Reading Style Read online

  Another instance in which participation is combined with critique—in which critique is made possible by the act of participatory ventriloquism—appears in a later installment of the subplot in which Emma continually misunderstands the ways in which men respond to Harriet and Harriet to the men around her. By this point in the novel, we have learned to question Emma’s own apprehension of events: in light of the earlier failure of Emma’s attempt to match-make between Harriet and Mr. Elton, her notion of building on the scene in which Frank Churchill “rescues” Harriet from the gypsies is automatically rendered suspicious. (Indeed, it will emerge that in the conversation Emma has with Harriet about that rescue, they are truly speaking at cross-purposes, Harriet having understood Emma to refer instead to Mr. Knightley’s gallant intervention to save her from public embarrassment at a dance.) Suspicion arises in part as a consequence of the hyperbole of the narrative recounting of Emma’s position:

  Such an adventure as this,—a fine young man and a lovely young woman thrown together in such a way, could hardly fail of suggesting certain ideas to the coldest heart and the steadiest brain. So Emma thought, at least. Could a linguist, could a grammarian, could even a mathematician have seen what she did, have witnessed their appearance together, and heard their history of it, without feeling that circumstances had been at work to make them peculiarly interesting to each other?—How much more must an imaginist, like herself, be on fire with speculation and foresight!—especially with such a ground-work of anticipation as her mind had already made. (III.iii.263)

  Here the fidelity of the words to Emma’s own thoughts—the switch may be as little as “she” for “I” and “herself” for “myself,” as even the verb tenses would work for a first-person ejaculation, barring the need for the present-tense “have” and “has” rather than “had”—contributes to the effectiveness of Emma’s exposure. Rhetorically, we expect these hopes will prove unfounded—their bounce is suspicious—and we are perhaps alerted to that suspicion by the narrator’s dry disclaimer in the second sentence (“So Emma thought, at least”).

  This passage ironically echoes Emma’s earlier resolution of “repressing imagination all the rest of her life”; she is irrepressibly an “imaginist” (in the first edition, that unusual noun was capitalized), one who takes speculation to be synonymous with foresight in a consequential misprision whose correction may lead to painful self-castigation later on. The novel enacts a strange dance of punishment and celebration around both imagination and judgment, the practice of each of which, incorrectly grounded in false perception and ethical irresponsibility, may lead to the most penetrating humiliation for the rash practitioner, but which together constitute (when properly practiced) not just the layperson’s ordinary obligation but the novelist’s peculiar one. I suppose that as a child, I loved Pride and Prejudice most out of all Austen’s novels because of its fairytale symmetries and precision-tooled language, but each subsequent stage of life has brought me to a new favorite. As an adolescent, I began to identify more strongly with Sense and Sensibility, a great novel of emotional disarray and pointed argument, and in graduate school, with the potent abjection of dependent Fanny Price; but in the full adulthood of middle age, I have to confess that Emma has become my undoubted favorite among all Austen’s novels, partly for its structural and narrative subtleties but also because of its commitment to depicting the costs of well-intentioned meddling on behalf of others. As professors, we too often believe in our own ability to discern and our right to determine the fates of others, and Emma tells a story about the outcomes we try to impose on others that seems to me at least as cautionary as Daniel Kahneman’s revelations about the shortcomings of common decision-making protocols in Thinking, Fast and Slow.

  5

  Tempo, Repetition and a Taxonomy of Pacing

  Peter Temple, Neil Gaiman, A. L. Kennedy, Edward P. Jones

  A passage of prose experienced on the page doesn’t exist as obviously in time as a snatch of music or a theatrical scene. That doesn’t mean time doesn’t matter when we’re reading. A number of the most striking verbal effects depend on the temporal dimension. Pace constitutes an important and sometimes neglected element of storytelling (we’re probably more aware of it in TV writing than in narrative fiction, due to the historical impact of tight temporal constraints in network television); the speed at which we read something is not supposed to affect the reading experience in any deep way, but I suspect that reading War and Peace feels significantly different when it is completed in ten hours versus in a hundred, and TV and film are in that sense more democratic than novels, insofar as they impose a uniform pace of consumption across the entire audience. The massive scale of a Clarissa or an In Search of Lost Time makes even a fast reader experience the book as a world to be entered rather than a story to be consumed, and a sense of dilation, of almost unutterably prolonged immersion, is crucial to the effects that each of those novels produces.

