The lovely and talented Pam shared this article with me about the craftmanship and art of sentence construction. Pam’s comment, offered alongside the article, was “Shane Porn.”
Articles like this are indeed practically porn to me, but maybe not for the reasons Pam thinks. I read the first essay by Gary Lutz (the one which is quoted at length) and found it, in the main, tedious and annoying. Once upon a time this would not have been so. Well, I still would have found it tedious and annoying, but I would have figured that was because this guy was way more thoughtful than me, and that my tastes were somehow ‘wrong.’
I spent a surprising amount of time making this mistake. My efforts were most comical when it came to poetry; most particularly evident in the work of Seamus Heaney, who got the Nobel prize a few years ago for reasons I cannot fucking fathom. After he was awarded the prize I bought his collected works, thinking that if I banged against them hard enough that eventually I’d realize his genius. Nope. His poems are obscure, impenetrable presentations in a language not completely unlike English, and in the rare event that I understand what he’s saying, I find myself utterly unmoved. The only exception to this characterization I can remember was his poem Blackberry Picking which someone fortunately put online:
Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.
These days, I’m smart enough, have read enough, and am generally well-enough educated to think that if I, among all possible English speakers, do not come within ten miles of understanding what the fuck you’re on about, then maybe it’s you and not me. I realize that this isn’t the sort of thing that one politely proclaims, and is exactly the sort of claim that Janie lives to induce me to make, purely for the medicinal effects she enjoys by protesting once I make it.
Even so, I think I’m right. But! (and this is the important part) I admit that I could be wrong. Perhaps I am still arrogant to the point of delusion, and in truth a veritable throng of English majors is wobbling about, bumping into each other, having been made rather dizzy by Heaney’s genius for imagery. If this is true – if my own literary tastes are so laughably removed from the norm – then I admit to being a little upset. But I guess I shouldn’t be – as Tennyson wrote, he has his work, I mine.
Coming back to the Lutz article, take this for instance:
In Christine Schutt’s two-clause formation “her lips stuck when she licked them to talk,” the second half of a sentence from the short story “Young,” the conspicuous content words are lips, stuck, licked, and talk. These four words are not all that varied consonantically. The reappearing consonants are l and k. Three of the four words have an l: two have the l at the very start of the word (lips and licked), and in the final word (talk), the l has slid into the interior. Three of the four words have a k in common—we go from a terminal k (stuck) to a k that has worked its way backward into the very core (licked) and then again to a terminal k (talk). In the first three words, the l and the k keep their distance from each other: in the first two words, they don’t appear together; inside the third word, licked, they are now within kiss-blowing range of each other over the low-rising i and c that stand between them. In the final word, talk, the l and the k are side-by-side at last—coupled just before the period brings the curtain down. A romance between two letters has been enacted in the sentence: there has been an amorous progression toward union.
Um. Huh? Yeah, I understand what he’s saying. But “her lips stuck when she licked them to talk” does not transport me to the rapturous place Lutz describes in such tedious detail. Setting aside the sort of half-assed phonological deconstruction he offers in this paragraph, there’s nothing in his analysis that resonates, and nothing you could really use, even if it did. It’s a paragraph of masturbatory word salad, which I guess is appropriate, because the sentence that kicked it off – the one about the lips sticking when licked – doesn’t actually make any fucking sense either. I mean: what? I’ve spent way too much time caring about words and sentences to pretend that I know what this means when I actually don’t. The sentence has some nice enjambment from the sequence of glottals and stops, but as far as being clear? As far as giving me something to hold onto? Nope.
Now that I’ve admitted that I don’t actually understand “great literature” you’ll understand why I take such a deep and abiding pleasure in the second article mentioned in the one Pam shared, which I remember my friend Wendy raving about years and years ago but which I had never read, and oh, how I now regret those lost years! Imagine what I might have amounted to had I found this soulmate in 2001!
Proulx once acknowledged that she tends to “compress” too much into short stories, but her wordplay is just as relentless in her novels; she seems unaware that all innovative language derives its impact from the contrast to straightforward English. It is common to find her devoting more than one metaphor or simile to the same image. “Furious dabs of tulips stuttering in gardens.” “An apron of sound lapped out of each dive.” “The ice mass leaned as though to admire its reflection in the waves, leaned until the southern tower was at the angle of a pencil in a writing hand, the northern tower reared over it like a lover.” “The children rushed at Quoyle, gripped him as a falling man clutches the window ledge, as a stream of electric particles arcs a gap and completes a circuit.” In one brief paragraph in The Shipping News a man’s body is likened to a loaf of bread, his flesh to a casement, his head to a melon, his facial features to fingertips, his eyes to the color of plastic, and his chin to a shelf.
This isn’t all bad, of course; the bit about the ice mass admiring its reflection is effective. And every so often Proulx lets a really good image stand alone: “The dining room, crowded with men, was lit by red bulbs that gave them a look of being roasted alive in their chairs.” Such hits are so rare, however, that after a while the reader stops trying to think about what the metaphors mean. [emphasis mine.] Maybe this is the effect that Proulx is aiming for; she seems to want to keep us on the surface of the text at all times, as if she were afraid that we might forget her quirky narratorial presence for even a line or two.
I always love it when people beat the shit out of someone by quoting them and then jumping up and down on the quotes until the words are broken into little pieces. And while this article is full of that sort of joyous ass whupping, the essential idea is that somehow We (that’s the royal we) have got into the habit of not actually expecting “literary” writing to mean anything. You just sort of impatiently wave your hands at the mis-shapen atrocities on the page, like those guys with light wands beckoning would-be parkers into lots before Timberwolves games: yes, come in, plenty of room, hurry up, there’s people behind you. They don’t look at you very carefully because why would they bother? All they care is that you’re in a car, and you’re gonna pay them eight dollars.
Anyway, if you’re a reader or a writer, worth checking out. Thanks Pamster.
POSTSCRIPT:
Now that I’ve written all of this I’m asking myself if my exercise from the other day – the one where I dug into the first paragraph of that story – is me being the same kind of ass-face that I’m taking Lutz to task for. For that to be true my analysis would have to be just as particular to me as Lutz’s is to him; and my confident trumpeting of the various techniques employed in the writing no more ‘universal’ than any other personal preference.
In other words, both Lutz and I wrote about What’s Good. I find his presentation alternating between uncompelling and misguided, but I find my own article right on the money. (heh.) So is this just more youthful-Shane, forcefully opining for no good reason?
I’ll have to think about it. I have a suspicion someone else might have a thought to share, though.