasant something. Adèle, in a backless, shimmering silver-grey gown, the even beads of her spine bisecting her back with such grace it took his breath away. She turned and his penis flatlined. Bentley shook his head to dislodge the image – a line of blood down Adèle’s belly, from the ribcage to the pubic bone, in a perfect parallel to her spine, the dress gaping open, muscle and fascia slashed, a glistening globe of the uterus exposed. The bottom half of a baby hung out from the incision, buttocks and legs hanging. Pulsating coils of umbilical cord dangled down to Adèle’s knees, blood stains splashed down to the hem of the gown.

The bisected Adèle lifted a champagne flute at him. “Cheers.”

Bentley shot upright on the bed. Adèle slept peacefully next to him, wrapped in the white linen sheets crushed from last night’s sex.

As he padded barefoot to the bathroom the cold marble floor bit at his soles. The wall tiles were weeping long droplets of moisture when he stepped out of the shower, but he still felt the cold sweat on his back.

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A week later, back in Toronto, Bentley had performed two kidney transplants and five bladder resections. Adèle finished a paper reporting her new research on gene therapy, and reviewed – and rejected – three others. They taught entitled surgical and medicine residents, they gave lectures to medical students who played with their smartphones. They attended patients in clinics and on the wards. They worked late and hardly spoke over their take-out dinners.

It was as if they both held their breath.

At home the crib grinned its slats at Bentley every time he passed the nursery they set up during the second to last pregnancy, when Adèle went beyond the twenty-week mark and they thought the pregnancy would keep. Once, when he came home from a late night in the OR, he stood outside the nursery door, his forehead against the cherry wood of the door jamb, and tried to imagine the snuffles, the mumblings of a just woken baby, but all he heard was Adele’s soft breaths in the darkness of their bedroom.

Two weeks later Bentley came downstairs as Adèle stood at the kitchen counter waiting for the water to boil, teabag label hanging over the rim of her mug. He had seen the tampon wrapper and the blood tinged applicator in the bathroom wastebasket. He reached for her, and she burrowed her face in his neck, her arms around and up his back like a vise, hands together, pushed against his spine.

Neither spoke until the kettle whistled.

“Not even a romantic interlude in Vienna,” Adèle said then. Not quite how Bentley remembered it – the pickled fetuses still haunted his dreams. He reached over and poured the boiling water into the mug, dunked the teabag in and out.

“You’ve always taken such good care of me,” Adèle said.

“I don’t want a baby,” he lifted her face up by the chin. “I just want you. I went along with all this, but I don’t want you bloated with hormones, needles stuck in your belly, rushing off at 6 am to have an ultrasound up your hoohah.”

Adèle chuckled, but a tear slid down her cheek. Bentley bent down and kissed it dry.

“We’ll be all right,” he said. “Just the two of us.”

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That was before the nightmares started. Before Adèle stopped going to work and just lay on the living room sofa, the pillow beneath her cheek sodden. Before Bentley was able to count the ribs beneath her disappearing muscles. And before he found her lying in a lukewarm bath, her white arms and legs floating just beneath the surface, nipples poking through the surface of the pink water, twisted wet hair snaked around her neck like a coil of umbilical cord.

But at that moment, surrounded by the aroma of the mint tea, in the orange light of the setting sun puddled on the slate tile floor, Bentley truly believed that they would be all right.

—Margaret Nowaczyk

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Małgorzata (Margaret) Nowaczyk, a pediatrician and a clinical geneticist, is a professor at McMaster University and DeGroote School of Medicine in Hamilton, Ontario. Her writing has appeared in Geist, The Examined Life Journal, and Canadian Medical Association Journal. Her short story “Cassandra” will appear in Prairie Fire. She is a co-editor of an anthology of short stories from the Canadian-Polish diaspora to be published by Guernica Editions in 2017. She lives in Hamilton with her husband and two sons.

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Mar 272015
 

Windsor Review2

A new little story of mine, a jeu d’esprit, a micro-story (a three-pager), called “A Noir Romance” has just come out in the fall issue 2014 (yes, a bit late) of the Windsor Review, a special Alice Munro issue. This is a print magazine, so you’ll have to go buy a copy to read the whole story. This issue of WR is blessed with work from several other Numéro Cinq bad girls and boys, including Marty Gervais, Karen Mulhallen, John B. Lee, and Amber Homeniuk.

Here’s a bit from the story, the opening lines.

“The short one, you say?”

“Yes. I believe that’s him. He had a mask. It was dark in my bedroom.”

“He had a mask.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But it was definitely the short one, you say?”

“He had a mask, but he was short just like the one in the middle.”

“The short one.”

“He had that look, you know. Short. I was wearing my nightie and putting cold cream on.”

“In the dark.”

“Yes. I’m really rather sure it’s the short one. He looks like a man who would steal up on women in their bedrooms.”

“Because?”

“Well, he has that look. Short. Shortness. Like the one in my bedroom.”

“Ma’am, the short one is an officer from the precinct. He picked you up and drove you here.”

“No. I would have recognized him.”

“He’s a police officer.”

“No, sir. It’s the man in my bedroom.”

“Because he’s short.”

—from “A Noir Romance” by Douglas Glover @ the Windsor Review

May 082014
 

Here’s a little onstage interview I did at Wordfest in Calgary last fall when I was out promoting Savage Love. As you can clearly see, I got myself into trouble talking about copulas and copulate. Sometimes, I think I shouldn’t be let out of my cage and allowed to roam at will. It’s not safe. But the interviewer’s reaction when I start to talk about sex is priceless. One of the disappointments is that you can’t hear the audience laughing. The audience had a good deal of fun with this.

dg

Oct 102013
 

As if you all didn’t know by now.

For the first time in history, the Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to a Canadian. Alice Munro, one of the world’s most respected and admired writers, was announced this morning as the winner of the prize in an especially notable year: one in which she has announced her retirement.

The 82-year-old author of 14 books of short stories is only the 13th woman to win the world’s most prestigious literary award. Earlier this year she announced her intention to stop writing, stating that her most recent book, Dear Life, would be her last.

via Canadian Alice Munro makes history with Nobel Prize win for literature – The Globe and Mail.

I published an essay, “The Mind of Alice Munro,” in Attack of the Copula Spiders. It had appeared in the magazine Canadian Notes & Queries and is still on the 0nline site there. I published here as a reading aid my marked up and annotated copy of the story.

“The Mind of Alice Munro”

Alice Munro — “Meneseteung” annotated

Just in care you’re interested.

dg

Sep 172013
 

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This is the beginning of things, the Ur-essay, the thought-lode out of which most everything else I have written about literature has evolved. It was written in the late 1980s and so, to an ever so slight extent, is a period piece. It forms the centre piece of my book of essays and memoir Notes Home from a Prodigal Son (Oberon Press, 1999). The ideas here expressed evolved out of my philosophical background, long reading, and the lessons I learned during my time at the Iowa Writers Workshop. I mention specifically the novelist Robert Day (who now contributes mightily to NC), but I would be remiss if I didn’t also recall the influence of the late Claude Richard, who was a visiting professor from the University of Montpellier at the time.

I reprint the essay here because the book and the essay were both published long ago; such is the nature of readership that older things fall out of the line of vision. But in fact this essay (and Notes Home from a Prodigal Son), along with The Enamoured Knight and Attack of the Copula Spiders and my long essay “Mappa Mundi: The Structure of Western Thought” form a consistent, coherent and elaborated system of thought about writing, criticism and philosophy.

dg

…there is an other [irony] besides the irony of the learned man; there is the poem, in the sense that it is rhythm, death and future.

— Julia Kristeva

1

The best writing teacher I ever had was a Kansas cowboy named Robert Day who showed up at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop as a last minute, one-semester replacement for a sick colleague in January, 1981. The first day of classes he strode into the room wearing Fry boots, jeans and a checked shirt. Without saying a word, he picked up a piece of chalk and wrote across the full length of the blackboard in huge looping letters: REMEMBER TO TELL THEM THE NOVEL IS A POEM.

At the time, Day had only published one novel, a book called The Last Cattle Drive. He was a tenured English professor at Washington College in Maryland. He was a past president of the Associated Writing Programs. As a young man, he had worked at G. P. Putnam’s in New York and could recall for us the excitement over the publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Summers he went back to western Kansas where friends ran a borderline ranch. He kept a horse there, a horse which at various times had eaten loaves of bread through the kitchen window, or Day’s hat. All summer long he would hand out with his friends, their cattle and his horse.

That semester we read Queneau, Musil, Rulfo, Achebe, Nabokov, Tutuola, Abe and Marquez. Day did not tell us what he meant — REMEMBER TO TELL THEM THE NOVEL IS A POEM. Maybe he forgot. Half-way through the semester he read the second draft of my novel Precious, three hundred typed pages of plot, dialogue and scene that stubbornly refused to come alive. I still have the notes I made during our conference, fifty-four words. It took less than fifteen minutes. But like a skilled surgeon he had opened the novel up for me and shown me its heart still beating, its bones, nerves and veins.

He taught me four basic devices. The first  was what he called the language overlay. My first person narrator was a newspaperman, he had printer’s ink in his blood. Day said I ought to go through the novel, splicing in words and images, a discourse, in other words, that reflected my hero’s passion for the newspaper world. So, for example, Precious now begins: “Jerry Menenga’s bar hid like an overlooked misprint amid a block of jutting bank towers…” Or, in moments of excitement, the narrator will spout a series of headlines in lieu of thoughts.

Second, Day taught me about sub-plots. The main plot of a novel, he said, is like a pioneer wagon train moving across the prairie. The sub-plot is like the Indians coming in out of the hills to attack from time to time. The pattern of the sub-plot must reflect or parallel the pattern of the main plot, Day said, just as the gene inside a cell contains the pattern for the whole body.

Third, he showed me how to use background and revery. My protagonist must have been somewhere before the novel began, he must have a story to tell that will give texture and depth to his thoughts and, by extension, to the narrative. In Day’s words, he wanted me to “give the novel a memory.” Once again, the background must reflect or parallel or bear the seeds of the main action. A revery that does not bear a relation, in pattern, to the main plot is wasted. It diffuses the reader’s attention. It makes the book foggy and boring.

What this means in practice is that far from being “loose and baggy monsters,” to use Henry James’s phrase, in which the author has room to digress, expand or linger, a good novel is a tight, formal production with very few wasted words.

Finally, Day told me how James used the confidante device to modulate the weight of a given speech. In Precious, I had two secondary characters who were both close to the hero. What if I created a pattern of giving and withholding information? What if I made one of the secondary characters the hero’s confidante, the person to whom he told his secrets? He could then maintain an ironic distance from the other, giving opportunities for lightness and humor. The reader would sit up and pay attention when the confidante was on the scene.

Day then lied and told me I could splice all these changes into the novel in three weeks. Actually, it took me five months, and I rewrote the thing from beginning to end. I remember those months as being the best time of my life; the woman I lived with then says otherwise. She says she never remembers me being more miserable. What that means, really, was that the work was hard but also amazingly exhilarating.

What I had learned was far more than a collection of four devices. I had learned a secret about writing stories, novels and poems. Also painting pictures and composing symphonies. I had learned that a novel is not a string of seventy-five thousand words, all different, all pressing the plot forward. If you think about it, the stories of most novels can be told in a page or two of summary. Then imagine me trying to stretch that summary over another two hundred and ninety-eight pages.

Or, to use an image I had carried in my head through two earlier failed novels, think of a novel as a bridge thrown across a bottomless gorge with nothing to support it from one end to the other. In my mind I had to get a running start and write fast for fear of not making it across. I wrote my first novel in six weeks in a state of terror. As a bridge it was a shambles.

What I had learned was that besides story, plot and characters, the novel needs patterns. That in fact the story, plot and characters don’t begin to come alive until they are submitted to a pattern. I had made a common mistake. Before Robert Day, I had assumed that a novel’s “aliveness” depended upon its verisimilitude, i.e. how closely it resembled what we call real life, whereas in fact it depends upon patterns. I think this is what Day meant when he wrote REMEMBER TO TELL THEM THE NOVEL IS A POEM. He meant for us to notice that, like a poem, the novel should be seen as an arrangement of materials of which one, but only one, is the story. This patterning is the poetic quality of prose.

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In a poem it is much easier to see the patterns. We’ve all had to map out sequences of stressed and unstressed syllables, the ABBAs of rhyme, the internal rhymes of alliteration, the surprising anti-patterns of sprung rhythm and free verse. We’ve all dissected extended conceits, noted the effects of diction and imagery. These are the things we focus on in a poem. Narrative, story and verisimilitude are secondary to the poetry of poetry, by which I mean the effect of patterns.

With novels and stories, the reverse is true. We tend to read a novel first for plot and character and the narrative’s relation to reality, what post-Saussurean critics call its “aboutness,” and only secondarily, if at all, for pattern. This is a little like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit argument. You know how you can draw a little circular figure with an elongation here and a dot there. If you squint your eyes one way, you can see it’s a rabbit with long ears. But if you squint another way, it becomes a duck with a protruding beak. With poems and novels, you can read for pattern or you can read for aboutness, depending on how you squint your eyes.

It happens to be the case, though, that we rarely read novels for patterns. One reason for this is that the novel’s very aboutness gets in the way. It is the easiest and most natural thing in the world to read a novel for plot and character. In fact, in most cases you have to read for plot and character in order to situate yourself, as an observer, in the world of the novel. The shift of focus, the new squint, if you will, from plot to pattern only happens on rereading. A good reader, as Nabokov wrote in his essay “How to Read, How to Write,” is a rereader.

When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and the artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have one in regard to the eye in a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy the details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave toward the book as we do toward a painting.

When Nabokov makes a distinction between “what the book is about” and our “artistic appreciation” of the book, he is separating our reading of the subject, story and characters — the book’s aboutness — from our appreciation of the book’s so-called artistic qualities, the details we would notice if we looked at a novel the way we look at a painting.

Nabokov assumes that we all look at paintings for more than the resemblance they bear to old dead people in funny clothes, for more than romantic seascapes and sunsets. He assumes that we see, for example, Whistler’s mother as something other than an elderly lady in a plain black dress and that we know, perhaps, that the painting of Whistler’s mother was originally titled “Arrangement in Grey and Black” and that when Whistler talked about painting he would say, as he did in a letter to his friend Fantin-Latour:

…it seems to me that color ought to be, as it were, embroidered on the canvas, that is to say, the same color ought to appear in the picture continually here and there, in the same way that a thread appears in an embroidery, and so should all the others, more or less according to their importance; in this way the whole will form a harmony.

Whistler is talking about patterns, patterns of color that exist over and above and through the subject of the picture, its aboutness. And when Nabokov talks about “artistic appreciation,” he is talking about appreciating the patterns of the novel in the same way, the repetition of certain verbal events or structures in a novel like the colors in a painting. This is precisely the way we appreciate poetry, where it is, as I have said, much easier to see that sounds and words are like oil paints or, for that matter, like notes in a piece of music.

3

Other ages and times have provided writers with pattern books, with instructions on rhetoric and composition. They put names to commonly used devices: paronomesia, periphrasis, prosopopoeia. Even in the 1920s at the University of Toronto’s Victoria College, my aunt was taught to write, to compose sentences, by translating back and forth from Latin to English. But no one teaches composition any more except in remedial programs to students who patently can’t write at all.

Instead we teach creative writing with the emphasis on “creative” (which, I guess, implies that there is “uncreative” writing as well, though I have never seen it). At Iowa, outside of Robert Day, teachers tended to urge us to “write what you know.” If we managed to do that, they said, whatever we wrote would come out all right. Ernest Hemingway, that most brazen of liars, once wrote, “All you have to do is write one true sentence…,” sending generations of his competitors chasing vainly after a will o’ the wisp reality. Why people choose to believe what he says about writing and not what he says about his manliness is a curious instance of intellectual willfulness and self-deception.

In university English departments, on the other hand, students are taught criticism — Arnoldian, Freudian, New, Structuralist and Post-Structuralist, etc. Archetypes, symbols, influences, foreshadowing, metaphor and theme. Academic critics tend to see a novel as full-blown, not something built; as something found, not constructed. Academics are romantics — they see, or prefer to think they see, romantic intention in a novel as opposed to the bricks and mortar. I tried to tell a friend of mine, a person partway through a PhD. in English, what I meant by a pattern in a novel. She said, “Well, we call that recurring imagery.” A singularly bloodless phrase. But fair enough. Yes, that is sort of what I mean.

But why does it recur? And who made it recur? And is that all there is to it? Does the phrase “recurring imagery” help a writer? Academic critics generally see recurring images as evidence of a point the author is trying to make, part of the aboutness of the work. Deconstructionists, on the other hand, look for recurring images that the author may not have intended so as to “deconstruct” the aboutness of the work. In either case, they are wedded to thematics, to aboutness, to truth. Write what you know, throw in a little recurring imagery, and it’ll come out right. That’s what the creative writing schools and the English departments teach us.

In general it’s not terribly bad advice. Many writers get by with no other. Every writer borrows to a greater or lesser extent from the real world the images which he or she deploys in his or her novel. Every writer who has read significantly has an instinctive feel for rhythm, pacing and the repetition of images. But to go through life believing “Write what you know and throw in recurring imagery” is like going through life believing in God and free enterprise — it leads to a conservative and narrow view of life and art.

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Pattern is an ambiguous word and I want to keep it that way. Writing a novel, Faulkner once said, is like a one-armed man nailing together a chicken coop in a hurricane. It helps to be open-minded and undogmatic about the rules of the operation.
Experience itself rests on our ability to recognize patterns — Forms Plato called them — in the sensory flux. A pattern that does not repeat itself is not a pattern, it is chaos, or it is something like God, or it is nothing. And the ability to recognize patterns is tied up with out ability to remember. Pattern, repetition and memory are the foundations of consciousness.

The same happens in a novel. On a very rudimentary level the author depends on pattern, repetition and memory to give the reader confidence in the world of the book, what we call verisimilitude, the quality of seeming to be real. In Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Anna appears on almost every page. Anna is a pattern, a group of words and characteristics that repeat. If Tolstoy had changed Anna’s name, age, hair color and social background every chapter or so, we would throw the book down in disgust.

Pattern can mean a model or design upon which something else is constructed. Or it can mean the systematic repetition of certain design elements as in the pattern in wallpaper.

Pattern can, for example, refer to something large such as a plot.  All romances are based on, say, the model boy meets girl, boys loses girl, boy gets girl. We also say there are no new plots under the sun. And we refer to coming-of-age novels, which have plots based on myths and rites of passage, or adventure novels, which are based on the quest model. What we call genre is a sort of pattern.

But pattern can also refer to something minute, a device such as, say, the list or the epic simile or even the structure of a sentence. Here is Nabokov talking about Flaubert’s Madame Bovary:

Gogol called his Dead Souls a prose poem; Flaubert’s novel is also a poem but one that is composed better, with a closer, finer texture. In order to plunge at once into the matter, I want to draw attention first of all to Flaubert’s use of the word and preceded by a semicolon. This semicolon-and comes after an enumeration of actions or states or objects; then the semicolon creates a pause and the and proceeds to round up the paragraph, to introduce a culminating image, or a vivid detail, descriptive, poetic, melancholy, or amusing. This is a peculiar feature of Flaubert’s style.

Now, though the actual number of usable patterns may, for practical purposes, be infinite, we always choose to use a finite number in any given piece of writing. This finite number of further reduced by the fact that many of the patterns are repeated throughout any given work. The more patterns a writer knows, however, the better his or her chances of being published, being read, or of writing a masterpiece that will endure. The way a person learns patterns is by reading; literature is an encyclopedia of patterns and devices.

Though it is possible to invent a pattern that no one has ever used before, originality in a writer generally amounts to an ability to vary the pattern in fresh ways. One might, for example, decide to use Flaubert’s semicolon-and sentence pattern in a contemporary rites-of-passage novel set in Montreal’s Jamaican emigre community. The pattern would be Flaubert’s, but the variation, the unique application, would be the author’s own.

Repetition, as I have said, is also a pattern. But it is a pattern of a different order, perhaps the pattern of patterns. To me, it is the heart of the mystery of art, of novel-writing. Without it, the novel becomes a strung-out plot summary.

I have tried to think out why repetition is appealing, why it is aesthetically pleasing as a pure thing. I think there are two reasons, or sorts of reasons. The first is essentially conservative — repetition is allied to memory, to coherence and verisimilitude.

The second is biological or procreative or sexual. Repetition creates rhythm which on a biological level is pleasurable in itself, the beating of our hearts, the combers rolling up on a beach, the motion of love. This is the sort of thing Lyotard is talking about when he writes about “intensities” or patterns of intensities in his book Économie Libidinal, or what the Spaniard Madariaga meant when he talked about the “waves of energy” in Tirso de Molina’s El Burlador de Seville.

In Anna Karenina there are two sub-plots: Levin’s marriage and Anna’s brother’s marriage. The novel actually begins with a sub-plot scene — Anna’s brother banished to sleep in his study for having an affair with a maid. These subplots are not simply tacked on. They repeat the marriage theme of the main plot, Anna’s marriage. Anna’s brother’s marriage is, like her own, a marriage on the rocks because of infidelity. Levin’s marriage is, by contrast, dutiful and steadfast.

Tolstoy created three identical patterns which twine and leapfrog and reverberate through the novel. Of course, the details, the contents, are different (this is one sort of variation); and, in the case of Levin’s plot, the structure, the pattern, is inverted, a positive to the negative of the other two plots (repetitions of abstract structures such as plots or relationships can vary in three ways — congruence, contrast or inversion, and the tree in the seed).

References to plot and subplot form a kind of rhythm in the novel. This rhythmic repetition of structures has something to do with what we call pace. As each plot comes round again for scrutiny by author and reader, it is like a new wave of energy, a drum beat. Anna’s story is the melody; Levin’s is a kind of booming base note thudding in counterpoint to Anna’s; Anna’s brother’s rhythm is lighter, more frenzied and comic. Or they are like Whistler’s colors, threading through a painting, darker, lighter, heavier, fainter.

There is another sort of repetition in Anna Karenina, one more mysterious yet. Just after Anna meets Vronsky, there is a train accident. A station guard, either drunk or muffled up too much against the cold weather, fails to hear the train approaching and is crushed to death. This station guard returns in Anna’s thoughts over and over again. He begins to inhabit her nightmares. He even migrates into Vronsky’s nightmares — transformed now into a dreadful-looking little man with a bedraggled beard, bending over a sack, groping in it for something and talking in French about having to beat, to pound into a shape a piece of iron. At the end of the novel, Anna sees him again just as she throws herself beneath the wheels of the train: “A peasant muttering something was working at the iron above her.”

Obviously train imagery is repeated as well, at the beginning and the end. Why? Coincidence? Or is Tolstoy telling us something about the 19th century Russian transportation system? Of course not. Is it foreshadowing? Well, sort of. But foreshadowing is a word I don’t trust. Does this mean Tolstoy is telling us ahead of time that Anna is going to die in a train accident? I think not. I think there is some other motive at work, that the repetition of trains and bedraggled peasants, this bookending of image and incident, the beginning and the end, has a pleasing quality all its own, symmetry, if you will, a rightness, that is felt and appreciated, not “known.” Overture and coda, rather than prediction. A symmetry that would be lost, say, if Anna drowned herself or beat herself to death with a hatchet.

As a pattern, this terrifying little peasant just seems to pop up. He is just there — and there and there and there. He “means” nothing, except insofar as he is associated by juxtaposition with a larger pattern of trains, death, dreams and Vronsky. Somehow he manages to accrue all the potential horror of that pattern. He reminds us, not of the end to which Anna journeys, but of the beginning; so that when she dies, her end is freighted with a kind of fatedness that makes it all the more horrible and pathetic. The peasant is a tiny thread in the tapestry of the novel, a hint of color in the painting, a grace note in the symphony. Nothing more. Yet without him, how much shallower a book Anna Karenina might be.

It is worth noting that certain kinds of patterning, e.g. the repetition of character traits, enhance verisimilitude, while others, e.g. Anna’s peasant, work against it. We might distinguish between these by calling the one sort patterns of verisimilitude and the other patterns of technique. Every novel uses both, so every novel is a little balancing act between the two, or a war. John Hawkes, the experimental novelist, for example, says that “plot, character, setting and theme” (which are generally what I mean by patterns of verisimilitude) are the real enemies of the novel. “And structure,” he adds, “–verbal and psychological coherence — is still my largest concern as a writer. Related or corresponding event, recurring image and recurring action, these constitute the essential substance or meaningful density of writing.”