  On a smaller scale, the stylistic impact of verbal repetition also depends on the fact that words exist in time. Henry Watson Fowler, in his 1926 dictionary of usage, urged the reader to avoid what he called “elegant variation” and deplored the “fatal influence” of “the advice given to young writers never to use the same word twice in a sentence.” Elegant variation can of course be turned to very good ends—the effulgence of a baroque sensibility, the instrument of a comedy of self-aggrandizement and self-deflation. It should never be ruled out automatically, and it’s this sort of dictum (“Omit needless words”) that similarly gives Strunk and White a bad name in certain circles. That said, concision is a useful guideline for inexperienced writers; indeed, the willful repetition of a single word can produce desirable effects well beyond the point at which most writers would lose their nerve and reach for the synonym. Here is a favorite passage from one of my very favorite writers, Peter Temple:

  Against the righthand wall were the clamp racks: at the bottom, the monster sash clamps; above them, the lesser sizes; in the next rack, the bar clamps, the infantry of joinery, dozens of them in every size; then the frame clamps, the spring clamps, the G-clamps, the ancient wooden screw clamps that Charlie loved best, and flexible wooden go-bars arranged by length. Finally, an assortment of weird clamps, many of them invented by Charlie to solve particular clamping problems.1

  The rubric “clamp racks” introduces an amazing array of clamps, the verbal momentum building up to the final catch-all category of “weird clamps” and their application to “clamping problems,” with the unexpected transformation of the noun into the adjectival form “clamping” providing a conclusion that feels strangely provisional, off-kilter, unsettled. Temple’s novels are published as crime fiction, which is probably the genre most hospitable to a stringent and beautiful ideal of prose in the tradition of Beckett (I think of practitioners like Derek Raymond and Ken Bruen). In his most recent books, Temple has perfected an idiom that is on the one hand estranging or defamiliarizing and on the other still appealingly and effectively load-bearing in the narrative sense. Crime fiction tends to feature stronger plots than literary fiction, and it also often carries a sociological freight as a result of its desire to portray broken societies and explore the problem of human evil.2 But Temple’s use of, say, the hyphen greatly exceeds the matter-of-fact needs of sentence-writing in popular fiction, as this sentence from his 2005 novel The Broken Shore shows: “The vinegary couple from the newsagency were in their shop doorway, mouths curving southwards. Triple-bypassed Bruce of the video shop was beside saturated-fat dealer Meryl, the fish and chip shop owner.”3 Satire lurks in the descriptive language as well as in the physical juxtaposition of victim and pusher of saturated fats, and the distinctive effect here is one of compression; the easy conventions of English word order are snubbed, as is the common injunction to avoid using conjugations of the verb “to be” in favor of active verbs.

  While there’s something humorous about Temple’s clamp passage, comedy isn’t the primary verbal effect of t
he repetition. In other hands, though, that sort of repetition can be extremely funny in a way that calls to mind the routines of The Goon Show or Monty Python’s famous “Spam” sketch but that’s probably as old as Aristophanes. (Or even older—it seems to me that verbal repetition works on the basis of something fundamental about language and cognition rather than being a literary innovation anchored in one writer’s imagination at some specific location in time and space.) Influenced by the tradition of verbal sketch comedy (the Blackadder scripts also come to mind), British novelists like Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman have made themselves masters of repetition as a comic effect. This kind of joke works not just by lavish repetition but also by subverting the proper forms of similes and metaphors so that they fold back in on themselves. The pace of Gaiman’s novel Anansi Boys, for instance, is quite gentle, definitely not uproarious, so that the periodic outright comedy catches the reader slightly off guard:

