Jonathan Callahan
In several prolix conversations a few years back with a friend who cares a lot about sentences, I did my best to articulate a distinction between what I then liked to refer to as phrase- and sentence-level virtuosity. Readers inclined to chalk up the afternoons in question to time we might’ve found more fruitful uses for will be forgiven whatever hesitations they might have with respect to tucking into a longish essay that will attempt to revisit the theme, but are sort of politely urged to hear me out, as this eventually gets interesting in ways I wouldn’t necessarily have anticipated at the outset.
If you read The Collagist you probably read a fair amount of contemporary prose, and there being such an abundance of stuff out there to choose from, if you’re anything like me, it’s almost always some quality of the prose that hauls you into a work of fiction—of any length—and keeps you reading beyond the first paragraph or so. I’ve heard this almost-impossible-to-pin-down quality described variously as “flow,” “punch,” “kick,” “savor,” a “crackle” or “click”—the heterogeneity of metaphor deployed in this obviously non-exhaustive list perhaps indicating the difficulty inherent in trying to express exactly what writing like this does. But we seem to be able to agree that it does something, and from here it’s a short step for the analytically-inclined to start constructing patterns and theoretical schemes. The paradigm I tried to foist on my friend involved a subdivision of prose that possessed this crackle or punch into the two broad categories of phrasal and syntactic effect. At the time he remained unconvinced, or maybe I just never made myself clear, and eventually he seemed to get justifiably tired of talking about it, but my recent reading of several novels in translation—including Thomas Bernhard’s Yes, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, and Kafka’s The Castle—has me thinking through this opposition again, about what it means to call a writer's use of phrase or syntax “virtuosic,” and, a bit less narrowly, wondering why the need to articulate the distinction at that time, as a very-fledgling-indeed aspiring young fiction-writer, seemed like such a big deal to me.<
Maybe it’s best to begin by considering what it actually means to achieve effects on the reader at either of these levels. “Phrase-level” effects, as I conceive of them, reflect the writer's scrupulous attention to individual words and his meticulous shaping of these words into the little phrase sculptures we tend to associate with writing that’s lauded as anything from “lyric” or “beautiful,” to “startling” or “uncanny” (or maybe in some quarters dismissed as “opaque”). There are all kinds of phrasal effects available to the rigorous writer, of course, and writers variously adept at making use of them compose a long gamut that runs from, say, the saguaro-like jut of certain singular phrasings in the stories of Denis Johnson and Amy Hempel, Gary Lutz and early Sam Lipsyte, through the quilted prose-poems of Michael Ondaatje or Anne Carson, into Don DeLillo’s uncanny, disorienting hyper-precision, the entrancing syllabic cadences and capering puns to be found in Martin Amis (by way of Nabokov) or Donald Antrim’s alliterative, consonance-rich lilt, all the way through the lingual looking-glasses conjured in the works of Donald Barthelme and Ben Marcus—but the common element is a kind of lexical manipulation. This is where the writer rejects the easy, familiar, or prefabricated phrase, vigorously resists the stale and timeworn, dismantles easy idiom, dispenses altogether with overused figures of speech, and not infrequently is forced to discard reams of what he ultimately deems superfluous or weak.
I have to be careful here, because the reason writers who give a damn about their sentences work so hard to sculpt each phrase is, when you come down to it, a pretty good one: when language isn’t fresh it often fails to say much of anything. As plenty of people have pointed out before me, clichés possess the interesting property of being simultaneously profound and banal, the profundity often being in direct proportion to the degree that its simplistic expression has become banal. Truisms are frequently truths that have seemingly become too commonplace to merit contemplation. So the search for fresh expression becomes a kind of quest to deliver to the reader a satori-like flash of apprehension, a re-seeing of some insight or truth we perhaps already know perfectly well—and can in fact paraphrase or refer to in shorthand via any number of axioms, adages, hoary formulations or outright clichés—but have ceased to be able to feel. Fresh language peels away the patina-like crust of familiarity that discourages contemplation of ideas we maybe ought to be perpetually peering into, and allows us, briefly, to see.