But, oddly, though patterns of technique and patterns of verisimilitude tend to destroy one another, like matter and antimatter, both are necessary to the work. Depending on how heavily the author plays up one or the other, his or her novel will be more or less “realistic” or more or less “experimental.”

Getting the balances right in any given work is part of the art of art and its mystery and is a skill that cannot be taught. It leads to the feeling, a feeling I have had twice, once with each of my novels, of submission, of loss of freedom, of loss of expressiveness. Because there is a point in the process of writing a novel at which you must submit to the strictures of pattern that you have chosen. All of a sudden, there are things you can no longer fit into this novel, things you must cut, and other things that you must put in. And, of course, with something as complicated as a novel, you never get it right. And you end up wanting to slash your wrists.

As Paul Valéry once said, “A work of art is never completed, only abandoned.”

5

I have already noted that some patterns in novels, those patterns which tend to create verisimilitude, are like the patterns of experience in the world. This is as much as to say that a conventionally realistic novel reflects a certain metaphysics or philosophy of being and knowing. Modern novels of a less conventional sort also reflect a metaphysics, but it is a new metaphysics, a radically new way of talking about the locale of existence.

Vladimir Nabokov, whom I have quoted extensively and who has influenced a whole generation of North American writers (in Canada, at least two Governor-General’s Award winners, Robert Kroetsch’s The Studhorse Man and Hubert Aquin’s Trou de Memoire, owe huge debts to the structural and verbal pyrotechnics of Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire), was an intellectual heir of the Russian Formalists. Formalism was an aesthetic and critical movement that thrived in St. Petersburg and other eastern European cities early in the twentieth century. The Formalists pegged a whole philosophy of language and literature on the split between meaning and signifiers, between aboutness and pattern.

What they did was put a theory to the things painters like Whistler and, soon after, the French Impressionists, and Surrealist poets like Breton, Eluard and Ponge — all the way back to Mallarme (Nabokov sneaks Mallarme quotations into his novels) — had been doing ten, twenty, thirty or more years before. They simply recognized that aboutness and pattern were two aspects of the things we call art and language, and that you could, in fact, have pattern without aboutness.

Since it seem impossible to have aboutness without pattern, a corollary of this is that aboutness is somehow secondary, a poor cousin, on the aesthetic scale of things, to pattern. Nabokov again:

There are…two varieties of imagination in the reader’s case… First, there is the comparatively lowly kind which turns for support to the simple emotions and is of a definitely personal nature… A situation in a book is intensely felt because it reminds us of something that happened to us or to someone we know or knew. Or, again, a reader treasures a book mainly because it evokes a country, a landscape, a mode of living which he nostalgically recalls as part of his own past. Or, and this is the worst thing a reader can do, he identifies himself with a character in the book. This lowly variety is not the kind of imagination I would like readers to use.

This is what the post-Sausurrean critics, recently so popular in Europe and on American university campuses, are saying. Aboutness is old-fashioned, authoritarian, and patriarchal. Signs — read, pattern, poetry — are playful, subversive, and female. How a thinker can jump from a purely logical incongruence — the fact that, apparently, you can have pattern without aboutness but not vice versa — to these strings of value-loaded predicates is marvelous indeed and evidence that the instinct for narrative and romance has not died behind the ivy-covered walls of academe.

Another corollary of splitting the categories of pattern and aboutness is that there is a sense in which pattern itself creates meaning. Or to put it another way, the novel is about its own form. Or every book is about another book, or books. And every work of art is a message on a string of messages which begins nowhere and ends nowhere, to no one and from no one, and about nothing except the field of pseudo-meaning created by previous and future messages. It is all a game of mirrors and echoes. A little dance of images, words, and patterns. The of the Hindus, or all is vanity, all is dust, sure enough.

Keats wrote, “A man’s life is an allegory.” Nothing else. Or conversely, Korzybski says, “The map (read, the allegory, the pattern, the words) is not the territory.” Which is to say, as Jacques Lacan does, that all utterances are symptomatic and that the real is impossible.

6

Form (or pattern) and aboutness (or content, or reality) are the binary opposites of thought. The stance of the modern, whether he or she is a novelist, critic, theologian, or psychologist, is that ontology begins and ends with the former, that so-called reality is a highly suspicious article.

We are pressed back to a position of washed-out Cartesianism: I think, therefore, I think; or more precisely, I think, therefore something is thinking. Structuralists like Levi-Strauss say things like, “There is a simultaneous production of myths themselves, by the mind that generates them, and, by the myths, of an image of the world which is already inherent in the structure of the mind.” Linguistic philosophers like Wittgenstein say, “The world is my world: that is shown by the fact that the limits of language stand for the limits of my world…I am my world.” Except that this “I am” is not the body but language itself.

Reality, meaning, aboutness, the good, God and the self are pushed away into the realms of the unconscious, the unknowable, the unspeakable, and the unfathomable. In a very logical sense, they no longer concern us here as we race toward the end of the twentieth century. To say you are writing “realistic novel” is to commit as much of an intellectual solecism as, say, the Reverend Jimmy Swaggart does when he says God spoke with him before breakfast. The words “realistic novel” can only be spoken by a person who is speaking in the discourse of an earlier age or in parody.

Think of yourself in a room with bare plaster walls and no windows or doors. You have an infinite supply of variegated wallpapers. You paper the room with something in blue with a skylark pattern, then you do it over with angels, then an abstract, decorative pattern.

The first thing you notice is that you can’t see the wall anymore. This is the first effect of language, according to the philosophers and critics. As soon as you begin to use language, describe the world, you can no longer see it. You can only see your description. In fact, since we can’t even begin to describe something without language, then the existence of the wall itself becomes moot.

The second thing you notice is that each layer of wallpaper covers the previous layers. They’re lost, though you know they’re under there. In a sense the old wallpaper, the past, becomes part of the reality you are describing with each new layer of wallpaper. And sometimes you wake up in the morning and wish you still had the skylarks. You might even try to scrape some of the new wallpaper off. But that only makes a mess.

All you have is the design of each successive layer of wallpaper, and, just possibly, the shape of the room, its broad outlines, its cubic form. Life and art are a little like this. We only see the current wallpaper, remember bits and pieces of the old in the form of myths and memories of memories and fragments of discourse which no longer “mean” what they once meant. And, if we’re lucky, we intuit, or think we intuit, some vague outline of the something which may or may not be the room or the womb of reality.

To be a writer is to write with this knowledge, that the wallpaper is wallpaper and not the room, walls and plaster. It is to have that quality which Keats said went to form a man of achievement “especially in literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously,” what he called Negative Capability — “that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Negative Capability is the artist’s ability to suspend belief in any particular conceptual system (or wallpaper) or to see the conceptual system as pattern, as opposed to reality, as material in itself to be juggled and juxtaposed. Or, to put this another way, aboutness is illusory. What we see as aboutness the artist sees as just another pattern or part of a pattern. Or again, everything is pattern, infinitely plastic and malleable. A person who believes in a particular conceptual system believes that everything can be explained by reference to that conceptual system. Whereas the artist sees the pattern and feels the mystery that looms beyond the pattern.

The truth of the matter, everything that seems supremely important in life, begins when the talking, writing, painting, sculpting, filming and singing of discourse stop. All talk or art that says it’s telling you the truth about life is second rate. Of course, you can write something second rate that’s very popular, even quite good, for all these categories are relative. But great art is pattern over mystery, it is juggling words over whirlpools of silence.

7

In the extended sense, this view of language, life and art can seem exceedingly austere, if not forbidding and bleak. “The ultimate goal of the human sciences is not constitute, but to dissolve man,” says Levi-Strauss. (Just as Nabokov says that one of the functions of a novel is to prove that the novel in general does not exist.) Few of us can help feeling a nostalgia for the old ways, or what we think are the old ways, of talking. For ancient beliefs. For certainty and immortality. For familiar stories with plots and characters and recognizable locales. For adventure, romance and magic.

A lot of fictional, intellectual and political hay has been made out of this nostalgia, a nostalgia expressed, say, in the phrase “breakdown of values.” When an old way of talking disappears, many people are forced to apply narrative in order to explain it to themselves. They often feel they have a stake in the old way. They invent metaphors and analogies — machine breakdowns, erosion, war, disease — to make themselves feel easier. And to sell books.

You can see where nostalgia led Levi-Strauss in his wonderful autobiographical novel Tristes Tropiques. The annihilation of the self, of meaning and aboutness, by structural anthropology drove him into a quest for theological support, which he may or may not have found wandering amongst the Buddhist temples of the Far East. Or think of Sartre turning from the barrenness of existentialism to the warm, sloppy infantilism of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. Or of Michel Foucault leaving his university office every afternoon to pursue a gruesome and self-destructive quest through the bath houses of New York until his death from AIDS.

One can look at people like Sartre, Foucault and Levi-Strauss as contemporary monks whose intellectual vigor and honesty led them to the conclusion that God, man and reality cannot be reached through words. (On December 6, 1273, at the age of fifty, Thomas Aquinas suffered something like a nervous breakdown and never wrote again.) That, by analogy, telling a story is a logically impossible project. That our only recourse (save for silence) is to take a step willy-nilly into narrative, or faith — Keat’s Negative Capability is something like Kierkegaard’s Leap of Faith. It can’t be done — all the critics and philosophers tell us — but some of us will jump in anyway and start the story “Once upon a time…”

In this regard, the American Catholic novelist Walker Percy once wrote:

…a novelist these days has to be an ex-suicide. A good novel — and, I imagine, a good poem — is possible only after one has given up and let go. Then, once one realizes that all is lost, the jig is up, that after all nothing is dumber than a grown man sitting down and making up a story to entertain somebody or working in a “tradition” or “school” to maintain his reputation as a practitioner of the nouveau roman or whatever — once one sees that this is a dumb way to live, there are two possibilities: either commit suicide or not commit suicide. If one opts for the former, that is that; it is a letzte Losung and there is nothing more to write or say about it. But if one opts of the latter, one is in a sense dispensed and living on borrowed time. One is not dead! One is alive! One is free! I won’t say that one is like God on the first day, with the chaos before him and a free hand. Rather one feels, What the hell, here I am washed up, it is true, but also cast up, cast up on the beach, alive and in one piece. I can move my toe up and then down and do anything else I choose. The possibilities open to one are infinite. So why not do something Shakespeare and Dostoevsky and Faulkner didn’t do, for after all they are nothing more than dead writers, members of this and that tradition, much admired busts on the shelf. A dead writer may be famous but he is also dead as a duck, finished. And I, cast up here on this beach? I am a survivor! Alive! A free man! They’re finished. Possibilities are closed. As for God? That’s his affair. True, he made the beach, which, now that I look at it, is not all that great. As for me, I might try a little something here in the wet sand, a word, a form…”

—Douglas Glover

Aug 122013
 

Jason Lucarelli

Jason Lucarelli follows his brilliant essay on Gordon Lish, composition and consecution (published on NC in February) with an equally brilliant and challenging piece on Stein, Walser and Lipsyte and the use of repetition in constructing narrative prose. In many ways this is an extension of his earlier essay since it seems obvious that Gordon Lish and Gertrude Stein emerge from the same stream of American Modernism and play somewhat similar roles as inspirational figures in their different generations. Lish’s influence on Sam Lipsyte goes without saying. And Walser is a European avatar of that same tradition. Jason’s essay, based on a lecture he gave at Vermont College of Fine Arts in July, is cogent, erudite, intuitive and compulsively readable. He teaches you how to read.

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“The whole idea is that there is the pattern.”

– Diane Williams, “D. Beech and J. Beech”

 

Lately I have been thinking a lot about repetition.

More specifically, I have been thinking about patterns of repetition and compression and ways to compose a narrative so that certain words and phrases carry the burden of motion or narrative momentum.

This all started after I read Roland Barthes, a French literary theorist who published a book in 1953 called Writing Degree Zero. In an essay titled “Is There Any Poetic Writing?” Barthes says that written language has a “relational nature” and that “words are abstracted as much as possible in the interest of relationships” (44). Barthes continues, saying, “no word has a density by itself, it is hardly the sign of a thing, but rather the means of conveying a connection.” According to Barthes, words extend toward other words, forming, what he calls, “a superficial chain of intentions.” As a word stands for itself, it also points to other words in a “relational network” that drives narrative intention and momentum. Barthes suggests that a reading of these relations might function similarly to a mathematical language expressing either “operative equality” or “difference.”

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As I thought about patterns of repetition, specifically word patterns, this seemed very interesting to me. I started thinking about the inter-textual connections in narrative form and the need for readers to be able to derive meaning from those relationships since it is always necessary to understand where we are going, why we are going there, and what the relational elements of a narrative mean within the context of the work as a whole (47).

Barthes says that our function as writers is “not to find new words, with more body or brilliance, but to follow an order of an ancient ritual, to perfect the symmetry or conciseness of a relation,” and because I was thinking about word patterns, I took Barthes quite literally (45). I thought, what could be more concise or symmetrical than a relational network of the same words and phrases repeating throughout a narrative?

So my journey into the world of word patterns began, and I will attempt to construct that same tour for you by examining word patterns from three stories: Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha,” Robert Walser’s “Nothing At All,” and Sam Lipsyte’s “The Wrong Arm.”

First, I would like to introduce a working definition of word patterns from the mouth of Douglas Glover. In his essay “The Mind of Alice Munro” from his book Attack of the Copula Spiders, he says, word patterns “begin with mere repetition and accumulate meaning by association and juxtaposition, splinter or ramify, sending out subsidiary branch patterns, and…discover occasions for recombination or intersection of the various branches…in tie-in lines” (95). As portions of a pattern repeat, each repetition conveys its relationship or connection to the pattern. Glover separates word patterns into categories of root pattern (identified as such by its connection to a story’s protagonist) and split-off patterns.

In an echo of the Barthes passage mentioned earlier (“no word has a density by itself…”), Glover says, “No word sits by itself; instead, each word vibrates in a dozen relationships with other words, repeating, competing, dominating, wrenching, transforming, shading, and subverting” (98). Similar to Barthes, Glover emphasizes the relationships between words and the nature of those relationships. In this way, repeating word patterns are charged with a variety of structural and thematic functions. Word patterns, for example, can initiate motive and intention, develop conflict and characterization, convey desire and resistance, action and counteraction.

Glover’s words are a contemporary explanation of word patterns, so before examining a portion of one of the many patterns in Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha,” let’s take a step back and see what Stein herself has to say about her process since she wrote and lectured on it so extensively. In her lecture “Portraits and Repetition,” published in 1935—eighteen years before Barthes, sixty-eight years before Glover—she says “…if you like repetition, that is if you like the repeating that is the same thing, but once started expressing this thing, expressing any thing there can be no repetition because the essence is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis” (167). In her own way, Stein is saying that repetition alone is not enough, for how can one say anything by merely repeating oneself? Rather, Stein stresses the importance of how that repetition is positioned in relation to its prior utterance. Stein unpacks this idea later in her lecture when she says, “the repetition consists in knowing that that one is a kind of one” and “each sentence is just the difference in emphasis” (198). Each repetition with variation carries its own emphasis, its own context, and as a “kind of one,” points back to the whole of where it came. As a rule, each sameness should carry its own difference.

In an examination of the work and life of Gertrude Stein, scholar and literary critic Fredrick J. Hoffman writes, “Repetition is an essential strategy in composition; it guarantees similarity and forces the consciousness upon the nature of the thing seen while at the same time it provides the avenue along which movement and change may occur” (Stein, 20). The momentum of Stein’s stories—published in the early 1900’s until the time of her death in 1946—do not rely on discernable plotlines, but rather, as Hoffman says, “subtle gradations of change” and “slow accretions of variant meaning” achieved through a careful balance of repetition with variation (21).

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In “Melanctha,” published in 1909, Stein builds a relational network of patterns that, as Douglas Glover might say, “controls development and meaning within the text” (96). Stein repeats a variety of words with varying emphasis as a way of progressing the emotional battle experienced by Melanctha throughout the story. The patterns in “Melanctha” are too numerous to name now in every instance, but some of the repeating words and phrases can be easily integrated into the following summary: Melanctha is a girl of mixed race who often feels “blue,” loves “too hard,” “too fast,” and can only find “new ways to be in trouble.” She “wanders,” and in her “wandering,” searches for “wisdom” and “understanding.” But poor Melanctha is “full of the excitement of many men,” and can “always only find new ways to get excited.” When her mother becomes ill, Melanctha meets Dr. Campbell. Melanctha and the doctor begin a relationship of “talking” and “listening,” and Melanctha pushes Dr. Campbell to do less “thinking” and more “feeling,” but Dr. Campbell believes Melanctha’s way of “feeling” is much too “hard” and “too fast.” Eventually Dr. Campbell comes to a new “understanding” and a new “feeling” about Melanctha, even though Dr. Campbell believes he is moving “fast” and ahead of his own “feeling.” Yet Melanctha only “suffers” and remains unsatisfied because Dr. Campbell still seems so “slow” in his “feeling.” This struggle of conflicting emotions continues between them, their “minds” and “hearts” never agreeing, until they finally end their relationship.

threelives“Melanctha” is told in the third person by an omniscient narrator who narrates closely beside Melanctha and other characters in the story, like Rose Johnson, Melanctha’s best friend, and Dr. Jeff Campbell, Melanctha’s love interest for most of the narrative. Much of the tension in “Melanctha” develops from and is controlled by word patterns, and I would like to look at a few patterns, a few examples, slivers really. The word patterns of “trouble,” “excited,” and “courage” are all connected to Melanctha’s character development, though these same word patterns also control aspects of the conflict between Melanctha and Dr. Campbell. The first instance of “trouble” is tied to Melanctha: “Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and quiet, and always she could only find new ways to be in trouble” (3). To give you a sense of its frequency, the word pattern “trouble” occurs 97 times throughout the story. The function of the pattern here is to reveal one of Melanctha’s flaws. The pattern continues on in other instances, though, most importantly, it appears in the sentence introducing Dr. Jeff Campbell: “Jeff Campbell had never yet in his life had real trouble” (14). Already, it’s easy to see the difference, the conflict, between the two characters: Melanctha is always in “trouble” and Jeff Campbell has never known “real trouble.”

Let’s look at a few instances of the intersecting patterns of “excited” and “trouble”: “Melanctha Herbert was always seeking peace and quiet, and she could always only find new ways to get excited” (3). For Melanctha, getting into “trouble” and getting “excited” are connected. One leads to the other, and Stein conveys this relationship in a sentence whose structure is parallel to that of the one with “trouble”: “Melanctha Herbert was always seeking rest and quiet, and always she could only find new ways to be in trouble”. Again, to give you a sense of its frequency, the pattern of “excited” along with its split-off pattern of “excitements” is repeated 27 times throughout the text.

During a conversation between Melanctha and Dr. Campbell early in their courtship, Melanctha suggests that Dr. Campbell do less “thinking” and more “feeling.” Dr. Campbell replies, “…I really certainly don’t ever like to get excited, and that kind of loving hard does seem always to mean just getting all the time excited. No Miss Melanctha I certainly never have mixed myself up in that kind of trouble” (18). Here, the patterns of “excited” and “trouble” intersect to reveal complication and growing tension in the relationship between Dr. Campbell and Melanctha. In this example, the patterns of “trouble” and “excited” indicate opposing viewpoints, alternate lifestyles.

 What makes Melanctha so prone to finding “new ways to be in trouble” is revealed in the following sentence: “Melanctha had always had a break neck courage…” (4) The relationship between “break neck courage” and “trouble” is defined in a later conversation between Dr. Campbell and Melanctha when she says: “…I mean real courage, to run around and not care nothing about what happens, and always be game in any kind of trouble” (37). Dr. Campbell replies, “…its all right being brave every day, just living regular and not having new ways all the time just to get excitements…I ain’t ashamed ever to say I ain’t got no longing to be brave, just to go around and look for trouble…” and, he continues, “that kind of courage makes all kind of trouble…” (38) Dr. Campbell’s idea of “brave” reflects “wisdom” that knows to keep away from certain “excitements” and “trouble.” Alternately, Melanctha’s idea of “courage” is one that leads to new “excitements” and “trouble” of all kinds. This succession of contexts forms a battle of opposites and, as Douglas Glover might say, “the competing points of view strive for interpretive primacy” (97). In other words, whose conception of love will supplant the other: Melanctha’s or Dr. Campbell’s?

Stein constructs the avenue for this struggle along threads of repetition and variation, sameness and difference, through the use of precise, complex word patterns. On “Melanctha,” Frederick J. Hoffman says, “Each of the significant phrases is repeated, again and again, in slightly new contexts, until one is aware of change within a central pattern of conscious experience” (30). Ultimately, the desired effect of Stein’s patterns, of all word patterns, is to produce some sort of change, or, in some instances, an awareness of staying the same.

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In Robert Walser’s “Nothing at All,” published in 1917, the pattern making is even more transparent. Walser was a German-speaking Swiss writer who published short pieces of prose, novels, plays, and essays throughout 1901 to 1953 during the height of the Modernist period. “Nothing at All” (700 words) is much shorter than “Melanctha” (50,000 words), and while Walser’s patterning and use of repetition is equally interwoven, the compression of his narrative has much to do the transparency of his patterns.

“Nothing at All” is told by a first person narrator who narrates the story of a woman, a little “flighty” and a little “absentminded,” who goes shopping for something “good” for her and her husband to eat for supper that night. In town, the woman cannot keep her “mind on the matter,” a result of her “absentminded”-ness.  Between her inability to keep “her mind on the matter” and being a little “flighty,” the woman comes to “no decision” and goes home with “nothing at all.” At home, she explains to her husband how the “choice was too difficult,” and because her “mind wasn’t on the matter,” she bought “nothing at all.” The “good” husband accepts his wife’s explanation and that night they have “nothing at all,” which, ironically, tastes “exceptionally good to them.”

walserbook1The transparency of Walser’s patterning lends itself more easily to categories of root pattern and split-off patterns. Walser even tips off readers to the main pattern of “nothing at all” by initiating the pattern in the title of the story. Instead of tracing each pattern separately, I will trace the root pattern of “nothing at all” and its connection to the split-off patterns of “good” and variations of the phrase “mind on the matter.” As in Stein’s “Melanctha,” “Nothing at All” contains other patterns that carry all other prior utterances to the pattern they came from while relating to other patterns at work throughout the narrative.

The intersection or tie-in of all three patterns (“nothing at all,” “good,” and “mind on the matter”) occurs at the juncture, or climax, of the wife’s decision-making: “It isn’t good when minds aren’t on the matter, and, in a word, the woman finally got disgusted, and she went home with nothing at all” (110). When the woman gets home, her husband asks what “delicious and good” food she bought for supper, to which the wife responds: “nothing at all.” The woman explains: “‘I went to town and I wanted to buy something truly delicious and good for me and you, I wasn’t lacking in good will, over and over I considered, but the choice was too difficult and my mind wasn’t on the matter, and therefore I didn’t succeed, and therefore I bought nothing at all.’” Walser constructs this sentence using the ancient repetitive structures of polysyndeton and asyndeton. Asyndeton is the omission of conjunctions between phrases in favor of rhythm and speed, as in the first half of the sentence: “‘I went to town and I wanted to buy something truly delicious and good for me and you, I wasn’t lacking in good will, over and over I considered…” The final half of the sentence uses polysyndeton, a repetitive structure relying on excessive conjunctions also in the favor of rhythm: “‘…but the choice was too difficult and my mind wasn’t on the matter, and therefore I didn’t succeed, and therefore I bought nothing at all.’” In both cases, asyndeton and polysyndeton focus on the way clauses (or words and phrases) are linked. In other words, Walser uses these repetitive techniques to establish concise connections between three separate patterns: “good” and its split-off pattern “good will,” “mind on the matter,” and the root pattern of “nothing at all.”