  It was sort of like Macbeth, thought Fat Charlie, an hour later; in fact, if the witches in Macbeth had been four little old ladies, and if instead of stirring cauldrons and intoning dread incantations they had just welcomed Macbeth in and fed him on turkey, and rice and peas, spread out on white china plates on a red-and-white patterned plastic table cloth, not to mention sweet potato pudding and spicy cabbage, and encouraged him to take second helpings, and thirds, and then, when Macbeth had declaimed that nay, he was stuffed nigh unto bursting and on his oath could truly eat no more, the witches had pressed upon him their own special island rice pudding and a large slice of Mrs Bustamonte’s famous pineapple upside-down cake, it would have been exactly like Macbeth.4

  This passage derives its energy from the comic contrast between the Shakespearean high-cultural reference (the bits of Jacobean pastiche) and the everyday familiarity of the four little ladies cooking up a Caribbean meal; the name Macbeth is used five times in a single sentence, structuring and elevating the cadence even as the naming of rice pudding and pineapple upside-down cake serves to deflate. The next example foregrounds two separate acts of verbal repetition. Spider, impersonating his brother Fat Charlie, creates an illusion of that identity simply by asserting it:

  “I’m Fat Charlie Nancy,” said Spider.

  “Why is he saying that?” asked Rosie’s mother. “Who is he?”

  “I’m Fat Charlie Nancy, your future son-in-law, and you really like me,” said Spider, with utter conviction.

  Rosie’s mother swayed and blinked and stared at him.

  “You may be Fat Charlie,” she said uncertainly, “but I don’t like you.”

  “Well,” said Spider, “you should. I am remarkably likeable. Few people have ever been as likeable as I am. There is, frankly, no end to my likeability. People gather together in public assemblies to discuss how much they like me. I have several awards, and a medal from a small country in South America which pays tribute both to how much I am liked and my general all-around wonderfulness. I don’t have it on me, of course. I keep my medals in my sock drawer.” (162)

  Magic works in this book by way of language, not as a function of arcane systems of learning, so that Spider’s playful but purposeful elaboration of the notion that his mother-in-law-to-be really likes him is the way he makes it so: “likeable,” “likeable,” “likeability,” and then the transition back through the verbal forms (“how much they like me,” “how much I am liked”) into the more expansive assertion of “my general all-round wonderfulness” and the deflationary self-deprecation of the explanation that the medals are stashed in his sock drawer. The last example I will give from Gaiman’s novel is a bit simpler than the other two, and for that reason reveals even more clearly the way the humor works: “The world was his lobster, his bib was round his neck, and he had a pot of melted butter and an array of grotesque but effective lobster-eating implements and devices at the ready” (175). It’s the repetition of the word “lobster,” stuck into the phrase “an array of grotesque but effective lobster-eating implements,” that I find charming, though I can also see how a reader might find it annoying or overly whimsical.

  Repetition can be comic, but it can also be surreal. Luc Sante offers an interesting analysis of the dummy placeholder word and the ways it can invoke the uncanny in his discussion of the best-known characters of Spirou, the French-language comic magazine he grew up reading, “Les Schtroumpfs, known in the English-speaking world as the Smurfs, small blue elfin creatures who lived in a toadstool village”:

  In their English-language animated appearances they could be cloyingly cute, but in French they were spared this fate by their language, marked by an incessant use of the (invented) word schtroumpf, employed as noun, verb, adverb, adjective, and interjection. Every reader, no matter how young, understood this usage without a gloss, because it parodied the French conversational trope of substituting catch-alls such as truc, chose, and machin for words that cannot immediately be called to mind, in any grammatical position. What schtroumpf highlighted was the ability of such dummy words to suggest words prohibited from writing or speech, regardless of the fact that the actual words schtroumpf was substituting for were always clear from context. Truc or chose became neutral from exposure, but schtroumpf subliminally spoke to the unconscious; its surface strangeness could make it mean things that the child’s mind does not yet know but can imagine with tantalizing vagueness.5