Writers adept at manipulating phrase can be challenging to wade through, but (for me at least), the work is a kind of bracing exhilaration akin to stepping into the sun’s full fulguration after a long stretch indoors under dim artificial light. It’s the pure joy of communicating with first things, or at least shadows cast a bit less far afield from the essences we’re in the end even in the best of circumstances only able to feebly hint at, gesture towards, approximate. The following passage from Don DeLillo’s famous opening salvo in Underworld is less dense than some of his earlier work, but no less lyrically masterful, a kind of massive word-engraving I simply cannot imagine taking any other shape than its own:
He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.
It’s a school day, sure, but he’s nowhere near the classroom. He wants to be here instead, standing in the shadow of this old rust-hulk of a structure, and it’s hard to blame him—this metropolis of steel and concrete and flaky paint and cropped grass and enormous Chesterfield packs aslant on the scoreboards, a couple of cigarettes jutting from each.
Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a local yearning, but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous with thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the day—men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game.
In the event this isn’t obvious, it’s worth remarking up front that these notes emphatically won’t be a knives-drawn assault on this kind of rigor at the level of word choice and phrase. None of what I will argue ought to be construed as a kind of concession to familiarity, or communicative ease—that way staleness lies, and if I want to read sentences that fail to say anything to me, I’ll page through a newspaper, bestseller, or popular magazine. I love nearly all of the writers listed above, and note with approval the shared emphasis on eradicating cliché, the search for the perfect word, the relentless quest to mine meaning from lunar juxtapositions and startling about-faces of phrase. Certainly if your prose is sagging you could do worse than to begin by attending more closely to its words. But in the following pages I’d like to propose that when lexical manipulation becomes the exclusive measure of a piece of prose’s stylistic worth, the writer is in danger of neglecting an equally potent aesthetic element. I’ve read authors whose command of the phrase seems preternaturally acute yet who can’t seem to write sentences that “click,” and I’ve decided not to bother with books loaded with little lexical miracles. This might seem like a paradox, or else that I’m essentially making the dubious claim that sometimes prose can be too good for its own good, but, sometimes, when the prose-maker becomes so narrowly focused on the undeniable richness of stylistic effect possible at the molecular, lexical level, the sentences these molecules are intended in combination to construct can feel paradoxically vacant of effect, impoverished—lacking something else. But what else is there?
What about syntax? It seems to me that a work of electrifying prose can also crackle with a kind of syntactical current. Just as the writer can surprise the reader with a language’s infinitely malleable lexicon, she can also work innumerable effects through the patterns and shapes, not of single words or phrases, but of whole clauses, the makeup of the sentences those words and phrases are fused together to form. The lexical maestro surprises you with his ingenuity of phrase, or even the piquancy of an oddly apt single word; the master of syntax may not stun you with his phrasings (a car may merely "swerve" into the next lane, rather than, say, "shark” in, to borrow an image from the opening page of Money by Martin Amis), but there's something else happening. The first time I read the above-cited passage I was stunned; but the first time I read this bit from David Foster Wallace’s “Another Pioneer" I was equally, if quite differently, amazed:
It was a continuation of some much longer flight, perhaps even Transatlantic, and the two passengers had evidently been seated together on the flight’s first leg, and were already deep in conversation when he boarded; and the crux here is that the fellow said he missed the first part of whatever larger conversation it was part of. Meaning that there was no enframing context or deictic antecedent as such surrounding the archetypal narrative as of course there is with all of us together here this afternoon. That it appeared to come, as the fellow described it, out of nowhere. Also that he had evidently been seated in the particular medial exit row that is always nearest the wing’s large jet engine, the overwing exit often in I believe on this type of aircraft Row 19 or 20, whereat in an evacuation you are required to turn two handles in two separate and opposed directions and supposedly then to somehow pull the entire window apparatus out of the jetliner’s fuselage and stow it in some very complicated way all detailed in glyphs on the instructional safety card that on so many commercial airlines is very nearly impossible to interpret with any confidence.