Throughout the story, “good” is used in relation to the “something good” the wife wants to buy for supper. “Good,” in this case, represents intention or character desire. In other instances, “good” had the effect of characterization, like in connection with the “good intentions” or “good will” of the woman during her supper-search, and in the use of “good upright husband.” The woman’s motivation carried by the line, “A woman…went to town to buy something good for supper for herself and her husband,” receives its fulfillment in a tie-in line between “good” and “nothing at all” toward the end of the story: “And so they ate nothing at all and were both satisfied, for it tasted exceptionally good to them” (110). The husband is “in no way angry,” and this irony seems to suggest a resolution, because, in a way, the wife succeeds, at least until the final line of the story, which contains the final instance of the root pattern “nothing at all”: “Many other things would probably have tasted better to him than nothing at all” (111). This line reveals the only instance of judgment from the perspective of the “good” husband in the story, and extends the root pattern of “nothing at all” by complicating the narrative. This final instance also completes the circular momentum of the pattern—and the movement of the piece as a whole—as “nothing at all” moves from its connection of “good” into an implied connotation of “not good.” While “good” is a split-off pattern, it occurs more than any other pattern in the text, 17 times in all, 7 more times than the root pattern “nothing at all.” Here, the root pattern drives the avenue of progression, while the enriched pattern of “good” and all its variant meanings helps to elicit deeper meaning from the root pattern and the narrative overall.

lipsyte

The same kind of transparent pattern making is evident in Sam Lipsyte’s “The Wrong Arm,” a contemporary short story from Lipsyte’s collection Venus Drive, published in 2000.  Lipsyte’s root pattern of “the wrong arm,” initiated in the title of the story, controls the development of the narrative while the split-off patterns and repetitive phrases in the narrative initiate change.

lipsyte_venus_drive“The Wrong Arm” is told in the past tense from the first person point of view of an adolescent genderless narrator, who, for the sake of simplifying pronoun use, I will refer to as “he.” A family—consisting of a father, a mother, and three children—sets out on a road trip to see “the boats of the world” sailing up a river somewhere, but during the course of the trip, the narrator overhears his father and mother talking, and the narrator realizes there’s more to the trip than seeing “the boats.” The father says the boats are one thing and that there is another thing that they all need to talk about once they reach “the boats.” The narrator believes that what his father and mother have to tell the children has something to do with the “wrongness” in his mother, who has an arm with a visual history of “all the scars from all the times something tried to kill her in that arm.” Through the years, the mother’s arm has come to be known as the “the wrong arm.” There are strict rules against touching “the wrong arm”, or leading the mother anywhere by “the wrong arm.” Once the family arrives at the river to see “the boats,” in an effort to prove that “the wrong arm” is just like “anybody’s arm,” that they are “making it wrong by saying it was wrong,” the narrator suggests they “go closer” to the boats, and then he does “the wrong thing.”

As with Walser’s “Nothing At All,” “The Wrong Arm” contains a root pattern that centralizes the progression of the story by creating conflict, increasing narrative tension, and tying into the desires of multiple characters in various ways. The root pattern has branching associations of split-off patterns that, in one way or another, relate back to the root pattern. In Gertrude Stein’s words, each repetitive phrase, in connection to the root pattern of the story, helps to provide new insistence, new emphasis to the pattern. Lipsyte uses patternmaking as a way to compress the history of “wrongness” done to the mother’s “wrong arm” while also progressing the pattern in the present moment of the narrative.

Let’s look at an example that outlines the boundaries of the relationship between “the wrong arm” and the other family members: “All we knew about the wrong arm was that it was wrong to touch it, to pinch it, to rub it…The wrong arm was not for us to take her by and lead her. The wrong arm was not for us to tap it for her to turn” (117). This portion of the root pattern containing its split-off pattern of “wrong” wrenches with tension, and provides a source of conflict in the story. The fact that “the wrong arm” should never be touched acts as an obstacle for the narrator in his quest to discover the truth behind his mother’s mental and physical state. The root pattern of “the wrong arm” and all of its split-off patterns of “wrong,” “wronger,” and “wrongness” repeat 27 times throughout the text.

Lipsyte slowly unravels the history of hurt behind “the wrong arm” and its history of hurt through split-off patterns like “bees,” “bad nails in the porch door,” “porch-door nails,” and “scars.” Split-off patterns relate back to the root pattern in other ways, like the way “the boats” functions as the motive for the scene and the way “waste a wish” functions in the narrator’s evolving line of desire. Of course, there’s not enough time to look at examples of these patterns in any real detail, so instead, let’s look at possibly the most important connection to be drawn from the history of “the wrong arm” as seen in this example of the root pattern: “The wrong arm would never heal right.” Not only is it “wrong” to touch “the arm,” but the narrator also understands that “the wrong arm” would never heal “right.” This portion of the pattern is constructed on sameness and difference, or, as opposites, like in the instance of “good” and the implied “not good” in Walser’s story.

The next example of the split-off pattern “wrong” reveals a change in the narrator’s line of desire when the narrator says, “We were making it wrong by saying it was wrong. We should be holding it and rubbing it and taking her by it to lead her somewhere. To lead her by it to the boats” (121). This is the climax of the story, a turning point in the narrator’s understanding of his mother’s arm as he begins to form a new association in his mind. At the same time, this example recalls an earlier utterance of “the wrong arm” root pattern: “All we knew about the wrong arm was that it was wrong to touch it, to pinch it, to rub it…The wrong arm was not for us to take her by and lead her.” The change in the narrator results from his desire to deny the entire history of “the wrong arm,” to move beyond the prior association that touching “the wrong arm” is “wrong,” and so the story ends on the action of his following through: “And then I did the wrong thing.” All at once, the narrator’s actions extend the split-off pattern of “wrong,” complicate story action, and complete the circular momentum of the plot.

josipovici bookThroughout this essay I have looked at small examples of word patterns for the ways they function in narrative through a relational network of connections. On the relational nature of written language, Barthes says, “connections lead the word on, and at once carry it towards a meaning which is an ever-deferred project” (47). In these stories by Stein, Walser, and Lipsyte, the connections between words do not point immediately to one meaning, but rather, defer meaning through the act of repetition. This effect is something that contemporary British literary theorist Gabriel Josipovici, in his book Whatever Happened to Modernism?, calls the “playing off” of “forward movement against stillness and repetition,” an effect that has long been prevalent in poetry (Modernism, 87).

On the making of Three Lives, the book in which “Melanctha” was first published, Stein says, “In the first book there was a groping for a continuous present and for using everything by beginning again and again” (3). Stein’s “using everything,” her reliance on repetitions, and the varying of those repetitions allowed her to construct Melanctha out of a succession of contexts instead of a scene-by-scene based pattern of conflict. The resulting narrative seems temporally odd with a constantly churning, elliptical momentum. As readers, we move through the narrative without seeming to move at all.

In Walser’s “Nothing at All,” a story of only 700 words, 331 words span the arc of the woman’s journey into town for something good to eat, while 182 subsequent words amount to her re-telling of that journey to her husband after she returns home, a movement that is, essentially, a repeating of, or, using Stein’s words, a “beginning again.” Walser dilates the situation and achieves a complete deceleration of forward movement, or, as Josipovici might say, the staving off of forward movement in favor of “stillness” and “repetition.”

Roland Barthes says that narrative “is an act which necessarily implies a duration,” and by “duration” he means an “oriented and meaningful time” (38). In an essay by Ben Marcus in the June 2003 edition of The Believer, Marcus says, “One basic meaning of narrative [is] to create time where there was none” (2). He also says, “Fiction is the production of false time for readers to experience. Most fiction seeks to become time.” The stories by Stein, Walser, and Lipsyte are all concerned with influencing the way readers experience narrative time through using repetition and word patterning as orienting devices to compress time (in the way Lipsyte compresses a history of hurt into “the wrong arm”), or to subvert our narrative-based notion of passing time (in the way Stein carries out her concept of a “continuous present,” or in the way Walser decelerates the forward momentum of his narrative).

As writers, there’s no way to escape time, but there are alternative ways for building narratives outside of using an events-with-consequences based pattern of conflict. In word-pattern based stories, the duration of the narrative persists as long as the dominating or root pattern remains open, and in this relational temporality, the tension between a set of words behaves similarly to the way consequences separate events. Causality and consequence will always be concerns for fiction writers, but the contingencies that result from the textual connections between repeating words and phrases can also provide narrative movement or momentum, and new opportunities for finding ways in, around, and out of story.

—Jason Lucarelli

——————-

Works Cited

Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. New York: Hill and Wang. 1968.

Glover, Douglas. Attack of the Copula Spiders. Biblioasis. 2012.

Josipovici, Gabriel. Whatever Happened to Modernism?. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. 2011.

Lipsyte, Sam. “The Wrong Arm.” Venus Drive. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 2000.

Marcus, Ben. “On the Lyric Essay.” The Believer. July 2003.

Stein, Gertrude. “Portraits and Repetition,” Lectures in America. New York: Random House. 1935. “Melanctha.” Three Lives. 1909.

Walser, Robert. “Nothing at All.” Selected Stories. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2012.

 

Jason Lucarelli lives in Scranton, PA. He is a recent graduate of the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. This is his second appearance on the pages of Numéro Cinq.

 

Mar 092013
 

I am quite sure that “went viral” doesn’t fit my present circumstances — a bit hyperbolic, I’d say. But it’s always nice to have someone in the press using the phrase next to one’s name. The Winnipeg Free Press, BTW, is a venerable Canadian journalistic institution.

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A Canadian author’s book on writing went viral on social media recently, leading to thousands of would-be fiction writers searching their manuscripts for “Copula Spiders.”

Douglas Glover’s book Attack of the Copula Spiders (Biblioasis) coins the term to refer to the multi-appendaged mess created by circling and linking all of the variations of the verb “to be” in a paragraph. (Copula is a term for the link between subject and predicate of a verb.) Excessive use of sentence constructions like “he was happy” or “the building was unassuming” lead to “flaccid and uninteresting prose,” he writes.

Joe Ponepinto, book review editor of the Los Angeles Review, brought Glover’s ideas to the literary world in a much-circulated blog post subtitled “Why I’ll never write (or read) the same way again.”

via Cameron Dueck’s arts column – Winnipeg Free Press.

Mar 082013
 

Anna Maria and the box turtleAnna Maria Johnson

Virginia Woolf, in her diaries, once said that she didn’t know how anyone could read without a pencil in his hands; Anna Maria Johnson doesn’t just use a pencil, she uses lines, paint, a self-created concordance and icons to mark the patterns when she is reading. Johnson is an artist-writer-reader who has an uncanny instinct for making visual and synchronic what in a text seems abstract and sequential. After she is done with a paragraph, a page, a sequence of pages, you suddenly SEE the text come alive as a trembling matrix of vectors, internal references, and visual rhythms; reading, Anna Maria Johnson, renders text into a startling work of visual art. This is a wonderful ability and not just a parlor trick; reading for pattern is a key element in understanding authorial intention. Repetition is the heart of art. Too many readers skim a work once and never get to appreciate the tactile, erotic quality of  great prose, the physical impulses of tension, insistence and resolution that form its inner structure. Anna Maria Johnson’s “reading” of Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is a delightful and astonishing work of hybrid art in itself, but it’s also a terrific lesson in HOW TO READ.

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pilgrim epigraph page

Anna Maria Johnson’s altered epigraph page of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

I. Introduction

EVERY STORY HAS its own circulatory system, with arteries and blood vessels networked and pumping life and nutrients from its heart to every other part. Each book is a watershed, a system of rivers, creeks and underground currents that flow unceasingly, pulled by some kind of unseen gravitational force. A book is a woven web, with silken strands connecting segment to segment.

It’s easy to wonder, while reading an admired author’s flowing narrative, just how she managed to do it. A prize-winning book seems to have been a miracle, a creative rush of genius that burst forth while the writer simply sat and transcribed the words onto the page. But generally, good writing comes down to slow craftsmanship and long periods revising. I find that syntactical patterns and repeated imagery play a dominant role in creating unity and structure, as seen in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a book that hangs together through such patterns.

But how, exactly? To find out, I re-read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I focused on sentence structure and image patterns, for it is syntax (specifically, repetition, parallel structures, and lyricism), in combination with image patterns (concrete images that recur throughout a given work), which gives unity and movement, or “flow,” to this book. According to Mary Stein, “a sophisticated use of syntax in prose can function well beyond lyric or ornamentation.” Syntax can be used as metaphor, she adds, in order to “motivate narrative movement and provide story structure.” [1] I would add that “syntax as metaphor” sometimes takes the form of image patterns.

Douglas Glover, in his essay “How to Write a Short Story Structure: Notes on Structure and an Exercise,” published in Attack of the Copula Spiders, defines an image pattern as “a pattern of words and/or meanings created by the repetition of an image.” (33) Each repetition is not simply a duplication of the first, however, for the most interesting patterns require variation. Think of the famous bars from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: if they were played fifteen times in succession without variation, how grating they would be! But Beethoven artfully incorporated variety into the score so that whenever it returns to the familiar phrase, the audience can appreciate it. Similarly, in visual art, the most successful images employ repetition with thoughtful variation to create unity. Even Andy Warhol’s famous silkscreened Campbell’s Soup Cans are slightly different from one another: each can bears a different label, “black bean,” “tomato rice,” “vegetable,” “green pea,” and so forth. The “cheese” soup even bears a visually different label, with a yellow banner spanning its front.

Glover’s essay names some specific options for varying a repeated image. First, in successive appearances, the author may add a piece of significant history—that is, repeat the image but include new information or detail that the reader wasn’t aware of in a previous iteration. Second, the author may use “association and/or juxtaposition,” pairing the image with another, previously unrelated, image so as to enlarge or alter its meaning. Third, the author may use what Glover calls “ramifying or ‘splintering’ and ‘tying-in,’” where one or more parts of the image are extracted and repeated, then put together again in a later iteration (33).

Image patterning gives a story “an echo chamber effect (or internal memory—important for giving the reader a sense that there is a coherent world of the book,” “rhythm,” and “a root or web effect that promotes organic unity (the threads connecting the pattern in the text are like the roots of a tree holding the soil together)” (33). While Glover is speaking of fiction, the principles of image patterning are equally applicable to non-fiction writing. Essayists and memoirists alike can select images from real life, interpreting such images to add new layers of meaning and symbolism with each recurrence.

I would add that syntactical patterns—even those that are not primarily visual—are capable of providing the above functions in a given work, just as image patterns do, when they are repeated with variations.

Dillard’s book nearly bursts to overflowing with both of these types of patterns. Repetition of syntactical and image patterns lends unity to a work, while variations on those patterns provide movement, or circulation. Still, the process through which image patterns and syntax “work” in the hearts and minds of readers, when they are working well, feels rather mysterious. One writer friend remarked to me that, despite years of studying literature and the writing craft, when she reads books by Marilyn Robinson, they still seemed “like magic.” Similarly, when I first read Annie Dillard’s remarkable Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, I was tempted to ascribe its flow, its circulatory system, to sorcery. But upon subsequent, closer, readings, I began to see patterns emerging, and an inherent, carefully ordered structure—evidence of craftsmanship, not dark arts. The first pattern jumped out to me, suddenly, much the same way that a stereogram image suddenly pops out, unmistakably visible, so that the viewer wonders, “How did I not see that before?” It was the repeated phrase, “the tree with the lights in it,” a specific pattern of text that recurs fourteen times throughout the book, and which, in section III, I will discuss in depth.

Shortly after that first pattern appeared to me, other images began to shimmer from the text: a mockingbird’s graceful free fall, a giant water bug that sucked a frog out of its skin, sharks in a feeding frenzy limned in light, the goldfish named Ellery Channing. [2] I ordered a sturdy hardcover copy of the book for the express purpose of tracking down every image pattern that I could find, cross-referencing them in the margins, coding them with watercolors, and indexing my finds in a chart like a concordance (Appendix A). I’ve included scanned images of some relevant pages so that you can follow this process. I should stress that it was only in the course of many successive readings that many of these patterns became apparent to me; mostly, that which you see sketched out in watercolor and marginalia would remain in the unconscious levels of a reader’s mind for the first reading. The purpose of these added visual elements was to make visible some of the subtle connections that a reader’s mind would perceive as a marvelous, almost supernatural, sense of flow.

pilgrim page 98

Using my concordance of recurring images (for example, planet/earth, sail, giant water bug that sucked a frog, goldfish, tree with the lights in it, snakeskin, et cetera), I next found a photograph to represent each one, and obtained permission from the photographers to use them for my purposes. In some cases, as with the goldfish and sea-anchor, I drew my own and scanned it. I reproduced numerous copies of each photograph or drawing onto sticker paper so that I could place a relevant hand-made sticker as a tag onto each page where a given image appears. Some pages, as in the example above, have multiple stickers, showing that these are pages where Dillard has tied several different images together. On page 128, Dillard links in one sentence several key images: the planet, the giant water bug that sucked a frog, Tinker Creek, the flight of three hundred redwing blackbirds, the goldfish bowl, and the snakeskin. In pencil I’ve drawn connections between repeated phrases, such as solar system, and related phrases such as giant water bug on page 128 and giant water bug’s predations on page 129, or goldfish bowl, the fringe of a goldfish’s fin, and fish’s fin on 129. In margins, I’ve noted the page numbers for other instances when these same visual images or textual patterns occur, such as the Kabbalistic tradition which turns up on pages 30, 198, 261, and the phrase spotted and speckled, which alludes elsewhere in the text to the biblical Jacob’s “speckled and spotted” flock (pages 145 and 239). The word speckled occurs on pages 145, 179, 239, 242, 266, and 271 and, when its various contexts are considered together, serves to link the notion of Jacob’s speckled and spotted flock to the natural world’s intricate details as well as its imperfections. (For a complete list of all the references to these and other repeated images, see Appendix A.)

With the aid of these and other visual annotations, Dillard’s patterns became more apparent—not only the interplay of recurring images, but also some of the syntactical patterns that characterize her idiosyncratic style: parallelism, repetition of key words and phrases, frequent use of colons and question marks, and lyricism through poetic devices. Most delightfully, there is playfulness—Dillard accents her deadpan humor with the use of homophones and other types of word play: puns, allusions to nursery rhymes and jokes (“Like the bear who went over the mountain, I went out to see what I could see,” on page 11), as well as the re-appropriation of popular expressions and aphorisms (“If you can’t see the forest for the trees, then look at the trees; when you’ve looked at enough trees, you’ve seen a forest, you’ve got it,” page 129).

II.  Syntactical Patterns

Virginia Tufte opens her book Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style with an epigraph by Anthony Burgess—“And the words slide into the slots ordained by syntax, and glitter as with atmospheric dust with those impurities which we call meaning,”—and adds the following commentary, “Anthony Burgess is right: it is the words that shine and sparkle and glitter, sometimes radiant with an author’s inspired choice. But it is syntax that gives words the power to relate to each other in a sequence, to create rhythms and emphasis, to carry meaning—of whatever kind—as well as glow individually in just the right place.”  Syntax is what gives sentences that remarkable sense of flowing movement, allowing meaning to glitter. Carefully constructed syntax at the sentence and paragraph level creates larger movement that helps to propel lyrical writing, in the way that the motion of water flowing down small mountain streams create a river’s strong current out toward sea.  In Dillard’s writing, we read not so much because we want to know what is happening (which is, in truth, little more than Dillard sitting watching animals, thinking about religious mystical traditions, and pondering physics and evolution), but rather because of the way in which Dillard expresses her thoughts and feelings: the power of words as they relate in sequence, the rhythms and emphases that syntax creates, and the multiple, shimmering meanings that those words and images carry. In short, syntax and imagery advance the narrative, providing both unity, through repetition and parallelisms, and movement, through variations and rhythm.

Syntactical tactics:  parallel structures, repetition, lyricism

Dillard grounds many of her metaphors in parallel sentence structures. For instance, on the first page, after describing an old tomcat who used to wake her by treading with bloody paws on her bare skin, making her look as though she’d been “painted with roses,” she poses the question, “What blood was this, and what roses?”

tomcat symbol

A compound sentence: the first half inquiring about blood, the second about roses. She follows this short interrogative sentence by another, more involved sentence, which twice pairs “roses” and “blood,” suggesting a variety of possible metaphors (some negative, some positive) for each: “It could have been the rose of union, the blood of murder, or the rose of beauty bare and the blood of some unspeakable sacrifice or birth” (Dillard 1). She continues: “The signs on my body could have been an emblem or a stain, the keys to the kingdom or the mark of Cain”(2). The paired clauses accentuate the multiple possibilities for paired meanings, for opposing meanings. What’s more, the paired clauses carry the same meter and also rhyme with one another (“stain” / “Cain”), attracting the reader’s special attention to this sentence. These parallel constructions set up the reader for what is ahead: room for opposing interpretations of what we find in the natural world.[3] These musings on “union” and “murder,” “beauty,” and “sacrifice or birth” will be followed up with stories of union, murder, beauty, sacrifice, and birth, featuring creatures such as female praying mantises, which eat their mates while they mate, and ichneumon wasps, which are lucky if they lay their eggs before the young begin to hatch and eat their mothers from inside. Dillard’s richly paired, carefully crafted sentences have the power to hold within themselves, on a micro-scale, the same extremities of beauty and horror found in the book as a whole, creating a fractal pattern. Just as these sentences weigh beauty against the violence and suffering inherent to the natural world, so do the paragraphs and chapters that hold them. This is an appropriate structure for a book about nature, as nature tends to be structured in fractals: the veins of leaves, networks of waterways, branches of trees, circulatory systems of human beings. Another example of Dillard’s parallel sentence structures occurs in the passage that introduces Tinker Creek and Tinker Mountain.

The creeks—Tinker and Cavern’s—are an active mystery, fresh every minute.  Theirs is the mystery of the continuous creation, and all that providence implies: the uncertainty of vision, the horror of the fixed, the dissolution of the present, the intricacy of beauty, the pressure of fecundity, the elusiveness of the free, and the flawed nature of perfection.  The mountains—Tinker and Brushy, McAfee’s Knob and Dead Man—are a passive mystery, the oldest of all.  Theirs is the one simple mystery of creation from nothing, of matter itself, anything at all, the given. (2-3, emphases mine to show parallelism)

pilgrim page 2pilgrim page 3

By presenting these metaphors—the creeks and what they represent, and the mountains with what they represent—as paired sentences running parallel to one another, Dillard heightens the contrast between the metaphors. The first two sentences lay out the creeks, their specific names, and what they represent metaphorically: “active mystery,” “all that providence implies.” The second pair of sentences lays out the mountains, their names, and the metaphor that Dillard intends for the mountains to represent: “passive mystery,” “one simple mystery of creation.” She arranges the paragraph with a set of two paired sentences, each with corresponding clauses and even the dashed parenthetical phrases placed in parallel (Article, noun, em dash, paired specific names, em dash, being verb, article, adjective, noun, etc.). I’ve coded the creek-related sentences in blue and the mountains in purple. It’s as if she’s placed signposts reading, “Creek metaphor this way!  Mountain metaphor that way!”  The reader pauses, reflects, notices the subtle distinctions between the parallel structures, the creeks versus the mountains—ah, one is active mystery, the other passive—in keeping with human perception that rivers visibly move, while mountains appear immutable. The former represents “all,” the latter, “one.” Soon Dillard ends the paragraph with two short sentences that confirm the contrast between the metaphors: “The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home” (Dillard Pilgrim 3). These final sentences, too, are parallel, although they are punctuated differently, and have different lengths, forcing the reader to slow the pace of reading in order to think about the differences between “living there” and “home.”[4] [5]

Repetition, like parallelism, can be a powerful syntactical tool. As Virginia Tufte writes, “Repetition and variation constitute that dual essence of prose rhythm, as they do of form in music or in painting. Many types of parallel arrangement, of balance and calculated imbalance in phrase and clause, of repetition and ellipses, pairings, catalogings, contrasts and other groupings, assembled together into distinct prose textures, can contribute to the unique rhythm of almost any kind of prose” (Tufte 234). Repetition captures attention, piques curiosity, builds emphasis, and when interlaid between disparate parts, repetition serves as a connector.