  I don’t think English speakers have a comparably strong habit of catch-all substitution, though it might be that an obscenity like mother-fucker does some of the same work in certain speakers’ idiolects. (One of the strangest and most characteristic features of Chester Himes’s crime fiction derives from his use of the euphemism “mother-raper” in place of the then-unprintable “mother-fucker,” and his contemporaries fell back on terms like “mother-jumper” and “mother-fouler” for the same reason.)6 Inherently uncanny is the fact that the human mind has such a strong grasp on meaning that even a sentence missing all of its proper nouns can be readily understood, the estranging joke made by Sterne by way of the ellipses of Tristram Shandy: “The chamber maid had left no ******* *** under the bed:—cannot you contrive, master, quoth Susannah, lifting up the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and helping me up into the window seat with the other,—Cannot you manage, my dear, for a single time to **** *** ** *** ******?”7 A debate roiled during the period in which that novel was written as to whether pregnant women might rely more properly and prudently on female midwives or male physicians; Mrs. Shandy prefers the local midwife to Dr. Slop, a preference Uncle Toby accounts for very bluntly: “My sister, I dare say, added he, does not care to let a man come so near her ****” (Tristram Shandy, II.vi.89). The asterisks are four, the word is “arse,” and Tristram repeats his uncle’s words and ruminates upon them:

  Make this dash,——’tis an Aposiopesis.—Take the dash away, and write Backside,—’tis Bawdy.—Scratch Backside out, and put Cover’d-way in,—’tis a Metaphor;—and, I dare say, as fortification ran so much in my uncle Toby‘s head, that if he had been left to have added one word to the sentence,—that word was it.

  Any given novel can be thought of as having its own pace or set of paces; some writers pace very consistently both within and across novels (this is obviously true for a great deal of genre fiction—let’s say the thrillers of Lee Child or the science fiction novels of Iain M. Banks—but it could also be said of Anne Tyler or Paulo Coelho), while others write books of more variable pacing (Kate Christensen’s Trouble, Ed Park’s Personal Days) or seem to vary their pacing deliberately from one book to the next (Motherless Brooklyn versus The Fortress of Solitude). Neil Gaiman’s novels are striking for their very marked differences in terms of structure and pacing, from the fantastic baggy monster of American Gods—which seems to contain several different novels within its multitudes—to the fable-like economy of Stardust or the Kiplingesque cumulative tale-compilation of The Graveyard Book. The prose of novels often differs from the prose of short stories partly because of some real though hard-to-pin
-down aspects of pacing, momentum and directionality, none of which are things that literary-critical terminology is especially well equipped to deal with. The following passage seems to me a good example not just of alluring prose but of prose that, while it is beautifully “crafted” in a way I associate with the literary short story, can also be said to display the rhythms of full-length novel pacing. It is from A. L. Kennedy’s Paradise:

  You are now approaching forty and have already spent far too long washing underwear in a theatre, stacking shelves, cleaning rental power tools—which are, I would mention, often returned in revolting states. You have slotted together grids of doubtful purpose, you have folded free knitting and/or sewing patterns into women’s magazines, you have sorted potatoes (for three grotesque hours), you have telephoned telephone owners to tell them about their telephones and you have spent one extremely long weekend in a hotel conference suite, asking people what they found most pleasing about bags of crisps. Every prior experience proves it—there is no point to you.

  At least at the end of the crisps job, I got to take some home. But selling cardboard was a godsend: flexible and satisfying in a way that involved no pressure at any stage, because—after all—what sane person could possibly care about who might be buying how many of which kind of box. The job actually managed to be more trivial than me, which seemed to produce this Zen glow across my better days and enabled me to lie my head off in a consistent, promotional manner with hardly a trace of nauseous side effects.