Dillard often repeats a significant phrase or sentence, sometimes with small variations. For example, she ends chapter 4 with, “catch it if you can,” then repeats the phrase as the opening to chapter 5.

pilgrim page 76pilgrim page 77

Chapter 5, primarily a meditation about time being a continuous loop, focuses on a knotted snakeskin that Dillard found in the woods, but is also a reflection on seeking divine power or spirit, which Dillard compares to the mythical hoop snake that rolls along with its tail in its mouth: “the spirit seems to roll along like the mythical hoop snake with its tail in its mouth.” For good measure, she also throws in an allusion to the biblical Ezekiel’s account of seeing the wheels: “‘As for the wheels, it was cried unto them in my hearing, O wheel.’” Dillard concludes with a long sentence that personifies the spirit, “This is the hoop of flame that shoots the rapids in the creek or spins across the dizzy meadows; this is the arsonist in the sunny woods: catch it if you can” (76). She seems to be conflating time with spirit, so that catch it if you can might refer to both. Right across the page spread, chapter 6 opens with the short sentence, “Catch it if you can” (77). The repetition of catch it if you can gives continuity between the two chapters, while at the same time, because it is such an active, daring, quick sentence in its second appearance, propels the narrative forward. A few pages into the new chapter, catch it if you can is repeated to begin another section—but now in this case the sentence is loaded with a somewhat different meaning, as here Dillard discusses not time as a continuous loop, nor spirit, but what it means to dwell fully in the present moment; awareness, rather than time or spirit, is the thing to be caught. “Catch it if you can. The present is an invisible electron; its lightning path traced faintly on a blackened screen is fleet, and feeling, and gone” (79).

Thus far, there have been three replications of catch it if you can, and three associated meanings. Next, over a hundred pages later, in quite another context, Dillard repeats the text pattern, changing one word: it for them, so as to create a variation on the motif.

pilgrim page 186

But now she is speaking of fishing; the pronoun them refers to fish. “You can lure them, net them, troll for them, club them, clutch them, chase them up an inlet, stun them with plant juice, catch them in a wooden wheel that runs all night—and you still might starve. They are there, they certainly are there, free, food, and wholly fleeting. You can see them if you want to; catch them if you can” (186). Notice that she has slyly inserted a reference to “a wooden wheel that runs all night,” which suggests the shape of that continuous loop of time, the hoop snake spirit, and Ezekiel’s wheel from the previous context.[6] But in this context, the pattern carries a new meaning: fish, which here also connote Christ, as Dillard explains that the fish was an early symbol for Christ. (The origin of the fish as Christian symbol might have come because of Jesus’ practice of calling fishermen to follow him, teaching them to “fish for men.”) Dillard has loaded the pattern: “The more I glimpse the fish in Tinker Creek, the more satisfying the coincidence becomes, the richer the symbol, not only for Christ but for the spirit as well” (186). So now, catch them if you can refers to fish, which in turn refers to Christ and spirit. It’s a serious sort of pun.

What a nice trick this is, for by this Dillard has not only added new layers of meaning, but also returned to an earlier one, that of spirit. The symbolism has come full circle—like a continuous loop or hoop or wheel. Fitting!

Later, Dillard again varies the pattern when she writes overtly of stalking the spirit: “You have to stalk the spirit, too . . . and hope to catch him by the tail” (205). About thirty pages pass before yet another variation, “Nature seems to catch you by the tail” (236). Such repetitions, “catch it if you can,” and variations, “catch [him/you] by the tail,” function like a musical theme and variation, providing both unity and variety as the book moves forward. The paragraph that begins with “Nature seems to catch you by the tail” concludes with a list of the tailless animals that got away, adding further rhythmic variation to this text pattern.

pilgrim page 236

One additional thought to note: perhaps the phrase “catch . . . by the tail” alludes to the children’s rhyme “catch a tiger by the tail.” The earlier version of the pattern catch it if you can seems to allude to children’s games (“catch” with a ball), or possible the fairy tale story of the gingerbread man who cries “catch me if you can.”

Another example of phrase repetition is it is chomp or fast. This phrase appears twice in a row on page 237, with only a section break in between its two occurrences:

pilgrim page 237

Before the whole phrase, “it is chomp or fast,” appears at all, however, it is foreshadowed, as the word chomp shows up three times scattered throughout page 227: 1) “I looked beyond the snake to the ragged chomp in the hillside where years before men had quarried stone,” 2) “Is this what it’s like, I thought then, and think now: a little blood here, a chomp there, and still we live, trampling the grass?” and 3) “the world is more chomped than I’d dreamed.”

pilgrim page 227

A few pages later, chomp appears again, this time as a single-word sentence, in reference to parasitism: “the dank baptismal lagoon into which we are dipped by blind chance many times over against our wishes, until one way or another we die. Chomp” (234).

One more brief example: The sentence, “What we know, at least for starters, is: here we—so incontrovertibly—are” (127-8) leads into a brief meditation on the brevity of life, and the importance of working, during the brief time we are alive, at making sense of what we see, in order to discover “where we so incontrovertibly are” (128). By adding a mere w and omitting the em-dashes, Dillard varies the phrase as she almost repeats it, so that it might stick in the reader’s mind for later. Later comes more than one hundred twenty pages further, in the chapter about parasites, when she re-states, “Here we so incontrovertibly are” (240), again without the em-dashes. Such recurrences provide connections between separate passages of the book, stitching them together, providing a syntactical clue that the content of these sections relate closely to one another.

Occasionally Dillard interjects sentences that are so lyrical (in terms of meter, assonance, and rhyme) that they are more like what readers typically expect from poetry than prose. In fact it is tempting to believe that some of these lines, which appear on separate pages at great distance from one another, might once have been couplets that were divided up, like twins separated at birth. For example, the lines, “I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was fleshflake, feather, bone” (32), and “I am the skin of water the wind plays over; I am petal, feather, stone” (201).

pilgrim page 32

pilgrim page 201

Most notably, these sentences rhyme (“bone” / “stone”). More subtly, these two sentences share a parallel structure, “I was . . . ; I was . . .”, “I am . . . ; I am . . .” and have a similar meter when read aloud. In both statements, the narrator has broken out of an objective stance to identify herself with inanimate objects in elaborate but earthy metaphors. Thus, although these lines are found 162 pages apart from one another, an astute (you might say, obsessive) reader may recall the first upon reading the second. In my case, I initially thought that the line on page 201 was a direct repetition of a sentence I’d read earlier (my mind remembered the rhythm); it sounded strangely familiar, so I flipped back through the early pages until I found its correlative. Even readers who do not consciously observe these relationships—probably most first or second-time readers—will sense that the book flows, that there is an ineffable something that unifies the book’s early pages with its later ones.

Word Repetition

Narrowing the scope from the sentence level to that of words, it’s possible to find a good deal of repetition of particular words, which are freighted with additional meanings and associations each time they appear.

The penultimate paragraph of chapter 1 sets up three images that will run throughout the book, lending unity and movement as the repetitions pile up. Describing the “lightning marks,” or deep grooves that “certain Indians used to carve” into their arrows, Dillard writes:

Certain Indians used to carve long grooves along the wooden shafts of their arrows. They called the grooves “lightning marks,” because they resembled the curved fissure lightning slices down the trunks of trees. The function of the lightning marks is this: if the arrow fails to kill the game, blood from a deep wound will channel along the lightning mark, streak down the arrow shaft, and spatter to the ground, laying a trail dripped on broadleaves, on stones, that the barefoot and trembling archer can follow into whatever deep or rare wilderness it leads. I am the arrow shaft, carved along my length by unexpected lights and gashes from the very sky, and this book is the straying trail of blood.(12)

pilgrim page 12

Thus, Dillard writes in metaphor a manifesto of the purpose of this book. This book is the “straying trail of blood,” and the narrator is the arrow carved by “unexpected lights and gashes.” Throughout the text, it is possible to visually see a “trail of blood,” as the word blood appears every few pages throughout the text (see blood in Appendix A). When I circled the word blood each time it appeared throughout the book, painting each one red, the repeated word blood trailing from page to page resembled the sort of track that a wounded animal might make in its attempted escape.

pilgrim page with blood

Similarly, every image pattern, every syntactical pattern, becomes another pathway for the reader to track the quarry, “the game,” as Dillard calls it above (page 12), or “the spirit,” as she calls it on page 76 in connection with the catch it if you can pattern.

Arrows create another such pattern. Soon after this initial reference to arrows at the end of chapter 1, the next chapter begins with a story of the child Annie Dillard, at age six or seven, amusing herself by hiding pennies and drawing chalk arrows on sidewalks pointing the way to the hidden coins. Like the arrow that inflicts the wound on the hunted game animal, these arrows also begin a trail to guide a lucky passerby to hidden treasure. “After I learned to write I labeled the arrows: SURPRISE AHEAD or MONEY THIS WAY. I was greatly excited, during all this arrow-drawing, at the thought of the first lucky passer-by who would receive in this way, regardless of merit, a free gift from the universe” (14). Dillard, now an adult, a writer, is still at the same game, since each image pattern laid into the narrative functions like a series of arrows, carefully drawn to point the reader toward hidden treasure. Whether we think of them as a trail of blood or as a succession of direction markers pointing toward copper pieces, Dillard’s image patterns give the reader a visible track to follow. The reader, finding another repeated image, recognizes it as familiar and therefore unifying, while the variations on each image invite movement, propelling the reader forward to consider: this time, the arrow is a chalked direction on sidewalk, while the last arrow was an Indian’s hunting weapon. The reader’s curiosity is piqued: What sort of arrow will I find next?  What will it point me toward? What will I find at the end of the trail?  (see “Arrow/arrowhead” in Appendix A to follow the trail) In reading Dillard, the journey itself is as much of a payoff as any conclusions to which she might lead us. The process of reading is much like hiking through woods: we follow the blazes marked on trees, enjoying the hike not simply for the view we get at the end, but also for what we see along the way.

The passage from page 12 pictured above yields yet another pattern to follow: light. “Lightning” and “unexpected lights and gashes” are both clues to this trail. I painted yellow all occurrences of the words light, sun, gold, and solar, so that throughout my version, splotches of yellow illuminate another way.

pilgrim page 12 light crop

pilgrim page 62 light crop

pilgrim page 242 light crop

So far, the patterns have been composed of words-as-nouns, but verbs can trace patterns too. For example, the verb to cast occurs throughout the text in several different usages, and often appears in conjunction with other image patterns such as Eskimos, the people of Israel, entomologists, and others. Because the word cast appears in conjunction with several different significant patterns, it links these disparate images, unifying several different threads in the text. The word cast appears first on page 43, as the narrator considers spending a winter evening “casting for arctic char,” which, for her, means staying home and reading about Eskimos and their lives. Next, casting appears several times on a two-page spread, associated with Pliny’s account of the invention of sculpture and other contexts:

A Sicyonian potter came to Corinth. There his daughter fell in love with a young man . . . When he sat with her at home, she used to trace the outline of his shadow that a candle’s light cast on the wall . . .

Muslims, whose religion bans representational art as idolatrous, don’t observe the rule strictly; but they do forbid sculpture, because it casts a shadow. So shadows define the real. If I no longer see shadows and “dark marks,” as do the newly sighted, then I see them as making some sort of sense of the light. The give the light distance; they put it in its place. They inform my eyes of my location here, here O Israel, here in the world’s flawed sculpture, here in the flickering shade of the nothingness between me and the light.

Now that the shadow has dissolved the heavens’ blue dome, I can see Andromeda again; I stand pressed to the window, rapt and shrunk in the galaxy’s chill glare. ‘Nostalgia of the Infinite,’ di Chirico: cast shadows stream across the sunlit courtyard, gouging canyons. There is a sense in which shadows are actually cast, hurled with a power, cast as Ishmael was cast, out, with a flinging force.

pilgrim page 62

pilgrim page 63

Note, in these three paragraphs, the piling of associations with the word cast (I’ve circled cast in black ink): “. . . the outline of his shadow that a candle’s light cast on the wall,” “they do forbid sculpture, because it casts a shadow,” “cast shadows stream across the sunlit courtyard,” “there is a sense in which shadows are actually cast, hurled with a power, cast as Ishmael was cast, out, with a flinging force.”

Not only does Dillard use the word cast in several different senses, but she also describes the action of casting, as in sculpture,without specifically naming it as such, when she retells Pliny’s story of a Sicyonian potter in Corinth who physically cast an image of his daughter’s lover using clay and plaster: “she used to trace the outline of his shadow that a candle’s light cast on the wall” (62). Within two paragraphs, cast is used in a variety of different contexts to refer to shadows cast (by candlelight or sun, in reality and in paintings) but also to refer to a person being sent away, “cast out,” as Ishmael was cast out from his father Abraham’s home. Before mentioning Ishmael, Dillard sets us up for it: “Muslims, whose religion bans representational art as idolatrous, don’t observe the rule strictly; but they do forbid sculpture, because it casts a shadow” (Dillard 62). Shortly afterward she inserts a reference to a famous painting, “‘Nostalgia of the Infinite,’ di Chirico: cast shadows stream across the sunlit courtyard, gouging canyons.” Then it comes, the sentence that joins the notion of cast shadows with the other meaning of cast: “There is a sense in which shadows are actually cast, hurled with a power, cast as Ishmael was cast, out, with a flinging force” (63).

At first, the reference to the biblical Ishmael seems unrelated to the rest of the passage, until the reader remembers that Ishmael (who was cast out) is the ancestor of Muslims, about whom Dillard was just speaking. What’s more, there’s also a reference to the nation of Israel in that paragraph: “They inform my eyes of my location here, here, O Israel, here in the world’s flawed sculpture, here in the flickering shade . . .” (62). This reference to Israel is interesting because it is word play in itself, a homophonic allusion to scripture, the Shema, “Hear, O Israel,” from the book of Leviticus, whose text orthodox Jews post in the shadowy doorways of their homes, and also an allusion to the biblical nation of Israel. Ever since Ishmael was cast out, his descendants and those of his step-brother Isaac (today’s Muslims and Jews) have had a good bit of fraternal conflict, and Dillard seems to connect this conflict to the shadowy side of nature, as she next knits in references to disturbing events in the natural world: mating mantises, the giant water bug that sips frogs from their skins, the mantis that preys on a wasp even while the wasp preys on a bee, prompting even the devoted, insect-studying naturalist J. Henri Fabre to write in 1916, “Let us hasten to cast a veil over these horrors” (64). With that last quotation, Dillard has drawn yet another link to the verb cast, and to be certain the reader hasn’t missed the connection, she continues, “The remarkable thing about the world of insects, however, is precisely that there is no veil cast over these horrors” (64).

The phrase “cast a veil” ties this pattern of cast to yet another pattern that has been running through the text, that of nature being like a veiled dancer, “a dancer who for my eyes only flings away her seven veils. For nature does reveal as well as conceal: now-you-don’t-see-it, now-you-do” (Dillard 16). Later, on page 202, the image of veils being removed (not cast, but “removed” and “whisked”) recurs, and is connected to gaining knowledge of the physical world and its workings: “We remove the veils one by one, painstakingly, adding knowledge to knowledge and whisking away veil after veil, until at last we reveal the nub of things, the sparkling equation from whom all blessings flow” (202).

Later, the verb cast appears several times more in a wide variety of contexts: Jesus urging his disciples to “cast the net on the right side of the ship” (186), Dillard walking in the woods where “tulips had cast their leaves on my path, flat and bright as doubloons” (245), and a leaf being “cast upon the air” (253). Finally, cast becomes adjectival for “a cast-iron bell” (261), and the “cast-iron mountains” which “ring” (271). Notice how the word ring, in combination with the descriptor “cast-iron,” further helps the mountain image to resonate with that of the bell.  These further appearances of cast lend continuity.

How did Dillard come up with all this? And are the rest of us mortals capable of doing the same? After all, a Harvard neurologist once described Dillard as “almost unbelievably intelligent.” Perhaps it is best—that is, most efficacious and most heartening—for aspiring writers to assume that it was through multiple revisions that Dillard discovered—and chose, developed, added to, and enhanced—such patterns. As Lucy Corin, in her essay “Material,” advises writers, “The story, I like to say and remember, is always smarter than you—there will be patterns of theme, image, and idea that much savvier and more complex than you could have come up with on your own. Find them with your marking pens as they emerge in your drafts” (Corin 87). Corin advises writers to then make the most of such patterns, expanding and accentuating them, and controlling their effect. Annie Dillard, in The Writing Life, seems not to disagree: “You write it all, discovering it at the end of the line of words. The line of words is a fiber optic, flexible as wire; it illumines the path just before its fragile tip. You probe with it, delicate as a worm” (7). By “it,” Dillard means the thing you suddenly realize is the new point of what you are writing. Because of this statement and others she makes in The Writing Life, I believe that Dillard means it is in the process of writing, of re-reading one’s work, and revising, re-writing, that the author delicately discovers such patterns and discerns whether to keep them, when to expand them. We writers must probe our own texts to find the intelligence that is there.

For novice writers, this is good news: patterns don’t typically appear all at once in their final form, but they do sometimes suggest themselves. It is the good work of writers to become aware of such emerging patterns, work them with intention and deliberation, and carefully craft the overall work.  Perhaps it would be prudent for us all to read our own work with watercolors in hand in order to better discover what is there!

Lyricism/Poeticism

Lyricism is Dillard’s not-so-secret weapon when it comes to syntax in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Her persistent application of poetic devices such as similes and extended metaphors, alliteration, assonance and consonance, even rhymes and homophones, create a strong, consistent, musical voice that both unifies the tone of the work and helps it to move with a strong rhythm, as in this memorable passage, which I quoted in part earlier: “I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone” (Dillard 32).

Two frequent poetic devices in Dillard’s work are metaphor and simile. A good example of Dillard’s use of extended metaphor and related similes occurs when she finds herself in a meadow filled with grasshoppers. In the first three pages of chapter 12, while Dillard describes the grasshoppers, nearly every simile and metaphor she uses relates to war, an apt metaphor as she describes these apparently armored insects invading the meadow. Even the chapter title, “Nightwatch,” suggests a soldier on duty keeping watch at night.

pilgrim page 207

pilgrim pages 208 & 209

War-related similes include: “barrage of grasshoppers,” “such legions,” “blast of bodies like shrapnel exploded,” “ordinary grasshoppers gone berserk,” “ranks,” “coat of mail.” Also “mustered this army,” “detonated the grass,” “sprang in salvos,” and “ricocheted” (207-9). By restricting metaphors to such a genre, Dillard not only maintains a specific, dangerous tone as she describes the process by which ordinary grasshoppers adapt into locusts, but also creates writing that coheres, syntax that advances forward.

Extended metaphors lend lyricism and also unify. Another example of extended metaphor is the recurring image of a magician in a circus tent show (ah, you remember the magician pattern, yes?), as well as splinters from, or variations on, this image. The metaphor begins in the first chapter, just after Dillard has described a spectacular sunset.  Then she waxes metaphoric, comparing the optical wonders of nature to a carnival act performed by a fast-acting magician:

pilgrim page 11

Some of the images within the extended metaphor above show up again and again throughout the book, “splinters” from an image pattern.  Examples of splinters from this passage that recur elsewhere are the magician, tent, show, rabbits, scarves, and the words bland and blank (these last two, though not specific to magic shows in general, Dillard more than once associates with the magician image). Such words, in future instances, are joined to the idea of sky/heaven as a dome or tent over the earth (see “magician” in Appendix A).   Dillard refers to several of these images again later: “Some days when a mist covers the mountains, when the muskrats won’t show and the microscope’s mirror shatters, I want to climb up the blank blue dome as a man would storm the inside of a circus tent, wildly, dangling, and with a steel knife claw a rent in the top, peep, and, if I must, fall” (31).

The word show, applied to impressive sunsets and cloudscapes, also refers to stalking muskrats, as in the above quotation from page 31, and again, “If I move again, the show is over” (195), and once in regard to a town’s attempt to exterminate starlings—“the whole show had cost citizens two dollars per dead starling” (37). It is interesting to note that an image that first appears in connection with rich beauty—an astonishing sunset so impressive that it is like a carnival magician’s act—is later applied to horrors: an attempted mass extermination of invasive starlings, and later, to a gruesome Eskimo myth. In the myth, an ugly old woman who, jealous for her handsome son-in-law, kills her own daughter and removes the face to lay as a mask over her own in order to trick the son-in-law into loving her. After recounting the story of the old woman and the skin mask, Dillard applies the tale metaphorically to the natural world, wondering whether the beauty she has sometimes witnessed in creation is really just a clever disguise for nature’s ugliness and cruelty: “Could it be that if I climbed the dome of heaven and scrabbled and clutched at the beautiful cloth till I loaded my fists with a wrinkle to pull, that the mask would rip away to reveal a toothless old ugly, eyes glazed with delight?” (266) Note the similarity between this sentence and the previous one, from page 33, about climbing the dome of the magician’s tent; using syntax and word choice, she’s drawn a striking parallel between these two passages.

Through repeating the metaphor of a magician’s show in different contexts, Dillard complicates and enriches its meaning. In so doing, she manipulates the magician image so that it functions similarly to the images of tomcat, blood, and roses on the first page, raising questions about beauty and horror, sacrifice, birth, and death. Nothing is ever boiled down to a simple, single representation; every image is multi-faceted, open to further exploration and interpretation.

Alliteration, assonance, consonance

 A potential danger in Dillard’s penchant for piling together so many disparate images—cats, magicians, Kabbalistic mystics, physicists, giant water bugs, shadows, artists, clouds, and biblical figures, just to name a few—is that some of them might not seem to fit. Dillard averts danger by connecting all the dots, drawing a web of relationships between image sets. But she also takes a syntactical approach, which includes using similar sounds in a given passage so that the music of the language itself provides cohesion within sections. Returning again the cast passage, an aforementioned pattern composed of quite a variety of parts­­, a reader, intoning it aloud, can hear how similar sounds help the differing parts to cohere.

The lyricism that comes from alliteration, assonance, and consonance helps hold the cast paragraphs together. For example, re-read aloud Dillard’s description of a painting by the artist di Chirico: “cast shadows stream across the sunlit courtyard, gouging canyons” (63). The many hard cees that begin words (alliteration), combined with the soft esses (consonance) in “cast,” “shadows,” “stream,” “across”, “sunlit, “canyons,” as well as the many short “a” sounds (assonance), elevate the description of the di Chirico painting to art in itself, a line of poetry. These devices combine for a rich, musical sound that flows audibly in the same way that the several images of cast and casting flow visually. Those hard cees, soft esses, and short a sounds recur throughout the paragraphs so that the sentences musically flow. This is just one example of how poetic devices create lyricism; the book is rife with these techniques.

Homophones

Sometimes Dillard seems to have such serious fun with the sounds of words. Returning again to the cast passage, remember the homophone of “here, O Israel,” which sounds like the beginning of the traditional Jewish prayer, the Shema Yisrael: “hear, O Israel.” This homophone is appropriate in context, for Dillard is discussing how cast shadows create a sense of place and presence—a sense of being “here”—while at the same time, she alludes to the story of Isaac and Ishmael from the Torah and Old Testament. These are serious, mysterious topics, yet a reader can hardly refrain from smiling to see the play on hear/here.

Another homophone appears in the context of an important central image pattern, that of Dillard’s first time seeing “the tree with the lights in it,” an experience so vital that she eventually builds a book around it (and I’ve built the next section of this essay around it).

Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance. (33)

But its import is no hindrance to a little serious word play: Dillard writes “wholly fire” (33), suggesting “holy fire.” This homophonic association is in keeping with other religious phrases that appear on the same page describing this event which is, for Dillard, akin to a religious experience: “pearl of great price,” “literature of illumination,” “litanies,” “ailinon, alleluia.”  For Dillard, seeing this light-shot cedar is as profound a moment as seeing a vision, and she describes it in language that suggests biblical figures who experienced divine fire: she even uses the term transfigured to heighten the religious metaphor, for in the biblical gospel account, Moses (who witnessing a flaming bush that did not burn up) and Elijah (prophet who called down divine fire) were both present with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration.

This re-appropriation of holy language is wholly Dillard, who ably commands a wide array of syntactical tactics: repetition, parallelism, alliteration, assonance, consonance, and homophones.

Image Pattern: ‘The Tree with the Lights in it’

Dillard’s account of witnessing a particular tree lit up by the evening sun becomes emblematic of her role as a pilgrim at Tinker Creek: she learns to see transcendence in nature. Dillard refers to the “tree with the lights in it” many times throughout, honing its essence but also yielding greater ambiguity (nature is awe-inspiring in sometimes horrific ways), until it becomes one of the central images standing in for Dillard’s conclusion, if there is such a thing, of her philosophical meditation on nature and what it means: “The universe was not made in jest but in solemn incomprehensible earnest. By a power that is unfathomably secret, and holy, and fleet. There is nothing to be done about it, but ignore it, or see” (Dillard 270). Over successive repetitions, she develops this image in such a way that it relates to the Heraclitus epigraph that Dillard chose for her book, “It ever was, and is, and shall be, ever-living Fire, in measures being kindled and in measures going out.”

pilgrim epigraph page

Introducing . . . “the tree with the lights in it.”

Dillard borrows the phrase “the tree with the lights in it” from another source, a “wonderful book by Marius von Senden, called Space and Sight,” which chronicles the experiences of newly sighted people—those who’d had cataract operations to cure lifelong blindness. Dillard quotes Van Senden describing one such little girl: “‘She is greatly astonished, and can scarcely be persuaded to answer, stands speechless in front of the tree, which she only names taking hold of it, and then as ‘the tree with the lights in it’” (Dillard 28). The former blind girl doesn’t understand dimensionality, so sees the negative space around the tree’s branches as lights. Dillard wonders what it would be like to forget dimensionality, to see as if for the first time, and makes a great effort to try to imagine it, wandering peach orchards all summer searching for “the tree with the lights in it” until:

Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it.  I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame.  I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly on fire, utterly focused and utterly dreamed.  It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance.  The flood of fire abated, but I’m still spending the power.  Gradually the lights went out in the cedar, the colors died, the cells unflamed and disappeared.  I was still ringing.  I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck. I have since only very rarely seen the tree with the lights in it.  The vision comes and goes, mostly goes, but I live for it, for the moment when the mountains open and a new light roars in spate through the crack, and the mountains slam. (Dillard 33-34, emphases mine)

pilgrim page 33

pilgrim page 34

The passage contains Dillard’s next two repetitions of the phrase “the tree with the lights in it,” a pattern of text that we read in this exact wording a total of fourteen times before the book’s end (see Appendix C). Within the above quotation, there’s Dillard’s first appropriation of the original image pattern, and also the first “splintering” of the image that Glover spoke of (“the grass with the lights in it”), which I have italicized. Next there’s the reversal of the image (“the lights went out in the cedar”), with words fashioned carefully to create a new rhythm (variation).

The passage contains Dillard’s next two repetitions of the phrase “the tree with the lights in it,” a pattern of text that we read in this exact wording a total of fourteen times before the book’s end (see Appendix C). Within the above quotation, there’s Dillard’s first appropriation of the original image pattern, and also the first “splintering” of the image that Glover spoke of (“the grass with the lights in it”), which I have italicized. Next there’s the reversal of the image (“the lights went out in the cedar”), with words fashioned carefully to create a new rhythm (variation).

The tree / with the lights / in it

The lights / went out / in the ce-dar

Before the first paragraph ends, Dillard repeats the initial image pattern, “the tree with the lights in it,” to burn its significance (that though it is fleeting, it reappears from time to time) into the reader’s unconscious mind, a proper set-up for the phrase’s next occurrence forty-eight pages later.

The Real and Present Cedar

The next occurrence of the image pattern “the tree with the lights in it” does two things: 1) it first reminds the reader of the cedar and its initial meaning: to see something as if for the first time, as if it were a divine vision, then 2) adds another meaning—this time, to be fully aware of the present moment while living it—by interweaving with a new image pattern, “patting the puppy.” Dillard sets this up by describing in sensory detail her experience of stopping at a roadside gas station where she finds a beagle puppy. She imbues the experience and image of “patting the puppy” with a particular meaning:  that of being in the present moment, of being in the particular, or opening a door into the present. Then she remembers the previous experience of seeing “the tree with the lights in it,” and connects it to the present moment of interacting with the puppy. The result of Dillard’s interweaving the two image patterns is that the meaning of the new image (the importance of being fully present in a particular moment) is now added to the previous image of the cedar. Dillard doesn’t expect the reader to leap to this conclusion, but painstakingly connects the dots, essaying:

I had thought, because I had seen the tree with the lights in it, that the great door, by definition, opens on eternity.  Now that I have ‘patted the puppy’—now that I have experienced the present purely through my senses—I discover that, although the door to the tree with the lights in it was opened from eternity, as it were, and shone on that tree eternal lights, it nevertheless opened on the real and present cedar.  It opened on time:  Where else? (80)

pilgrim page 80

Later, lest the reader muddle the two associated image patterns, Dillard neatly clarifies the distinctions between them: “Seeing the tree with the lights in it was an experience vastly different in quality as well as in import from patting the puppy. On that cedar tree shone, however briefly, the steady, inward flames of eternity; across the mountain by the gas station raced the familiar flames of the falling sun” (Dillard 80).

Next Dillard adds variety to the pattern with more “splintering,” putting the image of “the tree with the lights in it” into the reader’s mind indirectly. How does she do this? At first, she simply recounts a story of an old king, Xerxes, who once experienced an encounter with a tree so powerful that he halted his troops for days while he contemplated the tree and got a goldsmith to work its image onto a medal. After the story, Dillard drops textual clues. “We all ought to have a goldsmith following us around. But it goes without saying, doesn’t it, Xerxes, that no gold medal worn around your neck will bring back the glad hour, keep those lights kindled so long as you live, forever present?. . . I saw a cedar. Xerxes saw a sycamore.” (Dillard 88, italics mine) Dillard ties the splintered image to the original pattern with careful word choices—“lights” and “I saw a cedar.” Oh yes, the reader remembers, she’s talking about that tree, the cedar, the tree with the lights in it.  This time another layer of meaning is wrapped around the image: we make talismans to try to remember the visions we’ve seen in the past.  Xerxes with his medal, Pascal with his piece of paper scrawled with his recollection of a mystical experience that he called his nuit de fuit, “night of fire” (which Dillard abbreviates to simply one word “FEU” on page 88), Dillard with her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek—these are the attempts people make to hold on to fleeting visions and wonders, to remember them by.

Each repetition of the image layers additional meanings and associations, building in scope, while at the same time intensifying the concrete, visual image. I won’t attempt to spell out each meaning here; I’ll save some of that fun for you, dear reader, lest this essay run far too long. All told, six of the book’s fifteen chapters contain the direct phrase “the tree with the lights in it” (see Appendix B), while every chapter contains suggestions of the image pattern—trees and lights. This textual repetition allows the image to serve as a shorthand reminder of each previous occurrence of the image, its prior context, and the previous meanings it has held, so that all the meanings are stitched together throughout the narrative, giving coherence and unity without losing focus.

What Galls the Cedar

Late in the book, Dillard throws in a twist that seems, at first, to question the legitimacy of the image pattern’s previous meanings. “The tree with the lights in it” has meant the beauty of revelation, profound experience, acute awareness of presence in the moment, transfiguration, energy, vision— but now, as she explores the topic of parasitism, something ugly is revealed: cedar trees usually have galls. “And it suddenly occurs to me to wonder: were the twigs of the cedar I saw really bloated with galls? They probably were; they almost surely were. I have seen those ‘cedar apples’ swell from that cedar’s green before and since: reddish-gray, rank, malignant” (242).

This new observation plainly galls Dillard (please pardon the pun, as the author herself surely would), who, in the ensuing long paragraph, dives into a wrestling match with the meaning of evil, as seen in the image of galls on her cedar tree. Viewed in the context of a chapter that examines the horrors of parasitism, disease, and death inherent to creation (ten percent of living things survive only by parasitizing the rest of living things), the galls are terribly significant, not something that can be easily overlooked— unless, apparently, one is caught up in a transcendent vision as she was the first time. Eventually, though, Dillard reconciles the multiple, contrasting meanings represented in her cedar tree:

And I can I think call the vision of the cedar and the knowledge of these wormy quarryings twin fiords cutting into the granite cliffs of mystery, and say that the new is always present simultaneously with the old, however hidden.  The tree with the lights in it does not go out; that lights still shines on an old world, now feebly, now bright. (242)

pilgrim page 242

The speaker acknowledges that there are galls. Can the patterned metaphor survive them? Yes. The tree with the lights in it is imperfect, flawed, sick with the ugly protuberances of parasites, yet once, on a particular day, at a particular time, a particular light shone through it, illuminating with such power and beauty that a passing pilgrim was moved to build a book—and a vision of life—around it [7]. The image of “the tree with the lights in it” by now communicates visually what Dillard also articulates another way: “I am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them” (242). This statement, with its reference to a “splintered wreck” joins the “tree with the lights in it” to yet another pattern, that of sailing ships and anchors (anchor itself is holds at least two meanings, as sea anchor but also anchor-hold, the place where an anchorite dwells, as Dillard references on page 2). But the sentence is complex for other reasons, as it ties together several philosophical threads that Dillard has been grappling with, forging an uneasy truce between the notion of the world being a good place, worthy of being embraces and the fact that horrible things occur over the face of the earth daily.

Complex and nuanced though this image pattern has become, it would be much too facile to end even here, Dillard seems to think. Without directly mentioning “the tree with the lights in it,” she inscribes yet another series of allusions, or splinterings.  For instance, she refers to a biblical sacrificial practice involving a heifer and—what else?—a cedar tree. “The old Hebrew ordinance for the waters of separation, the priest must find a red heifer unblemished,” burn her, and “into the stinking flame the priest casts the wood of a cedar tree for longevity, hyssop for purgation, and a scarlet thread for a vein of living blood” (267). The phrase cedar tree resonates subtly in the reader’s brain with the previous images of cedar to lend yet another meaning, that of a holy and disturbing sacrifice, to the already rich pattern.

pilgrim page 267

Next Dillard presents what initially seems to be a brand-new image, a maple key (what I’d call a maple seed, or helicopter), but through subtle word choices, provides links between it and the old, familiar tree with the lights in it. When the maple key falls, she eloquently ponders:

The bell under my ribs rang a true note, a flourish as of blended horns, clarion, sweet, and making a long dim sense I will try at length to explain. Flung is too harsh a word for the rush of the world. Blown is more like it, but blown by a generous, unending breath. That breath never ceases to kindle, exuberant, abandoned; frayed splinters spatter in every direction and burgeon into flame. And now when I sway to a fitful wind, alone and listing, I will think, maple key. When I see a photograph of earth from space, the planet so startlingly painterly and hung, I will think, maple key. When I shake your hand or meet your eyes I will think, two maple keys . . .(268)

It’s as if, hidden inside the text, the speaker is whispering, “Reader, what does this remind you of?” A bell— ah, yes, the speaker has spoken before of a bell. Upon her first encounter with the tree with the lights in it, she thought, “I had been my whole life a bell . . .”  (33). Meanwhile the words “frayed splinters spatter” suggest the line from page 242, “splintered wreck whose beauty beats and shines . . .” And again, Dillard has often linked the word flame with the tree with the lights in it, as in that first encounter, which used the words flame, fire, and unflamed (this last is phrased such that, although it means the opposite of flame, it yet underscores the image pattern)  (33).

Finally, stunningly, in-case-there-remains-any-doubt-about-the-connections-here, let’s-put-it-on-the-very-last-page-so-we-see-for-sure-how-important-it-is, Dillard ties the latest maple-key splinter—via the proxies of the ringing bell and the flame from the long passage quoted above—back to the image pattern: “The tree with the lights in it buzzes into flame and the cast-rock mountains ring” (271). The image pattern is now complete, each stitch knitted securely into the fabric made of all the others. Again, careful phrasing choices, such as “buzzes into flame” on page 271, resonate with earlier wording, “each cell buzzing with flame” on page 3.

pilgrim page 271

Conclusion

Jad Abumrad and Richard Krulwich, in a May 2010 RadioLab podcast called “Vanishing Words,” articulate why readers do the type of deeply analytical work I have done: we all want to get closer to the author that penned those words. From the medieval monks, who spent entire lifetimes making concordances of the Bible, to modern-day literature professors like Ian Lancashire of the University of Toronto, who uses computers to analyze Agatha Christie’s (and other) texts, readers have sought to penetrate the minds of the authors they love. We read to connect.

For me, engaging one text hands-on, with watercolor paints, a sharp pencil, and tiny sticky-backed photographs, was fruitful for recognizing and visualizing textual patterns that would otherwise have remained mostly in my subconscious. But more than that, I felt like I had found a small portal into a favorite author’s mind. Through my study, I became deeply attached to and personally invested in the patterns that Dillard crafts. As a result, my own writing mind is being transformed. On a practical level, this means that I’m more aware of the way I myself use syntax and image patterns, so my latest writing is starting to benefit from the observational and pattern-finding skills I’ve acquired. But on an emotional level, I’ve simply fallen in love with the text. (My husband is a wee bit jealous.)

Not every writer will want to spend a few months taking pens, paints, and pictures to a single text. The physical process is incredibly time-consuming and requires some degree of craftsmanship. Recently, thanks to new advances in technology, a plethora of digital tools exist for readers/writers/scholars to use when actively reading. DevonThink, XLibris, and PapierCraft are a few of the software programs I’ve come across which, to varying degrees, allow readers to interact electronically. A new program, LiquidText, currently under development, will allow readers, via iPad, to view multiple pages at once, add annotations, pull selected paragraphs into a sidebar to organize, group and color-code them, and search for words or phrases. Recent neurological research suggests that the parts of the human brain triggered by iPad and iPhone use are the same as the centers stimulated by empathy, by falling in love. So perhaps it is not completely far-fetched to imagine that these new media will also provide a further means by which readers, scholars, and writers may fall in love with the texts they study, as they explore, like a cartographer, unfamiliar territory in order to know and to map geological features, the edges of landforms, the flow of rivers and streams.

View or download Appendix A, “Selected Image Patterns,” here.

View or download Appendix B, “The Tree with the Lights in It,” here.

Acknowledgments

I owe a debt to several teachers of the writing craft for their insightful instructions on how to read text(s). Lucy Corin’s excellent essay “Material” encourages sketching out the “material” of a given piece of writing, thinking of paragraphs and sentences as objects that can be represented as drawn blocks or lines, in order to detect underlying patterns and structure. Douglas Glover’s personal copy of Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser has margins and gutters—nearly all its white space—tightly cluttered with notes in his small, fine handwriting.[8] Glover’s essay “How to Write a Short Story Structure: Notes on Structure and an Exercise” taught me first, what an image pattern is, and second, the importance of attending to them in literature. Virginia Tufte’s instructive Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style lays out for the aspiring writer the elements of syntax in sentences, as well as how it sets the style, tone, and voice of a literary work. Mary Stein’s lecture gave me a framework for thinking about syntax-driven, rather than plot-driven, narrative. Trinie Dalton, in a lecture at Vermont College, described stories as having “circulatory systems,” or some means by which the story moves, or flows. David Jauss, in his essay, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow,” credits successful flow to syntax, the way in which sentences are put together.

For the altered book portion of this thesis, I’m grateful to photographers Steven David Johnson and Dave Huth for permission to reprint their images onto sticker paper for my pattern-finding purposes. Dave Huth owns the rights to the photographic images of the giant water bug, dragonfly nymph, frog, and Polyphemus moth; the image of Earth Oceana is used here for non-commercial purposes through a creative commons license by alegri/4freephotos.com; the image of the tree with the lights in it originated with a cedar tree photographed by Ian Robertson, thanks to a creative commons license, and was digitally altered by Steven David Johnson; all other photographs belong to Steven David Johnson and are used with permission. Hand-drawn illustrations are my own.

I wish to also thank artist and poet Jen Bervin for her exquisite textile art that explores the margins of Emily Dickinson’s poetry manuscripts; her work and her conversations with me helped push my thinking about margins and what might happen in them.

For their encouragement and helpful feedback throughout the conception and fulfillment of this project, I thank my advisors at Vermont College of Fine Arts, Richard McCann and Patrick Madden.

Most of all, my greatest thanks to Annie Dillard for writing a book so rich and intricate that I easily spent over six months thinking deeply about it without being bored once. Studying this book was an experience akin to seeing “the tree with the lights in it,” and I’m still spending the power.

— Anna Maria Johnson

Works Cited

Abumrad, Jad and Robert Krulwich. “Vanishing Words.” Radiolab: WNYC. 5 May 2010. Web.

Corin, Lucy. “Material.” The Writer’s Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House. Portland: Tin House Books, 2009.

Dalton, Trinie. “Good Liar/ Bad Liar: Myth, Symbol, and Choosing the Right Details.” MFA in Writing Summer Residency. Vermont College of Fine Arts. Montpelier, Vermont.  2 July 2010. Lecture.

____________. “Circulatory Systems in Fiction.” MFA in Writing Winter Residency. Vermont College of Fine Arts. Montpelier, Vermont.  Jan. 2011. Lecture.

Dillard. An American Childhood. New York: Harper & Row, Inc., 1987.

____________. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1974.

____________. The Writing Life. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1989.

____________. “Annie Dillard Official Website.” Annie Dillard, 2010. Website.  Accessed 7/21/2011.

Glover, Douglas. Attack of the Copula Spiders. Emeryville: Biblioasis, 2012.

Jauss, David. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Flow.” Alone With All That Could Happen. Cincinnati, Ohio: Writer’s Digest Books, 2008.

Stein, Mary. “Mucking Up the Landscape: Poetic Tendencies in Prose.” Número Cinq. Volume II, No. 40. Oct. 5, 2011.

Tashman, Craig. “Active Reading and its Discontents: The Situations, Problems and Ideas of Readers.” CHI 2011.  May 7–12, 2011. Vancouver, BC, Canada. Web.

Tufte, Virginia. Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics Press LLC, 2006.

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Anna Maria Johnson’s writing brings together her diverse interests in the visual arts, science and nature, family systems, and spirituality. She studied fiction and creative non-fiction at Vermont College of Fine Art (MFA July 2012). Her short stories and essays have been published in Ruminate Magazine, Blue Ridge Country, Numéro Cinq, DreamSeeker Magazine, Flycatcher Journal, Newfound, and The Mennonite, as well as in the anthology, Tongue-screws and Testimonies. Anna Maria writes, gardens, and makes art along the Shenandoah River’s north fork, where she has lived for seven years with photographer Steven David Johnson and their two daughters. She and Steven are currently collaborating on photo-essays about southern Oregon’s ecology. View their project at www.cascade-siskiyou.org

See also:

James Agee’s Unconventional Use of Colons  by Anna Maria Johnson

Whirlpool (All Tremors Cease): Underwater Video Meditation by Steven David Johnsonby Anna Maria Johnson

What it’s like living here in Cootes Store, Virginia by Anna Maria Johnson and Steven David Johnson

The Quirky Bird Art of Paula Swisher by Anna Maria Johnson

Riffing on Whirlpoolsby Anna Maria Johnson & Steven David Johnson

“Meditation on Mary, for Advent,” a sermon by Anna Maria Johnson

The Way To A Man’s Heart is Through His Stomach, or Kitchen Ostinato, a rondeau by Anna Maria Johnson

Off The Page: Novel-in-a-Box by Anna Maria Johnson

 

 

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Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Mary Stein said this in a lecture at Vermont College of Fine Art. This fine lecture was later published on Numéro Cinq, but with different phrasing. I’ve chosen to retain the original phrasing here to suit my purposes, but highly recommend reading the published version as well.
  2. Dillard’s goldfish is apparently named for Thoreau’s friend and fellow poet Ellery Channing. For scholars familiar with this fact, Ellery’s name swimmingly links Dillard’s goldfish and the Thoreau allusions sprinkled throughout the book.
  3. The practice of making room for multiple interpretations of a given subject is inherent to essaying since the time of Montaigne.
  4. Parallelism and repetition are common literary devices in the biblical Old Testament, a book that seems to have been highly influential on Dillard’s writing judging from the numerous allusions and references to, and quotations from, that source (see Appendix A). It is not surprising that some of the Bible’s rhythms and syntactical patterns would also have found their way into Dillard’s style.
  5. In drawing a contrast between “living here” and “home,” and between “Tinker Creek” and “Tinker Mountain,” Dillard seems to be following the western philosophical tradition of dualism, suggesting that beyond the changing, physical realm lies an eternal, unchanging spiritual realm that is her true home. By using a syntactical structure frequently employed in the Bible (parallelism), Dillard underscores this earthly-versus-spiritual tradition.
  6. A wooden fish wheel, similar to a water mill, is a device used for catching fish.
  7. This might be compared to Christians who have re-purposed the symbol of the cross from being an instrument of execution to one of salvation. The cross is often referred to as a tree, and Christ is called the light of the world, so perhaps “the tree with the lights in it” is furthermore an allusion to the Christian story, which Dillard has woven throughout her book.
  8. Attack of the Copula Spiders also contains a rather nice essay about the importance of structure in this novel.
Mar 022013
 

Douglas Glover changing the world one reader at a time…

dg

I reviewed a book a while back that has stayed with me for many months and has affected the way I write and read, and it’s opened my eyes to a weakness in much creative writing, even in published books. Douglas Glover’s Attack of the Copula Spiders (Biblioasis, 2012) criticizes many aspects of fiction, but saves its most withering scorn for the rampant and indiscriminate use of copulas.

via The Case of the Copula Overdose, or, Why I’ll Never Write (or Read) the Same Way Again | The Saturday Morning Post.

Feb 042013
 
Gordon Lish photo by Bill Hayward

Gordon Lish photo by Bill Hayward

One gets tired of all the logrolling articles about Gordon Lish’s editorial dramatics and possibly malign influence on the likes of Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah or Amy Hempel. They are refulgent with schadenfreude and envy. He bought my novel The Life and Times of Captain N for Knopf on the strength of 50 pages and was decent and helpful to me. He would phone me, launching into monologues in that deep, stentorian voice. “Douglas, you have a contract with Knopf, the finest publisher in America, you have nothing to worry about. You are writing to God.” Something like that, meant, I am sure, to encourage me, although the effect was often rather more alarming. These phone calls were terse and epigrammatic (sometimes, though, he would talk about his wife dying or his troubles with his son) — and distracting. I ended up taking notes and putting some of what he said in the novel (the dwarf Witcacy occasionally speaks Lishian).

I don’t say he was perfect; he had some very eccentric ways. But through the editorial process and an interview I did with him later, I realized he had a method, a theory behind what he was saying, that he was not anything like the middle of the road, tell-a-good-story, sentimental realists that are so commercially successful in America. His own best fiction is monologic, obsessively recursive, relentlessly pushing the story and images forward, yet seeming to invent out of a few initial narrative axioms. He loved to cut words, he talked about the whiteness of the page, and about limiting explanation in order to reveal mystery. Mystery is a word that has a special meaning to him. Above all he was thinking about art, not the market.

We publish here a long and comprehensive essay, not about the the Lish-Carver debate circus, but a thorough and honest look at Lish’s theory of composition. Lish hasn’t written this down anywhere. Jason Lucarelli, a young writer from Scranton, Pennsylvania, had to work with class notes published by former Lish students, interviews with Lish and interviews with some of his former students. And then he looked at the writing, Lish’s own work, and the work of people he edited or taught. This is really the first essay of its kind, the first to take Lish seriously as a theorist and try to parse what he says. Lish comes out of an era, the sixties and seventies, the golden age of American experiment, the high modernist years of Hawkes, Barth, Barthelme and Coover (among others). But he is also deeply influenced by French critical theory, especially Deleuze and Guattari and Julia Kristeva. He has had a profound influence on American writers, something like Gertrude Stein in the 1920s. Jason Lucarelli here begins to balance a rather one-sided view of the man who was once known as Captain Fiction.

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“…a topic he took up had to be thought through to the end, everything involved in it had to be gone over point for point before he could be satisfied, to take up a topic means to think it though to the end, no aspect of it must be left unclarified or at least unclarified to the highest degree possible…” – Thomas Bernhard, Correction

“Let us endeavor to sum up. How much repetition does it take?”  – Diane Williams, “Scratching the Head”

W HEN I STARTED LEARNING TO WRITE, callow and rebellious like an adolescent, I wanted to repudiate tradition, deny the classics, and discover my art only in what was new and original. I found my natural bent in the modernist aesthetics of Gordon Lish and, especially, people he taught and edited — writers who seemed to me to be in full cry against every convention. Yet when I put my mind to studying Lish, painstakingly decoding his enigmatic nomenclature, I very slowly began to realize that what seemed like an eccentric focus on recursion and “attack sentences” was actually a brilliant way of re-describing the compositional process, how the repetition of words and sequences of events progress toward a naturally developed short story with a coherent plot structure. I gradually began to understand that what he was saying was not so very different from the advice of the classicists — good writing is, after all, good writing. Lish’s genius is in making it strange that we might see it better.

Fiction editor at Esquire from 1969 to 1976, editor at Alfred J. Knopf from 1977 to 1995, publisher and editor of The Quarterly from 1987 to 1995, Gordon Lish edited, taught and championed writers like Raymond Carver, Barry Hannah, Gary Lutz, Amy Hempel, Diane Williams, and Christine Schutt. Lish also taught private fiction writing classes where he talked at length about a compositional toolbox he called consecution, a writing process of “going forwards by looking backwards.” Decoded, consecution seems to mean moving forward in a story while keeping in mind what has gone before through the use of repetition.

Christine Schutt—whose first collection of stories Nightwork was one of the last books to be published by Lish at Knopf—was also one of Lish’s students. She defines Lish’s concept of consecution in the following way:

Each sentence is extruded from the previous sentence; look behind when you are writing, not ahead. Your obligation is to know your objects and to steadily, inexorably darken and deepen them…Query the preceding sentence for what might most profitably be used in composing the next sentence…The sentence that follows is always in response to the sentence that came before. (Believer, 71)

For Schutt and Lish, consecution is about continually coaxing action, conflict, and interest out of prior sentences by bringing out what is implied or suggested in what has already been written. Lish further outlines the type of plot-profitable narrative material most beneficial to a story when he says:

Examine your objects for the tension inherent in them, the polarity, the natural conflict, the innate conflict, what is already there, and in the unpacking of this tension, you will reveal…the whole of your story, and how each unpacked object relates in [the] story to every other object. (Lish Notes, 47)

This “relationship” between objects is the same relationship discussed by Viktor Shklovsky when he says, “A literary work is pure form. It is…a relationship of materials” (Theory of Prose, 189). Douglas Glover says that, “In many stories, much of the material is used again and again” (Copula Spiders, 36). This relationship between and recycling of materials begins at the sentence level and extends outward over the work as a whole. Progressive construction and narrative logic evolves out of clearly represented relationships between materials while indicating what these relationships mean within the context of the rest of the work.

Consecution involves repetition at the sentence level and at the larger structural level of a narrative. The recursive compositional methods of Lish’s principle of consecution are a means of using form to create content.

 

Starting the Narrative Riff

The start of any story is in its initial sentence, the goal of which is to create interest and draw readers into the world of the story while also announcing, in some way, the essential desire, topic or structure of the story. Lish calls the initial sentence of a story an attack sentence. In a set of class notes transcribed by Tetman Callis, a student who enrolled in one of Gordon Lish’s private fiction workshops, Lish is quoted as saying, “Your attack sentence is a provoking sentence. You follow it with a series of provoking sentences” (Lish Notes, 15). By provoking sentences Lish means sentences that initiate intention, action, opposition, and conflict—all words on loan from Douglas Glover.

Lish continues, “You take the initial sentence, your object, and you extrude and extrude, unpack and unpack, reflect and reflect, all in ways thematically and formally akin to the ways in the attack, the opening, the initial sentence” (Lish Notes, 41). In other words, the attack sentence starts the riff of the narrative, then what follows pushes the narrative forward through a kind of narrative logic that says whatever comes to the page must be a function of what is already present on the page. Consecution is about unpacking or revealing more and more of what is implied—the natural conflict, the innate conflict, as indicated by Lish—in what has already been written.

Lish refers to the process of querying the preceding sentence for what might be profitably used in composing the next sentence as refactoring. Refactoring is the mental process of finding a better or clearer way to word something through continually reinventing upon the initial conditions established in the attack sentence of the story. Think of refactoring as sentence-by-sentence refining, or exposing and excavating of details in the text only hinted at in the prior sentences. The objective of each successive sentence of the narrative is not to fill the narrative space with inconsequential details, but narrative details that further develop character, motive, and conflict.

In the lecture notes transcribed by Tetman Callis, Lish is also quoted as saying, “Curve back in your stories in every possible way: thematically, structurally, acoustically” (Lish Notes, 4). This is not only the key to consecution but to all forms of fine writing. When Lish says “curve back” he means repeat references to hints or clues deposited by earlier sentences through methods of consecution that aim at profitably extending the construction of the plot, the theme, the image or word patterning, or simply words mentioned previously.

Douglas Glover explains more of what should be considered narrative material:

Stories have a liner component based on the forward movement of plot and time. But the stuff, the textured density of material draped over this bare bone of plot, often takes on a churning, recursive quality. Words, thematic topics or motifs, images and memories start up and then recycle through the story, coming back again and again, with variation. (Copula Spiders, 36)

These materials naturally develop relationships as they repeat and recycle throughout a narrative. Glover’s compositional premise is in line with Lish’s consecution. Glover continues to articulate Lish’s recursive compositional method of “curving back,” adding:

A rule of thumb: during composition, when a gap opens up and the story seems to resist moving forward, reach back into the earlier text of the story, find something to bring in again and proceed from there. This recycling or juggling of a basic set of materials contributes to the overall effect of unity and coherence in the story. (Copula Spiders, 36)

This “juggling of a basic set of materials” is accomplished through compositional techniques of consecution that aid in the progressive development of a story by “curving back” or “reaching back.” These same strategies are at the heart of consecution.

 

Methods of Consecution

The main technique of structural consecution concerns the repetition—or recycling—of relevant plot elements or motifs through the progressive, step-by-step repetition of a story’s main desire and resistance pattern. Glover defines story plot as “a structure of desire and resistance (conflict) in which the same desire and the same resistance meet in a series of actions (events)” (Copula Spiders, 85). Glover uses words like “goal,” “intention,” and “motive” to describe desire while he defines resistance as “the force pushing against the achievement of the concrete desire” (5). Parallels between the main plot and subplot of a narrative are another technique of structural consecution.

A technique of structural consecution at the level of the sentence involves the use of a but-construction—a Douglas Glover term—to create tension at the level of the sentence. Glover defines a but-construction as “the use of the word ‘but’ or cognate to create contrast or conflict between what comes before and what comes after” (106). Lish’s name for this narrative turn is a swerve, meaning to contend with. But-constructions help formulate contrast and surprise or juxtaposition and opposition as a way of adding a surprising turn in the momentum of the narrative.

Parallelism at the level of sentences and paragraphs is another technique of structural consecution that uses sentence-to-sentence repetition in the form of parallel construction (using the same pattern of words to juxtapose or compare equal ideas), tautological repetition (rephrasing an idea using an alternate choice of words), and anadiplosis (ending a passage or paragraph with one word and following that passage or paragraph with that same word).

The thematic method of consecution is the technique of repeating references to the desire and resistance pattern of the story with the aim of adding narrative depth by exploring and questioning character action and motive and general story meaning. Another technique of thematic consecution is the use of rhetorical questions through varying forms and points of view that help to develop deeper insights into the narrative while opening up the possibility for new and surprising action. Another technique of thematic consecution is the use of aphorisms, or stylized assertions that offer insight into the actions and motives of characters in a story, and thereby providing observations about overall story meaning. Aphorisms can help enforce a story’s theme. Image patterning is a technique of thematic consecution that repeats the same image, word or set of words in altered contexts.

The acoustical method of consecution involves, as Christine Schutt says, taking narrative direction from sound. She says, “As a writer, I find that sound can give me meaning, narrative direction. Produce a sentence with any sound and respond to it” (Believer 67). Acoustical techniques include alliteration (the repetition of stressed first-syllable-sounds), assonance (the repetition of vowel sounds), and consonance (the repetition of consonants). Dating back to the classical Greeks, these ancient techniques are often used in harmonious and poetical combinations of sounds within the same sentence or paragraph.

At the level of the sentence, consecution focuses on carrying or pushing forward plot-profitable narrative material, like thematic passages, as the story progresses. At the level of the story as a whole, consecution aims at the progressive step-by-step development of the desire and resistance pattern relative to what has gone before.

As Gordon Lish, in his roundabout way, says, “A story must be about what it is about and continue to be about what it is about” (Lish Notes, 38).


Example Texts and Story Analysis

While these recursive principles abound in all examples of fine writing, I thought it would be interesting to look for examples of all three methods of consecution in writers edited by Gordon Lish or who studied under him—writers whose writing strategies were heavily influenced by Lish’s teaching and insights into composing prose under the methods of consecution. My examples of structural, thematic, and acoustical consecution will come from four stories: Gordon Lish’s “The Death of Me,” Barry Hannah’s “Water Liars,” Christine Schutt’s “Daywork,” and Gary Lutz’s “I Crawl Back to People.”

Gordon Lish’s “The Death of Me” is a story written in the past tense and told by a first-person narrator who remembers the event that evidently became known as “The Death of Me.” The story reads like a monologue or voice-driven fiction. Lish uses an unconventional plot, or, what is essentially a non-plot. All external action has occurred up to the start of the narrative, which begins with the narrator stating his desire (“I wanted to be amazing.”). The monologue traces the progression of that desire as it meets resistance inside the narrator’s obsessive mind. The boy narrator wants to be amazing and has become amazing by winning every field event during his camp’s annual day competition. However, after becoming the only boy ever to win every event in the day competition, the narrator begins to feel everyone around him forgetting his achievement. Lish’s narrative employs consecution at the sentence level where he employs techniques such as parallel construction and tautological repetition to slowly work his way through the ongoing desire and resistance pattern inside the mind of the narrator. At the end of the monologue, the narrator waits with his father and mother for the head of the camp, who comes to shake the boy’s hand. Then the head of the camp goes away and the narrative ends.

Barry Hannah’s “Water Liars” is written in the past tense in a first person, reminiscent point-of-view. “Water Liars” is self-referential and uses repetition to create meaning through the story’s thematic connections. The story begins in a monologue style similar to Lish’s “The Death of Me,” though without the obviously repetitive sentence constructions. The narrator begins by telling us what occasions typically send him down to Farte Cove where old men tell lies and invented tales on the dock. The plot begins when the narrator reveals that he is still upset over his wife’s revelation on the morning after his thirty-third birthday, a birthday that seems important to the narrator “because we all know Jesus was crucified at thirty-three.” On that morning, the narrator’s wife revealed that he was not her first sex partner as she had sworn when they married ten years before. The external action of the story begins in a scene in Farte Cove where the narrator and his friend Wyatt listen to “a well-built small old boy” tell a story about high school kids boozing, smoking dope, and swimming naked. Hearing this story reminds the narrator of his wife and the high school kids who had trespassed against her in the days of her youth. Then “a new, younger man, maybe sixty but with the face of a man who had surrendered” tells a story about being frightened during a fishing trip by “unhuman sounds” coming from shore. When the man went in search of the source of the sounds on shore, he discovered his daughter having sex with another man behind a bush. The other old liars are outraged at this story because it is not a lie. But the narrator feels a kinship with the old man who told the story because, as it turns out, they were both crucified by a sexual truth. The final line of the story coupled with the earlier reference to Jesus being crucified acts as the story’s resolution and evidence of Hannah’s use of thematic consecution to aid in plot development.

Christine Schutt’s “Daywork” is a present tense single scene story told by a first-person female narrator. The external action begins when the sisters enter the attic with the desire of cleaning out the attic, including their mother’s old, unused appliances—the medical and prosthetic devices she relied on to aid in her mobility. Conflict arises when the sister agree that they might be too early in taking apart their mother’s house since she is not yet dead. Each device or appliance in the attic triggers memories of the mother’s hospital trips and her long struggle with sickness and death. The items in the attic (“…these parts of mother that seem a part of her still…”) also trigger the subdued conflict between the sisters over varying care tactics (the narrator buys her mother cigarettes while the other sister spoon-feeds her), and the conflict each sister feels over sending their mother away to live under someone else’s care. Throughout the text, Schutt uses rhetorical questions—a technique of thematic consecution—in which the narrator calls attention to separate instances of resistance against the sisters’ desire to simply clean out the attic. Schutt’s use of image and word patterning links associations between the different appliances littering the attic. By the end of the narrative, the narrator realizes that the sisters are finally cleaning out the attic in the way that their mother wished she could have done herself: “Hose down, no care.”

“I Crawl Back to People” by Gary Lutz is written in the past tense and told by a first person narrator who recalls four separate love affairs all ending in failure. The title itself—“I Crawl Back to People”—is a tip-off to the technique of structural consecution Lutz uses in the story; after each relationship ends for the narrator, another one begins and the narrator moves on to someone new. The story is divided into four sub-headed sections containing parallel plots that detail the rise and fall of relationships. The first lover Leatrice leaves the narrator after discovering a hint in a dream or a diary that the narrator would not be having her much longer. The narrator takes her to the airport, and afterwards, begins searching other people for signs of her. In the second section about a male lover named Caulen, the narrator moves in with him and begins sending Caulen off to bars alone for reasons unknown to the narrator. The narrator’s third relationship with a female named Kell begins with mutual feelings of “I’m not going anywhere,” which eventually progresses to “I won’t keep you.” The final fourth lover is named Faisal, a woman the narrator loves but who eventually grows tired of the relationship and asks the narrator for a lift to the airport. In each story, there is an overlapping theme of the narrator continually looking for remnants of former lovers on the next one. The final section ends with the notion that the narrator has likely reconstructed his most recent lover’s features all wrong in memory, which suggests that the narrator is looking for remnants of someone that he or she cannot even accurately recall.

 

Techniques of Structural, Thematic, and Acoustical Consecution

I. Plot Structure as the Main Technique of Structural Consecution

Techniques of structural consecution at the level of the work as a whole include the step-by-step progression of the main plot via repetitions of the desire and resistance pattern, and plot doubling in the use of sub-plots and parallel plots.

On the “progressive structure” of plot construction, Viktor Shklovsky says, “The story usually represents a combination of circular and step-by-step construction, complicated by development” (Theory of Prose, 57). By “circular” Shklovsky means “action” and “counteraction,” another way of understanding Glover’s idea of plot as a repetition of a primary desire and resistance pattern. The step-by-step development of the desire and resistance pattern occurs within a series of scenes or event sequences in which, says Douglas Glover, the “central conflict is embodied once, and again, and again” (Copula Spiders, 24). The progressive construction of scenes or event sequences extends the desire and resistance pattern, which develops intensity over the course of the narrative.

Gordon Lish, Gary Lutz, Barry Hannah and Christine Schutt eschew the conventional scene-by-scene embodiment of the same desire meeting the same resistance. Instead, they choose to subvert the conventional linear progression of the desire and resistance pattern of conflict in favor of variation of form.

Let’s look at the progressive step-by-step development of the plot in Gordon Lish’s “The Death of Me.” The desire and resistance pattern occurs in a linear series of steps inside the mind of the narrator. The narrator’s concrete desire is initiated in the opening lines: “I wanted to be amazing…I had already been amazing up to a certain point. But I was tired of being at that point. I wanted to go past that point.” The narrator’s desire to be “amazing” is refined when the narrator becomes “the best camper in the Peninsula Athletes Day Camp.” This desire develops a step further when the narrator says, “I was better than all of the other boys at that camp and probably all of the boys at any other camp and all of the boys everywhere else,” and then refined even further when he says, “I felt like God was telling me to realize that he had made me the most unusual member of the human race…” Recognition for the narrator’s “amazing” feat comes in the form of a shield with five blue stars of which the narrator is the “only boy ever to get a shield with as many as that many stars on it.” Suddenly, the narrative momentum shifts and the narrator encounters resistance inside his own wobbly, obsessive mind. First, the narrator feels himself “forgetting what it felt like for somebody to do something which would get you a shield with as many as that many stars on it.” Then he feels “everybody else forgetting—even my mother and father and God forgetting.” More resistance occurs when the narrator says, “I felt like God was ashamed of me.” The narrator attempts to thwart this internal resistance when he says, “I had to be quick about showing God that I could be just as amazing again as I used to be and that I could do something, do anything, else.” Instead, the narrator oscillates between “lying down on the field,” “killing all of the people” or “going to sleep and staying asleep” until his parents are dead and there is a new God in heaven who likes him better than even “the old God had.” This indecisiveness represents the plateau of action and counteraction inside the narrator’s mind, and when his parents ask him where they should go, or what they, “as a family,” should do, the narrator says, “But I did not know what they meant—do, do, do?” which is repeated again, “I did not know what to do” and again, “I could tell my parents did not know what to do.” While the narrative continues for a few more paragraphs, this is where the desire and resistance pattern ends. In “The Death of Me,” Lish depicts the desire and resistance pattern, or action and counteraction, in an internal fight within the mind of the narrator using techniques of repetition in the form of parallel construction and tautological repetition.

Another technique of structural consecution is the repetition or reflection of a story’s main plot within the sub-plot. In Barry Hannah’s “Water Liars,” the main plot concerns the narrator and his inability to handle the truth of his wife’s past lovers: “I was driven wild by the bodies that had trespassed her twelve and thirteen years ago” (8). The sub-plot concerns the man on the dock who discovers his daughter having sex with another man. After the man tells his story, the narrator says, “He had a distressed pride. You could see he had never recovered from the thing he’d told about” (10). The conflict between the narrator and his wife mirrors the conflict between the man on the dock and his daughter. Coupled with a reference to the narrator turning the age of Jesus when he was crucified (“Last year I turned thirty-three years old…I had a sense of being Jesus and coming to something decided in my life—because we all know Jesus was crucified at thirty-three”), the last line of the story ties the main plot and the sub-plot together: “We were both crucified by the truth.” This level of repetition works on the structural and the thematic level. On repetition of this sort, Viktor Shklovsky says, “In spite of this symmetry, the repetition carries a different nuance the second time around, thereby revealing the full meaning of the story’s structure” (Theory of Prose, 58).

In another similar parallel or repetition in “Water Liars,” when the narrator in hears a story on the dock at Farte Cove concerning naked teenagers smoking dope and swimming, he is instantly reminded of his wife: “I could see my wife in 1960 in the group of high schoolers she must have had. My jealousy went out into the stars of the night above me” (10). This repetition represents a perfect instance of “recycling” or “reaching back” with the purpose of referencing and advancing the main desire and resistance pattern, which concerns the conflict between the narrator and his wife over the lovers she had before him.

Let’s look at structural consecution using parallel plots. On parallel structure, Viktor Shklovsky says, “In a story built on parallel structure, we are dealing with a comparison of two objects” (Theory of Prose, 120). In the case of Gary Lutz’s “I Crawl Back to People,” Lutz relates four parallel plots concerning the “displacement of one object by another” (Theory of Prose, 120). “I Crawl Back to People” contains four sub-headed sections titled for the narrator’s lovers: Leatrice, Caulen, Kell, and Faisal. Each sub-headed section is a depiction of a failed relationship that leads up to another depiction of a failed relationship. Lutz’s parallel plots are based on the same object being brought back in a different way, the same set of issues embodied in a different character.

Besides the repetition of plot structure, each parallel plot carries repetitive details of characters that are seemingly created through comparison. As Shklovsky might say, these details act as a way to “transition from one plot line to another” (Theory of Prose, 138). For example, the narrator cannot tell whether Leatrice was “on the mend or not yet finished being destroyed”; Caulen was “the type not ruinable ordinarily”; Kell “was none too grubby for having dug herself out from other people”; and, finally, Faisal “had suffered at all the right hands.” In the first sub-headed section, the narrator drives Leatrice to the airport after their relationship ends. In the final sub-headed section, the narrator drives Faisal to the airport after their relationship ends.

After Leatrice leaves, the narrator says, “In a couple of days I was already picking her out by the piece here and there on other people…” This is the narrator’s desire—to find pieces of former lovers on other people. After the narrator’s fourth lover Faisal leaves, the perhaps-purposely-genderless narrator is told that, “I would turn up something nicely remindful of her dry-boned elbows or collusive knees on somebody nearer my own age.” The narrator’s desire in this sub-headed section mirrors the narrator’s desire initiated after Leatrice left. While the narrator’s desire is to find these “remindful” remainders of previous lovers on other love interests, resistance occurs when the narrator finds reminders only to lose them once the relationship ends. In an after-story where the narrator meets a kid of seventeen after Leatrice leaves him, the narrator says, “In fact, it was this kid, a high schooler, that I mostly got her dwindled down to by the end of that first summer.” The “her” here is Leatrice, and there are two more instances where the narrator succeeds in finding a “piece” of her: “I could get him to feed me the seizing feel of her sometimes.” And again: “I milked his arms for further thrill of her farewell.” These are all repetitions of the narrator’s central desire.

The fourth section, concerning a female named Faisal, begins with, “There were holes in what I felt for people, and it was through these holes that I slid finally toward this fourth,” which is, essentially, an aphoristic statement that mimics the parallel plot pattern of each sub-headed section. “There were holes in what I felt for people…” is also peculiarly thematic in the way that it references the narrator’s desire to turn up “remindful” remainders of former lovers on new one. When skeptics of the relationship between the narrator and Faisal ask, “What does she see in you?” the narrator responds with, “I told them I was doubling for somebody.” The narrator’s response carries a hint of irony, since the narrator’s new lovers seem to be filling in for the ones of the past. Finally, the narrator’s assertion of the fourth lover (“I have probably got her features collated all wrong in memory anyway”) suggests that the cycle of thematically parallel relationships will never end.

 

II. Techniques of Structural Consecution at the Level of the Sentence

Techniques of structural consecution also happen at the level of sentences and paragraphs; these include parallel constructions, tautological repetitions, but-constructions, and the use of anadiplosis.

Douglas Glover defines a parallel construction as “a means of using the same pattern of words to show that two or more ideas have the same level of importance. This can happen at the word, phrase, or clause level” (E-mail from Douglas Glover). My first example of a parallel construction is an example at the sentence level: “I wanted to be amazing. I wanted to be so amazing. I had already been amazing up to a certain point. But I was tired of being at that point. I wanted to go past that point. I wanted to be more amazing that I had been up to that point” (160). In this series of parallel constructions, Lish begins with the attack sentence, “I wanted to be amazing,” which initiates the narrative by naming the desire of the narrator. While Lish adds slight variation to the next sentence, the sentence uses a parallel pattern of words to the one that preceded it (“I wanted to be so amazing.”) In the third sentence, Lish adds the phrase “up to a certain point,” further unpacking the circumstances surrounding the narrator’s desire within another parallel construction (“I had already been amazing up to a certain point.”) With each repetition, Lish lures readers deeper into the world of the story by baiting them with the narrator’s intensifying desire “to be amazing.” Each addition to the following parallel construction becomes the obsession or base formulation of the following parallel construction: “I had already been amazing up to a certain point. But I was tired of being at that point.” After a sentence turns the narrative momentum on a but-construction, Lish repeats “point” from the prior sentence (“I had already been amazing up to a certain point”) and introduces motive with “I wanted to go past that point.” The next sentence refines the desire again (“to be more amazing than I had been up to that point”). With each consecutive parallel construction, the narrator’s motive increases in intensity.

The next example of a parallel construction—an example at the clause level—comes directly after the first example:

I wanted to do something which went beyond that point and which went beyond every other point and which people would look at and say that this was something which went beyond all other points and which no other boy would ever be able to go beyond, that I was the only boy who could, that I was the only one. (160)

In this example, Lish elongates the construction on the clause level. In the first half of the parallel construction (“I wanted to do something which went beyond that point and which went beyond every other point and which people would look at and say that this was something which went beyond all other points…”), Lish elongates the sentence by inserting the conjunction “and” between a range of restrictive phrases that quickly raise the narrator’s motive in steps: “…to do something which went beyond…” 1.) “…that point…”; 2.) “…every other point…”; 3.) “…all other points…” The parallel construction continues on with the added contingent: “…and which no other boy would ever be able to go beyond, that I was the only boy who could, that I was the only one.” The narrator’s desire grows throughout the sentence until he arrives at a place attainable by no one other than himself.

The next example of a parallel construction continues along the same desire line: “It was 1944 and I was ten years and I was better than all of the other boys at the camp and probably all of the boys at any other camp and all of the boys everywhere else” (160). Here, Lish also refines the circumstances regarding the narrator’s desire “to be amazing” within consecutive clauses. The narrator was “better than all of the other boys” 1.) at the camp; 2.) at any other camp; 3.) everywhere else. Again, Lish uses the conjunction “and” in order to link the range of restrictive clauses. Lish might call each move within a parallel construction “refactoring the attack sentence,” but basically he is using repetition as a way of refining the narrator’s desire while feeling his way toward the story.

Viktor Shkolvsky refers to tautological repetition as an “impeded, progressive structure” with a “peculiar poetic cadence” and which “reveals a need for deceleration of the imagistic mass and for its arrangement in the form of distinct steps” (24). He also says that within tautological repetition “a parallel is often established, not between objects or actions of two objects, but between an analogous relationship between two sets of objects, each set taken as a pair” (25).

First, let’s look at Lish’s use of tautological repetition in “The Death of Me”: “They said that I was the only boy ever to get a shield with as many as that many stars on it. They said that it was unheard-of for any boy ever to get as many as that many stars on it” (161). This example offers a further refinement of the narrator’s desire (“I wanted to be amazing”) by establishing relationship between the narrator becoming the 1.) “only boy ever” 2.) “to get a shield with as many as that many stars on it.” At this point, the narrator has reached the pinnacle of his being “amazing,” and Lish employs tautological repetition to linger on this moment for added emphasis.

The next example of tautological repetition also comes from Lish:

My parents kept asking me where did I want to go now and what did I want to do. My parents kept trying to get me to tell them where I thought we should all of us go now and what was the next thing for us as a family to do. My parents kept saying they wanted for me to be the one to make up my mind if we should all of us go someplace special now and what was the best thing for the family, as a family, to do. (162)

In this example, the overall progressive structure of the narrative is also decelerated. The impeded progress of the narrative concerns where to go and what to do now that the narrator has reached the pinnacle of his achievement. The narrator is caught between action and inaction, and Lish uses tautological repetition as a way to emphasize the narrator’s internal conflict. Interesting enough, these tautological repetitions are also couched in a series of parallel constructions.

Here is an example of tautological repetition with slight variation from Schutt’s “Daywork”: “Here they are tiled against the attic walls: the legs, the arms, the clamshell she wore instead of a spine. Here is some of mother leaned up in the attic” (57). Schutt’s use of tautological repetition has a way of refocusing on and refining a specific detail in the narrative for emphasis, which is, in this case, the mother’s old medical devices that haunt the sisters as they clean the attic.

A but-construction is a grammatical swerve that torques a story’s progression with subversion, conflict and surprise. According to Douglas Glover, the use of a but-construction “demands content that might not initially be there in order for completeness” (Copula Spiders, 72). The use of a but-construction is a way of creating content—and conflict—at the level of the sentence. Again, a but-construction creates contrast or conflict between what comes before the “but” or cognate and what comes after.

Let’s look at a but-construction from the passage I previously referred to from “The Death of Me”: “I had already been amazing up to a certain point. But I was tired of being at that point” (160). Here, the narrator’s emotional state changes from a contentment at “being amazing up to a certain point” to being “tired of being at that point.” The but-construction undercuts the previous sentence and adds conflict to the narrative by suggesting that the narrator’s success in being amazing is not enough, that he is not satisfied, and that he is motivated to do something else. Lish applies the same sort of contrast in the next example of a but-construction: “They said that it was unheard-of for any boy ever to get as many as that many stars on it. But I could already feel that I was forgetting what it felt like for somebody to do something which would get you a shield with as many as that many stars on it” (161). In this example, Lish combines the but-construction with repetition (“…as many as that many stars on it…”) for easy-to-follow refinement and subversion as the narrator feels himself forgetting his “amazing” achievement. The but-construction initiates the issue of “forgetting” that intensifies to the point where the narrator is afraid that everyone is forgetting about his achievement.

Now, let’s look at an example of a but-construction from Barry Hannah’s “Water Liars”: “I could not bear the roving carelessness of teenagers, their judgeless tangling of wanting and bodies. But I was the worst back then” (10). This but-construction juxtaposes the behavior of teenagers—which, because of the recursive pattern of relation in Hannah’s text, also includes the “high schoolers [his wife] must have had”—with the narrator as himself as a teenager, whose behavior was “the worst.” The association provides temporary comfort to the narrator, who is bothered by the number of his wife’s past lovers. This but-construction is a crucial turn in the narrator’s desire and resistant pattern of conflict.

Let’s look at a cognate of the but-construction in which the narrative momentum of the text turns on “yet”: “It makes no sense that I should be angry about happenings before she and I ever saw each other. Yet I feel an impotent homicidal urge in the matter of her lovers” (8). The narrator introduces reason into his first statement (“It makes no sense…”) and then undercuts his previous assertion in the sentence that follows (“Yet I feel…”). This swerve helps increase the narrator’s conflict while developing the main desire and resistance pattern of the narrative.

Anadiplosis, another technique of consecution at the level of the sentence, is an ancient Greek device in which the last word of a preceding sentence is used in the beginning of the succeeding sentence. Schutt uses this technique a few times throughout “Daywork.” For example, here: “…the patched on nipples from when her breasts had seams and looked shut as drawstring purses. / Purses, there are none here in the attic…” (59) Here again: “…the nurses have been turning Mother, keeping Mother clean in a clean bed. / The nurses, I half expect to see them in the attic…” (63). Then another example with variation: “‘…Remember, will you, visit.’ / One of the visitors…” (58) Anadiplosis helps with continuity between narrative sequences, while also informing the narrative direction of the next narrative sequence.

 

III. Techniques of Thematic Consecution

Thematic consecution adds a deeper level of coherence and unity to a story with passages that offer insight into story meaning. On thematic material, Douglas Glover says, “A thematic passage is any text in which the narrator or some other character questions or offers an interpretation of the action of the story. Characters in the story explore the meaning of the story by asking questions of their own impulses and actions” (Copula Spiders, 37). These questions are sometimes literally asked through the use of rhetorical questions. Other techniques of thematic consecution that reinforce theme or overall story meaning include the use of image or word patterning and aphorisms. Glover says, “Authors use repeated images, words and concepts to reinforce the thematic encoding of a text” (125).

Rhetorical questions are a technique of thematic consecution that increase thematic narrative depth while opening up the opportunity for surprising new motivation that might aid in the development of the plot or the desire and resistance pattern of conflict. As Douglas Glover notes, rhetorical questions often take the shape of inquires like, “What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Why is that other character doing what he is doing? What does this look like? What does it remind me of?” (Copula Spiders, 7). Rhetorical questions speculate on character motive and overall story meaning. Glover continues, saying, “Thought is action. Characters don’t necessarily have to be right in their assessments, they just have to be true to themselves in the context of what’s gone before.”

Let’s take a look at two examples of rhetorical questions from Schutt’s “Daywork” that explore the theme of the mother’s dying. The first example: “What does Mother want? we wonder. For what cruel attentions does she still lie down?” (59) In this example, the long amount of suffering the mother has endured throughout her life is brought up as the sisters speculate on how long the mother means to live. Another rhetorical question: “Oh, why should it be strange how, loving death the way she has, our mother wants to live?” (64). While the sisters have withstood the mother’s long amount of suffering, this rhetorical question, from the point-of-view of the narrator, seems to suggest that the mother lives by “loving death.” This particular rhetorical question opens up the possibility for new action while speculating on the larger truth of the mother’s existence. Together, these rhetorical questions present the conflict the sisters feel over their mother’s way of living through sickness.

Aphorisms are another technique of thematic consecution that offer insight into the actions and motives of characters in a story, or observations about meaning in the story that result in references to the story’s theme. On aphorisms, Douglas Glover says, “Aphorisms are short, pithy, somewhat artificial statements…stylized forms of thought, or conjecture, mostly structured on the contrast of opposites…” and are good for “rendering thought vigorously, concisely and authoritatively” (37 and 76). An example of an aphorism comes from Gary Lutz’s “I Crawl Back to People”: “What I mean is that people shaded into each other pretty easily, and all I had to do was find her somewhere there in the gradients” (119). A bit ambiguous at first, the first half of this aphoristic phrase references the thematic nature of one relationship displacing the prior one, while the second half reveals character motive through the narrator’s desire to find traces of former lovers on new ones.

Regarding image or word patterning, another technique of thematic consecution, Douglas Glover says

Image (or word) patterns begin with mere repetition and accumulate meaning by association and juxtaposition, splinter or ramify, sending out subsidiary brand patterns, and finally, discover occasions for recombination or intersection of the various branches in…tie-in lines. (Copula Spiders, 95)

Schutt and Hannah use a variation of word patterning by using the same word or set of words within altered contexts, often splitting the main image into associated images throughout the text. Sometimes, these word patterns have a way of reinforcing the narrative’s thematic coding, and other times, these word patterns help to initiate motive and deepen overall meaning.

In “Water Liars,” Barry Hannah uses a variation of word patterning as a technique of thematic consecution, though Hannah’s use of word patterning also progresses the desire and resistance pattern of conflict concerning the narrator and his wife by creating parallels that aid the structure and form of the narrative.

Hannah initiates the main word pattern in the title: “Water Liars.” The main pattern continues in the first sentence: “When I am run down and flocked around by the world, I go down to Farte Cove off the Yazoo River and take my beer to the end of the pier where the old liars are still snapping and wheezing at one another” (7). The main pattern of “liars” continues, but with “lie”: “The lineup is always different, because they’re always dying out or succumbing to constipation, etc., whereupon they go back to the cabins and wait for a good day when they can come out and lie again…” Another reference: “On the other hand, Farte Jr., is a great liar himself.”

The main pattern splits into a subsidiary image of “ghost people” and “ghosts”: “He tells about seeing ghost people around the lake and tells big loose ones about the size of the fish those ghosts took out of Farte Cove in years past.” Then another branch pattern begins with “crucified” (portions of text in italics increase the significance of the image or word with history): “Last year I turned thirty-three years old…I had a sense of being Jesus and coming to something decided in my life—because we all know Jesus was crucified at thirty-three” (8). Here, the narrator establishes a significant parallel between his age and the age of Jesus when he was crucified. In the same scene, Hannah develops a branch pattern with “truth,” arranging a pattern of opposites, or juxtapositions: “On the morning after my birthday party, during which I and my wife almost drowned in vodka cocktails, we both woke up to the making of a truth session about the lovers we’d had before we met each other” (8). The branch pattern also reveals the conflict of the narrator’s wife having lied to him over how many lover she had before him: “For ten years she’d sworn I as the first,” or, in other words, she lied.

Hannah’s word pattern extends to include “liars,” “ghosts,” “crucified,” and “truth,” of which subsidiary branch patterns include “lies” and “sworn.” Hannah brings the main pattern back around to “liars”: “Then I’ll get myself among the higher paid liars, that’s all” (9). This is ironic—the narrator has been lied to, though he claims to be a liar himself.

Toward the end of the story, while on the dock with his friend Wyatt, the narrator overhears two old men on the dock tell stories about “ghosts,” continuing the branch pattern. The first story involves a man named Doctor Mooney having “intercourse” with a “ghost” while the second story involves the “ghost” of “Yazoo hisself.” What follows is a series of tie-in lines that serve an important structural purpose. First, comes the story from “a new, younger man…with the face of a man who had surrendered.” The man says, “We heard all these sounds, like they was ghosts” (10). This word pattern with “ghosts” seems to extend along the similar path as the ones before. Instead, the source of the sounds is revealed not to be ghosts, but the man’s daughter having intercourse with another man: “My own daughter, and them sounds over the water scarin us like ghosts.” Hannah ties the word pattern of “ghosts” and “truth” together when an “old geezer” on the dock asks, “Is that the truth?” Then again from the narrator: “He’d told the truth.” And finally, in the most important plot-profitable tie-in line: “We were both crucified by the truth” (11). Here, the narrator feels allied with the man at the dock who tells the true story of discovering his daughter having intercourse with another man. This tie-in line references the structural consecution technique of parallel plots between the main plot, which concerns the narrator and his wife over the narrator’s inability to cope with the truth of his wife’s earlier sexual relationships, and the sub-plot, which concerns the man on the dock who “never recovered from” discovering his daughter with another man. Hannah’s use of word patterning works two-fold by advancing the thematic coding of the text with “lies” and “truth,” and also progressing the parallel conflict between the narrator and his wife, and between the man on the dock and his daughter.

The next examples of image or word patterning come from Christine Schutt’s “Daywork” and concern the main image pattern of “the attic”: “We enter the attic at the same time, which makes it all the more some awful heaven here, cottony hot and burnished and oddly bare except for her appliances, the parts our mother used to raise herself from bed” (57). Here, the main image “the attic” begins and splinters into a subsidiary image pattern of “appliances” and “parts,” which is given meaning through revealing history. The next reference to “the attic”: “We make such terrible confessions, my sister and I, which is why we are uneasy in the attic in the presence of these parts of Mother that seem a part of her still, quite alive and listening in on what we talk about” (59). The image of “the attic” and “parts” are tied together for the significant reason that being in “the attic” means being in the presence of “these parts of Mother” that aided in her mobility around the house. References to “the attic” are related to setting while references to “parts” and “appliances” are related to the mother’s history with being ill. There are an additional four references to “the attic” throughout the text, but it would be best to trace the subsidiary image patterns. First, the subsidiary pattern with “appliances”: “So what are we going to do with these appliances, these sheets?” (63) Then, the subsidiary pattern with “the parts”: “Dark bags full of Mother’s house—so much we don’t know what to do with we throw out: old clothes cut to fit over the parts that Mother buckled on” (58). In this subsidiary pattern concerning “parts,” another pattern branches off from “Mother’s house.” An additional two references to “Mother’s house” occur in the text. The next example concerns a subsidiary pattern with “the attic walls”: “Here they are against the attic walls: the legs, the arms, the clamshell she wore instead of a spine” (57). Here, the main pattern of “the attic” splits into “the attic walls” where the pattern of “appliances” is extended by the naming of these “appliances.” Another pattern branches off “the attic walls” with a reference to “the legs”: “I look at Mother’s legs, how they stand up by themselves in the attic” (62). “Mother’s legs” is an extension of the subsidiary image pattern concerning “parts” and “appliances.” An additional reference to “the attic walls”: “She is looking at the hinged machinery hooked on the attic walls: a cane with teeth, a bedside pull, a toilet seat with arms” (58). Again, in this reference to another subsidiary image pattern of “the attic walls,” the “machinery” image pattern is detailed in similar fashion to the “appliances” pattern. Image patterning allows the details of the text to pursue themselves into other details later in the story that add depth and significant history when one image is tied to another. Schutt’s compositional patterning of images adds to the cohesion of the single scene story of sisters cleaning out their mother’s attic.

 

IV. Techniques of Acoustical Consecution

The final method of consecution, acoustical consecution, involves ancient recursive techniques in which sounds repeat in the form of alliteration (repetition of first syllable sounds), assonance (repetition of vowel sounds), and consonance (repetition of consonants). Viktor Shklovsky, advocating for poetical techniques in prose, cites Nietzsche’s aphorism on “good prose” in which Nietzsche says that only in the presence of poetry can one write good prose (Theory of Prose, 21). In a lecture delivered to writing students at the University of Columbia about the strengths of focusing on the effects of sounds in composing prose, Gary Lutz says:

The words in the sentence must bear some physical and sonic resemblance to each other—the way people and their dogs are said to come to resemble each other, the way children take after their parents, the way pairs and groups of friends evolve their own manner of dress and gesture and speech. (Believer, January 2009)

In acoustical consecution, sounds repeat when one word discharges something within itself into successive words in the same sentence. Whether in the composition of poetry or prose, writers often use multiple acoustical techniques within the same sentence or sequence of sentences. Before I highlight the effects of alliteration, assonance, and consonance at work in the same sentence, I would like to highlight examples of each effect separately, starting with alliteration.

On alliteration, Lutz says, “Avail yourself of alliteration—as long as it remains ungimmicky, unobtrusive, even subliminal. Such repetition can be soothing and stabilizing, especially in a sentence whose content and emotional gusts are anything but” (Believer, January 2009). An example Lutz’s use of alliteration: “Go-betweens impart important impromptu breadth to any population, keep cities backed up and abrim” (123). The alliteration is evident with the inclusion of “impart,” “important,” and “impromptu,” though Lutz also uses a slight variation of alliteration with “breadth,” “backed,” and “abrim.” Another example of alliteration from Lutz: “You get better and better at dialing down the light to the point where passerby decide the place is probably closed” (121). Here, the alliteration within the sentence also overlaps between one set of words (“dialing,” “down,” “decide”) and another set of words (“point,” “passerby,” “place,” “probably”). As Lutz says, the content and emotions of these sentences do not pack much of a punch, and so he relies on the repetition of sounds to briefly carry the momentum of the narrative.

On assonance, Gordon Lish says, “The force of English lies in its vowels. You want to resonate the stressed assonances in your work, in a phrase, a clause, a paragraph, a sentence…” (Lish Notes, 45). Similarly, Lutz says, “…reserve assonance for the words in a sentence deserving the greatest stress…” (Believer, January 2009). An example of assonance in a fragment from Lutz: “Jollied a lone, focal mole along the slope of the nose” (124). The assonance is evident in the force of the “o” in “jollied,” “focal,” and “along” and the “oe” sound in “lone,” “mole,” “slope” and “nose. A similar effect of assonance is created in this sentence from Schutt’s “Daywork”: “But we look and look at how the blistered skins of covered bins and trash bags have gone yellow” (57). The assonance is seen in the shared “i” between “blistered,” “skins,” and “bins.”

Now an example of consonance from Lutz: “I milked his arms for further thrill of her farewell” (120). Lutz’s use of consonance is evident in the shared “l” between “milked,” “thrill” and “farewell.” Another example of consonance from Lutz: “We were together one spring, briefly, tickledly, and then it came to her—in a dream, in a diary entry; I forget, that I would not be having her very much longer” (119). Lutz uses the consonantal sound of the shared “y” between “briefly,” tickledly,” “diary,” “entry,” and “very” to drive the rhythm of the sentence.

Finally, let’s look at a sentence bringing together the combined effects of alliteration, assonance, and consonance in another sentence by Lutz: “I could make out the timid din of who she had already been, a hum of harms hardly done” (123). The alliteration effects in the sentence: “hum,” “harms,” and “hardly,” “din” and “done.” The assonance effects in the same sentence: “timid,” “din,” and “been,” “harms” and “hardly.” Finally, the effects of consonance concerning the consonant “d” in the same sentence: “timid,” “had,” “already,” “hardly.” In this example from Lutz, the combined effects of alliteration, assonance, and consonance create a wholly recursive effect of sound throughout the entirety of the sentence. Christine Schutt says that she takes narrative direction from sounds. In a sentence that is so busy with overlapping effects, it’s easy to see how these sounds might have driven the narrative direction of the sentence during composition.

While acoustical consecution holds effects for strong prose at the most fundamental level of composition, Lutz advises against searching solely for sound when composing sentences without keeping in mind how this smaller technique works most effectively in the larger structure of narrative form.  In Lutz’s lecture to writing students at the University of Columbia, he says, “Such a fixation on the individual sentence might threaten the enclosive forces of the larger structure in which the sentences reside…” Something similar might also be said about the techniques within structural and thematic consecution at the level of sentences. In fact, what Lutz warns against is what Viktor Shklovsky also warns against when he says, “Images alone or parallel structures alone or even mere descriptions of the events do not produce the feeling of a work of fiction in and of themselves” (Theory of Prose, 52). Douglas Glover takes this point a step further when he says, “The structures which lend plausibility, focus and meaningful density to a piece of writing are primarily structures of repetition and it is by repetition that we know that reality through our ability to apply consistent and predictable descriptions to it” (127). While the techniques of structural, thematic, and acoustical consecution provide readers with a self-referential map for finding their way through a story, they are techniques that are repetitions—or reflections—of the development of a story’s plot. The logical sequence of events as a depiction of the step-by-step progression of the desire and resistance pattern of conflict is the main feature of narrative, and the recursive details relative to the ongoing action (desire) and counteraction (resistance) are what bind the narrative with unity and cohesion.

 

Conclusion

Reaching back into the text to pull forward something deposited earlier that can be used to further flesh out the world of the story is the heart of narrative logic. On narrative plausibility, Gordon Lish says:

In the business of world-making, logic is everything…Nothing can be there that you don’t put there, so be careful about what you put there, and be careful about what you assume is there but is, in fact, in the eye of your mind and not in the words on your page. (Lish Notes, 31)

Even with the structural, thematic, and acoustical methods of consecution in my pocket, my problem still lies in improving the situation between what I think is on the page and what actually ends up on the page. More advice from Lish that points to another limp of mine while composing drafts of stories: “You must learn to look and see if what you are writing is appropriate to the form of your story, or if it is mere decoration, empty and pointless fluff” (20). The point here, of course, is learning to write while staying true to the content or structure initiated in the attack sentence of the story, and never leaving the surface of the true narrative as it develops in the moment. As far as I can see, this will always be my struggle. The very least of what I have learned from Gordon Lish through the mouth of Douglas Glover is that the work is never over.

—Jason Lucarelli

Jason Lucarelli

Jason Lucarelli

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Works Cited

Callis, Tetman. “The Gordon Lish Notes.”1991.

Glover, Douglas. Attack of the Copula Spiders. Biblioasis. 2012.

Hannah, Barry. Long, Last, Happy. New York: Grove Press. 2010.

Lish, Gordon. Collected Fictions. New York: OR Books. 2010.

Lutz, Gary. I Looked Alive. Black Square Editions and The Brooklyn Rail. 2010.

Shklovsky, Viktor. Theory of Prose. Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press. 1990.

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Jason Lucarelli lives in Scranton, PA. He is in the final stages of completing his MFA in Creative Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

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Dec 092012
 

Here’s the podcast of an interview I did at CJSW with a woman named Sky Hornig in Calgary during WordFest in mid-October on writing, reading, stupid people, and Attack of the Copula Spiders.

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The GG Podcast – Douglas Glover

via Douglas Glover – CJSW – Calgary’s Independent Radio 90.9 FM.

Nov 242012
 

“[By] by the time I reached the penultimate chapter, a brilliant examination of, among other things, the catastrophic meeting of the 15th-century book cultures of Europe and the oral cultures of the new world, I had decided that every literate person in the country should be reading Glover’s essays.” — Charles Wilkins

via 43 non-fiction books from this year that are worth a read (or two) – The Globe and Mail.

Oct 162012
 

The Brooklyn Rail has a great essay by Douglas Glover about Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser (it is serialized from Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing, published by Biblioasis.

The essay makes a fine rundown of the various rhetorical devices that makes Bernhard Bernhard. So if you ever wonder how he manages to attain those typically Bernhardian effects, look here. For instance:

via How Thomas Bernhard Works | Conversational Reading.

Oct 052012
 

Many of you know me as “the Shredder,” but there is another side of me as a teacher captured here by Calgary writer Jacquie Moore who was assigned to interview me in the run-up to my Wordfest class next week. 🙂

dg

Along with myriad writing tips, one of the best reasons to take Glover’s class is for this compassionate brand of pep talk for fearful writers. “I worry about a lot of these words like ‘procrastination’ and ‘writer’s block’ and all that crap. I’m very sympathetic to people who want to write something and are daunted by it,” he says. I tell him I’ve written approximately one paragraph of my novel in four years. He is unfazed. “That’s not a sign of weakness. There are all sorts of very good reasons for taking one’s time to get at it,” he says. “We should all give ourselves a break.”

This is the kind of gentle writing advice that has the potential to unclog my perpetual writer’s block—or rather, to get me thinking about it differently. In all seriousness, there are some pretty good reasons for why I haven’t gotten at it yet. For one thing, it’s painful to write about my own family—fictionalized or not. For another, I worry that my dad, who has generously answered all my probing questions about his life, might not be comfortable with me going public with the family history, albeit in lightly disguised form—an impulse Glover assures me is moral and admirable although here I go again envisioning myself with a bestseller rather than writing for writing’s sake. He encourages me to let go of my paralyzingly big idea and submit a vignette-sized piece to his excellent online magazine Numéro Cinq, comfortingly described as “a warm place on a cruel web.”

via The Calgary Herald, The Book in the Basement.

Sep 212012
 

My emphasis. A great book list. Also a blog worth following. dg

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An inventory of every book on my desk, in three stacks and one upright row, on the night of September 14, 2012.

Three Critics of the Enlightenment. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Where Tigers are at Home. Middle C. ‘Pataphysics. The Bird that Swallowed its Cage. Forests. Herakleitos and Diogenes. From Berlin to Jerusalem. Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing. Both Flesh and Not. River of Shadows. The Beauty and the Sorrow. Proust. Thinking of Others. Attack of the Copula Spiders. The Romantic Revolution. Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall. Notes on the Poetry of Pierre Reverdy. Satantango.

Evasions. Jozef Czapski: A Life in Translation. In the Thick of Things. Days Bygone. When the Pie Was Opened.

Space and Place. Eccentric Spaces. The Midnight. My Emily Dickinson. American Poetry Since 1950. The Poems of Octavio Paz. The Book to Come. Potentialities. Inferno (trans. Mary Jo Bang). The Road to Xanadu. Wonderful Investigations. Spell. Nota. Complete Travels. Swallows. December. Kornel Esti. The Castle. Soul of Wood. Madness, Rack, and Honey. The Devil in the Flesh. Futility. Biogea. Two Lessons on Animal and Man. Fanfarlo. Shklovsky: Witness to an Era.

Traveler of the Century. The Apology and Last Days. Maidenhair. The Future is Not Ours. Almost Never. The Cardboard House. Dublinesque. Agua Viva. Near to the Wild Heart. A Breath of Life. The Passion According to G.H. The Lute and the Scars. Psalm 44. The Attic. Ariadne in the Grotesque Labyrinth. Replacement. The Siege in the Room. Awakening to the Great Sleep War. Silences, or a Woman’s Life. Self-Control. Blindly. Atlas. The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira. The Bridegroom Was a Dog. Places of My Infancy. The Man Who Walked Through Walls.

via Invisible Stories: An inventory of every book on my desk, in three stacks and one upright row, on the night of September 14, 2012..

Jul 172012
 

Shelagh Shapiro interviews dg on his new book Attack of the Copula Spiders at Write the Book, Shelagh’s long-running radio show, which, by the way, is fast becoming an institution in its own right, a vast trove of writerly advice and experience. Listen to the interview on Shelagh’s site or download the podcast — it’s also available at iTunes.

Douglas Glover – Interview

Award-winning Canadian author Douglas Glover, on his latest book: a collection of essays on writing, Attack of the Copula Spiders, published by Biblioasis.

via Write the Book

May 282012
 

Book News, Reviews, Orders

“…a master of narrative structure” (Wall Street Journal)

“…every literate person in the country should be reading Glover’s essays.” (Globe and Mail)

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Order Attack of the Copula Spiders

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April 25, 2013

Brendan Riley review in Review of Contemporary Fiction:

This is not literary craft reduced to statistical formulae and write-by-the-numbers word-bytes. Glover’s admirable ability and patient willingness to cast a careful—not cold—eye on what makes sentences hum and flow is fueled by a vital, infectious fascination with words, enabling him to reveal the inspired, alchemical, verbal concatenation at work in the most alluring and memorable fiction writing.

Read the whole review here.

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March 30, 2013

3 Canadian Writers with Buzz @ The Reader

 

 

attack

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March 9, 2013

A Canadian author’s book on writing went viral on social media recently, leading to thousands of would-be fiction writers searching their manuscripts for “Copula Spiders.”

Douglas Glover’s book Attack of the Copula Spiders (Biblioasis) coins the term to refer to the multi-appendaged mess created by circling and linking all of the variations of the verb “to be” in a paragraph. (Copula is a term for the link between subject and predicate of a verb.) Excessive use of sentence constructions like “he was happy” or “the building was unassuming” lead to “flaccid and uninteresting prose,” he writes.

Joe Ponepinto, book review editor of the Los Angeles Review, brought Glover’s ideas to the literary world in a much-circulated blog post subtitled “Why I’ll never write (or read) the same way again.”

via Cameron Dueck’s arts column – Winnipeg Free Press.

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March 2, 2013

from Joe Ponepinto @ The Saturday Morning Post

I reviewed a book a while back that has stayed with me for many months and has affected the way I write and read, and it’s opened my eyes to a weakness in much creative writing, even in published books. Douglas Glover’s Attack of the Copula Spiders (Biblioasis, 2012) criticizes many aspects of fiction, but saves its most withering scorn for the rampant and indiscriminate use of copulas.

The Secret of Maimonides-Submission for 2-26

I hear you asking, “What’s a copula? I admit I had to look it up. Webster’s definition says: “the connecting link between subject and predicate of a proposition.” In most cases, this refers to a form of the word “be.” But what does that mean to us everyday writers? It means banal, didactic, often passive sentences, almost completely lacking in action or depth.

As Glover says: “A copula spider occurs when a student uses the verb ‘to be’ so many times on a page that I can circle all the instances, connect them with lines, and draw a spider diagram. Now there is nothing grammatically wrong with the verb ‘to be,’ but if you use it over and over again your prose is likely to be flaccid and uninteresting.”

via The Case of the Copula Overdose, or, Why I’ll Never Write (or Read) the Same Way Again by Joe Ponepinto @ The Saturday Morning Post

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December 9

From Chapman/Chapman’s Favorite Longreads of 2012.

“‘A Scrupulous Fidelity: on Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser’ by Douglas Glover, The Brooklyn Rail

Close reading doesn’t get much better than this. Glover expertly unpacks the logorrheic hilarity of Bernhard’s text without ruining any of the fun.”

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November 24

Attack of the Copula Spiders named one of the top non-fiction books of 2012 by The Globe and Mail.

“[By] by the time I reached the penultimate chapter, a brilliant examination of, among other things, the catastrophic meeting of the 15th-century book cultures of Europe and the oral cultures of the new world, I had decided that every literate person in the country should be reading Glover’s essays.” — Charles Wilkins

via Non-fiction books from this year that are worth a read (or two) – The Globe and Mail.

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November 9

Governor-General Podcast Interview with Sky Hornig in Calgary during Wordfest in mid-October.

The Governor-General Podcast Interview – Douglas Glover

via Douglas Glover – CJSW – Calgary’s Independent Radio 90.9 FM.

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September 29

A few months ago I read a book by Douglas Glover titled Attack of the Copula Spiders. At the time, I didn’t even know what a copula was. Once I understood, I spent days fixing copula-laden writing, and sweated over every sentence I wrote to make sure I was using more active verbs. In time, though, those fixations fade into the subconscious, which is where they belong. The key to good writing, I believe, is not to ignore rules and not to obsess over them. It’s to incorporate the ones you believe are true into your writing psyche so that you are aware of them without thinking about them. — Joe Ponepinto, Book Review Editor at LA Review. Writer, editor, teacher. Occasional curmudgeon. Dad to henry, the coffee-drinkin’ dog

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September 29

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September 5

If I had to guess what events will sell out first, my money would be on the Douglas Glover Master Class. He’s a spectacular Canadian writer who has kindly agreed to do a three hour class on the mechanics of good creative writing for WordFest patrons. The best part about it? It’s only 30 bucks per person. What are you waiting for? Follow this link and buy tickets now!

via Post-Launch Blog: A Response | WordFest Blog.

 

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July 17

Shelagh Shapiro interviews dg on his new book Attack of the Copula Spiders at Write the Book, Shelagh’s long-running radio show, which, by the way, is fast becoming an institution in its own right, a vast trove of writerly advice and experience. Listen to the interview on Shelagh’s site or download the podcast — it’s also available at iTunes.

Douglas Glover – Interview

Award-winning Canadian author Douglas Glover, on his latest book: a collection of essays on writing, Attack of the Copula Spiders, published by Biblioasis.

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July 15

Douglas Glover and How to Write a Novel

by Jane Eaton Hamilton

I’m reading “Attack of the Copula Spiders” by Douglas Glover. i remember him trying to drill the matters in his first piece, “How to Write a Novel,” through my thick brain back in Saratoga Springs in the early 90s. It was the best advice I had ever gotten on making a novel. Really, it still is, and I’m glad to see it again in other than my own scrambled notes. 

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July 6

Vivian Dorsel interviews Douglas Glover in upstreet 8.

upstreet with Douglas Glover

Dorsel:  What do you emphasize in your teaching of writing?

Glover: Reading. The first thing I give students is a reading rubric and an analytical check-list to begin to reform their reading skills. As I say in Attack of the Copula Spiders, we live in a post-literate age. On a certain level that book is about the act of reading. I am pushing a critical aesthetic that is a bit like New Criticism and a bit like Russian Formalism; but, to my mind, as a writer, it just seems reasonable and immeasurably expands comprehension. You read a story and pay some attention to how it’s put together and, beyond the illusion of fictional narrative, you suddenly engage with the text on a whole other, rather exciting, level of grammar, rhythm and meaning. You begin to see connections that hitherto you vaguely passed over supplying your own dreamy connotations (as you’re taught to do in high school). We’re at a moment in our culture when differences in the ability to read and comprehend a text are critical.

I can’t remember the moment when I actually invented the phrase “copula spiders,” I only foggily recall circling over and over again all the “to be” verbs and then noticing that I could make a diagram on the page and that the diagram resembled a spider (with far more legs than it should have). The real issue, the shocking point, is that when you teach writing you are basically teaching the same student over and over again. It doesn’t matter whether the student is writing nonfiction or fiction or that the student thinks the burning piece of paper in his hand is the next War and Peace because he has put his heart into it and it comes out of his own original personal thoughts and is different (he believes) from anything ever written before (or in the future). The shocking thing is the uniformity of mediocrity. The shocking thing is that intelligent adults can’t think of another verb to use (actually most students jog along with a verb repertoire of about five: to be, to look, to sit, to stand, to see—absolutely the most popular verb choices).

The crucial connector here is to realize that part of the reason proto-writers don’t notice they are doing this is because they don’t know how to read. Eighty percent of what I do every semester is teach students how to read like writers, that is, with attention to structure and the felicities of well-written prose. So the two aspects of my book are necessarily joined: you can’t teach people to write simply by telling them what they are doing wrong; you have to show them where it is done right, that is, you have to show them how to read.

Once you learn to read you can teach yourself how to write. Literature is an encyclopedia of technique.

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June 5

“The best essays in this collection come further in as Glover, like a physicist dissecting atoms, breaks down the prose of several great writers of the past few decades. A successful fiction writer in his own right, he wants not only to identify the techniques of stylists such as Alice Munro, Mark Anthony Jarman, and Thomas Bernhard, but to understand the grand logic behind the structures, the God-like plans that such geniuses hatch to produce their greatest works. Although this is not specifically a “how-to” book, Glover’s analyses in Copula Spiders prove far more insightful than traditional criticism, and by extension far more helpful to writers who are serious about approaching perfection in their craft.” — Joe Ponepinto @ The Los Angeles Review

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June 5

It’s a great book. Look for my review in the next issue of Broken Pencil. — Nico Mara-McKay @ nicomaramckay.com

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June 3

The first bad review; always a landmark. DG taken to the barn and whipped with limp squibs by Daniel Evans Pritchard at The Critical Flame, a young man apparently lacking a sense of humor and a delusional optimist who seems to think all those e-books coming out are worth reading. Without a trace of irony, he quotes, um, a Gallup poll to tell us the state of literary culture in America. At least he spelled my name right (although he didn’t manage to copy Mark Anthony Jarman’s name with the same accuracy — Mark suddenly becoming French in the translation — Marc Anthony Jarman). Tiresome as it is, I herewith issue my usual challenge to a duel.

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May 21

Such was the pace of my conversion, that by the time I reached the penultimate chapter, a brilliant examination of, among other things, the catastrophic meeting of the 15th-century book cultures of Europe and the oral cultures of the new world, I had decided that every literate person in the country should be reading Glover’s essays and was fixing to present them to my eldest daughter, who is about to begin literary studies at UBC.

Glover is at times rather detached in his assessment of the value of storytelling. And yet there is a subtext to his work, a sense that if a story is to have life beyond the intrinsics of its existence, it must, sooner or later, ease up to the imponderables at the heart of what it is to be human. As Joni Mitchell said of songwriting, if at some point a song’s lyrics don’t extend themselves into a larger orbit, “it’s all just complaining.” Charles Wilkins, The Globe and Mail

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May 13

His sortie on the verb “to be” in “Attack of the Copula Spiders” is particularly brilliant. Mark Sampson at Free Range Reading

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April 28

Attack of the Copula Spiders is a practical guide for anyone interested in writing. Glover’s first chapter, “How To Write A Novel,” alone is worth the price of the book. Telegraph Journal SalonBooks

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Caroline Adderson, author of A History of Forgetting: “Just ordered it. The essay on “Meneseteung” alone is worth the price.”

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April 13

“These essays are not just for writing students, however. Whatever heightens student awareness of craft also sharpens the awareness of the general reader who has no desire to try his or her hand at writing but would like better to understand literature. Glover has an essay on Alice Munro that is of value to any short story writer but also should be required reading for anyone interested in Canadian fiction.” Philip Marchand in the National Post

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April 10

“You should have a look at Douglas Glover on what may be the Mexican classic, Pedro Paramo, which was once described to me as “Mexico’s Joyce.” (The essay appears in Glover’s recent Attack of the Copula Spiders, which looks to be a great book of literary essays.)” — Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading

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April 9

“Thoughtful and erudite books such as Attack of the Copula Spiders are always useful as roadmaps for developing better readers and writers. Now if we could only get the world to read them carefully.” George Fetherling review in Quill and Quire

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“I’m a few chapters into reading it a second time. All of it is wise and clear and exciting. The book is chock-full of good stuff, but the first and third chapters are especially brilliant. And the first paragraph of your essay on the Rooke novel is itself worth the price of the book. ” — Jack Hodgins, Governor General’s Award winning author of The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne and The Invention of the World

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March 25

Douglas Glover interview re Attack of the Copula Spiders on The Danforth Review.

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Douglas Glover’s Craftwork talk on the novel at the Center for Fiction — based on “How To Write A Novel,” one of the essays in Attack of the Copula Spiders

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March 14

Craftwork: Douglas Glover — Wednesday, March 14, 2012, 7:00 pm, at

The Center for Fiction
17 E. 47th Street
(between Fifth and Madison)
New York, NY 10017
(212) 755-6710
info@centerforfiction.org

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March 15

Douglas Glover Read at Celebration of The Literarian

The Center for Fiction
17 E. 47th Street
(between Fifth and Madison)
New York, NY 10017
(212) 755-6710
info@centerforfiction.org

Thurs

day March 15, 2012
07:00 pm

Come join us for drinks and micro-readings in celebration of our online magazine, The Literarian, featuring contribs Alan Cheuse, Anne Landsman, Barbara O’Dair, Carmela Ciuraru, Christine Schutt, Diane DeSanders, Douglas Glover, Elissa Schappell, Jane Ciabattari, Kim Chinquee, Leigh Newman, Leopoldine Core, Terese Svoboda, Tracy O’Neill, and Victoria Redel.

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February 9

The Thomas Bernhard essay in Attack of the Copula Spiders quoted in The New Yorker online Book Bench.

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Among the essays included in the book:

  • How to Write a Novel (dg’s famous Novel Lecture)
  • How to Write a Short Story: Notes on Structure and an Exercise (see examples of student stories written from the exercise here and here)
  • The Drama of Grammar
  • The Mind of Alice Munro
  • Novels and Dreams
  • A Scrupulous Fidelity: On Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser

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February 5

UK Guardian reviewer and columnist and editor of the magazine 3 a.m. Andrew Gallix quotes from Attack of the Copula Spiders.

(This is in his Phantom Book category, related to language theory and a modernist aesthetic. dg is up there with Walter Benjamin, George Steiner and Herman Melville.)

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February 1

Essay excerpted from Attack of the Copula Spiders in The Brooklyn Rail

Linked on A Piece of Monologue, ReadySteadyBook, and wood s lot.

“…excellent essay” — @ Who Killed Lemmy Caution?

“…excellent essay” — @ Three Minutes’ Chewing

“…a great essay by Douglas Glover about Thomas Bernhard’s novel The Loser (it is serialized from Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing, published by Biblioasis. The essay makes a fine rundown of the various rhetorical devices that makes Bernhard Bernhard. So if you ever wonder how he manages to attain those typically Bernhardian effects, look here.” Scott Esposito @ Conversational Reading

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Attack of the Copula Spiders Book Signing at Vermont College of Fine Arts booth, AWP ChicagoThursday, March 1, 2-3:30pm. Books available. Bring cash or checks.

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Attack of the Copula Spiders Party at AWP Chicago Friday, March 2, 7-8:15pm, Hilton Chicago Hotel Dining Room 4. Invitation below.
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Invitation Flyer

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Visit the NC Bookstore.

Buy books here and a percentage comes back to NC for the upkeep of the magazine.

Apr 052012
 

The best novels are like dreams. They come out of the silence of the page like a dream. They structure themselves like dreams, that is, there are clear ways in which the structure of dreams parallels the structure of novels. Like dreams, novels use image patterning as a device for suggesting meaning: image repetition, association, juxtaposition, and splintering (Viktor Shklovsky’s term for the branching pattern created by a repeating image and its associated or split-off elements which also repeat). Like dreams, novels are available to interpretation; the best novels have a central luminous mystery at their core which tempts generations upon generations of critics and readers to find new structures and meanings beyond the surface of the words. And like dreams, novels are built around (and this is explicable in only the vaguest of terms) the recurrence or insistence of desire which, in order to generate plot, must be resisted; the locus or arena of desire and resistance appears again and again with obsessive regularity in novels, an obsessive regularity which, in real life, would seem eccentric if not pathological. In novels, character is perversion, and the novel returns again and again to the animating desire which it must resist to the bitter end or even beyond the end of the words on the page.

—from “Novels and Dreams,” an essay by Douglas Glover in Attack of the Copula Spiders

The Greeks called their novels tales of suffering for love. If they weren’t about suffering for love, they wouldn’t be tales. A story consists of someone wanting something and having trouble getting it. There are no stories about people who start out happy and contented, remain happy and contented throughout, and end up happy and contented. Imagine the phrase “tales of not-suffering for love” or “tales of having fun for love” or “tales of finding pleasure for love.” The difference between pornography and literature is that in pornography everyone has orgasms all the time. There is no gap between desire and consummation. In literature there is always an element of frustration, displacement, delay and incompleteness (even if someone does eventually manage to have an orgasm). Don Quixote is the quintessential novel because it’s about a man in love with a woman who doesn’t exist. At the outset, Cervantes invents the limiting case.

—from The Enamoured Knight

Repetition, as I have said, is also a pattern. But it is a pattern of a different order, perhaps the pattern of patterns. To me, it is the heart of the mystery of art, of novel-writing. Without it, the novel becomes a strung-out plot summary. I have tried to think out why repetition is appealing, why it is aesthetically pleasing as a pure thing. I think there are two reasons, or sorts of reasons. The first is essentially conservative–repetition is allied to memory, to coherence and verisimilitude. The second is biological or procreative or sexual. Repetition creates rhythm which on a biological level is pleasurable in itself, the beating of our hearts, the combers rolling up on a beach, the motion of love. This is the sort of thing Lyotard is talking about when he writes about “intensities” or patterns of intensities in his book Économie Libidinal, or what the Spaniard Madariaga meant when he talked about the “waves of energy” in Tirso de Molina’s El Burlador de Seville.

—from “The Novel as a Poem” in Notes Home from a Prodigal Son

———-

Here is the performance version of “How to Write a Novel,” the first essay in my new book Attack of the Copula Spiders. I place it here for instructional purposes, also so that I can include it in our growing trove of craft and structure advice The Numéro Cinq Literary Craft Book, which you all should consult from time to time. I gave this talk as part of the Craftwork series at The Center for Fiction in New York, March 14, 2o12.

It’s important to note that “How to Write a Novel” is a fairly stripped down version of the years of thought I have given to writing novels (and stories and essays and, yes, even poems). If you want to get the whole picture to this point, you should read also “The Novel as a Poem” in Notes Home from a Prodigal Son. That book also contains essays on novels by Leonard Cohen, Christa Wolf, Hubert Aquin, and Margaret Atwood, plus an essay on point of view and my pride and joy “Gertrude, or the Postmodern Novel.”

Then you would need to read my book on Cervantes The Enamoured Knight. The first section of the book, “Recovering the Text: Technical and Analytical,” provides a re-reading of Don Quixote and preps you for the sections to follow.  The second section, “Don Quixote and Novel Form,” gives a history of the development of novel form, sorts out the rather confusing array of definitions offered by theorists, and then discusses a set of primary structures: plot, subplot, character grouping and gradation, and novel memory devices (which I have not really touched on elsewhere). The third section, “Night Thoughts of an Insomniac Reader, or Thematic Meditations,” demonstrates how the form itself predisposes the novel to a thematic “basket” of ubiquitous themes which appear in writers as diverse as Joseph Conrad, Cervantes, Jane Austen, and Alice Munro (to name four that come into the discussion).

Finally, in Attack of the Copula Spiders you’ll find not only “How to Write a Novel” (the complete text with sundry examples) but also analyses of novels by Juan Rulfo, Thomas Bernhard, Leon Rooke, and Cees Nooteboom as well as an essay on endings and a meditation on novels and history.

Unfortunately, foresight has been lacking. I haven’t managed to collect all of this material in one place (and that’s mostly because I have been sorting out these ideas for years, decades, often previewing them as lectures at Vermont College of Fine Arts where I teach in the low-residency MFA in Writing program). But here now you have a basic sense of where to find it all.

dg

Mar 272012
 

For you delectation and inspiration, here are the opening paragraphs of my essay “Pedro the Uncanny: A Note on Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Parámo” excerpted from my new book Attack of the Copula Spiders on the Biblioasis International Translation Series. Pedro Parámo is an amazing novel, written about dead people from the point of view of a dead man. Rulfo based the structure on the idea of a cemetery in which the various grave occupants spend their time whispering to one another, an eerie and startling conception. Critics often all this book the first instance of Latin American Magic Realism. It’s a Mexican classic. Click on the link above to go to the Biblioasis site and read the rest of the essay.

dg

 

Feb 012012
 

Here’s a teaser from a new essay of mine, just published at The Brooklyn Rail. This essay is from Attack of the Copula Spiders and Other Essays on Writing published by Biblioasis. Out in March. Other essays include the latest version of my novel lecture, “How to Write a Novel,” also “How to Write a Short Story: Notes on Structure and an Exercise,” “The Drama of Grammar,” and “The Mind of Alice Munro,” and others.

dg

The Man and his Books

Thomas Bernhard is dead. He had a terrible life, at least the early part. He was born in Holland where his Austrian mother had fled to escape the shame of her unwanted pregnancy. He never knew his father who died far away and in obscurity (and obscure circumstances). His mother mistreated him because of the shame he represented. Back in Austria he wanted to be an opera singer and studied music but caught a cold working at a menial job to make ends meet; the cold turned into tuberculosis. He was hospitalized repeatedly, his treatment was bungled, he was given up for dead, and survived just to prove how stupid his doctors were. Since opera-singing was out, he became a writer. He became a famous writer of deadpan, mordant, hilarious, difficult (modernist) novels and plays that often portray depressed characters with lung diseases.

Another common theme is Bernhard’s disgust with his native Austria which he continually berated for its Nazi past, its stupidity, sentimentality, and philistinism. In his will he stipulated that none of his works could ever be published in Austria. Paradoxically he rarely left Austria and lived quietly in a country retreat outside of Vienna (many of his characters live in country retreats outside of Vienna).

Despite the fact that he seemed to put himself in every one of his novels, little is known about his intimate life. He wrote a five-volume memoir, Gathering Evidence, which is quite beautiful but, as all memoirs are, unrevealing. His first biographer somehow managed to discover that he liked to masturbate while watching himself in the mirror. This is both comic and significant; over and over Bernhard presents his narrators as characters watching themselves think about themselves. In fact, his narrators seem more interested in watching themselves think about themselves than in telling the story which often seems, upon analysis, more of an occasion for baroque invention than an end in itself. Reading Bernhard one is often reminded of the American experimentalist John Hawkes who once famously said:

My novels are not highly plotted, but certainly they’re elaborately structured. I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting, and theme…structure—verbal and psychological coherence—is still my largest concern as a writer. Related or corresponding event, recurring image and recurring action, these constitute the essential substance or meaningful density of my writing. (Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Literature, 1965)

Click here & Read the rest of the essay at The Brooklyn Rail.