These sentences’ ophidian coils whip the reader around one blind curve after another, so that there is no way to foresee a coming clause’s effect until it’s already been achieved. Consider, for instance, the jarring reorientation wrought by the third sentence in the excerpt’s final subordinate clause—“as of course there is with all of us together here this afternoon”—which abruptly knocks the reader out of the air with the “two passengers” on their Transatlantic flight and into a nebulous external narrative frame that would seem to account for (and make light of) the pedagogic pomposity of the narration’s language (“enframing,” “deictic,” etc.) itself. I see less of this kind of syntactic virtuosity (or if, like me, you concede the late Wallace’s blistering syntax will not likely be matched, let’s say prose that even gestures in this stylistic direction) in self-consciously written contemporary prose—and I wonder if the culprit, counterintuitive as it may at first seem, might not be too much initial attention to the phrase-focused portion of the prose-artist’s palette, a problem to which we return in a bit.
But first, it may be worth positing that one mark of lexical mastery is how it defies or really flat-out rejects successful translation. The easiest way to demonstrate this is to cite a writer whose lexically-accomplished stylistic effects—phrasings, wordplay, the poetics and tricks of his word-by-word prose—would be very difficult to transfer undiminished into another language. For instance, I find it pretty much impossible to imagine reading Donald Barthelme’s short fiction in translation (I’m thinking in particular of pieces like “The Indian Uprising,” or “The Emerald,” whose lexical ingenuity is the art, but I suspect a good three-fourths of his fiction would be rendered somewhere between perplexing and incomprehensible in, say, Japanese, though I suppose some folks do read him here.) However, I’d actually prefer to come at this inversely: People frequently cite Madame Bovary as an archetype of perfectly-sculpted lyric prose. Flaubert was famously painstaking, merciless in his insistence on the diamond-hard perfection of every word of every polished phrase. Certainly the edition I’ve read had its share of word-precision and nicely buffed phrases, but the fact remains I have literally no idea what Flaubert actually accomplished in the French, because much of that accomplishment could only have been accomplished—or rather it represented the uniquely Flaubertian accomplishment—in French. Readers who have read English-language stylistic virtuosos whose virtuosity obtains primarily in their manipulation of the English lexicon, its pliable diction, its cadence and sound, the array of available poetic devices, the syllabic idiosyncrasies, the beats, the color and feel of English as it's spoken and heard and even visually rendered on the page, may intuitively grasp that some of it would be difficult to transmit intact to readers interpreting in some other tongue. I would go further and suggest that in order to truly appreciate a Barthelme, a Hempel, a DeLillo or Amis, a reader would require an absolute mastery of English lexicon and usage—a mastery matched by a tiny portion of the literate populace and only substantially bettered or outstripped by the very authors whose virtuosic ultra-mastery this sort of second-tier mastery enables a reader to appreciate, admire, be stunned by, or just plain enjoy. (Joyce's career sort of makes this point concrete, as I think the achievement of each successive work in the Dubliners–Portrait–Ulysses–Finnegans sequence is to better its predecessor, at least as a measure of phrasal virtuosity, by the very degree to which Joyce's ultra-mastery has dilated—and the books become correspondingly difficult, culminating in a universally acknowledged masterpiece that hardly anyone seems to have actually understood.) In other words, I am able to appreciate Joyce exactly to the extent that I am myself a skilled manipulator of English phrasings and able to discern how badly my mastery is embarrassed by his.
Or consider the following passage from John Hawkes’ The Lime Twig:
We were so close to the old malevolent station that I could hear the shifting of the sandbags piled round it and could hear the locomotives shattering into bits of iron.
And one night wouldn’t a cherubim’s hand or arm or curly head come flying through our roof? Some dislodged ball of saintly brass palm or muscle or jagged neck find its target in Lily Eastchip’s house? But I wasn’t destined to die with a fat brass finger in my belly.
[. . .]
“You’re the dear,” she repeated to herself in the kitchen. But she had not turned off the stove and the asparagus was burned. She put a little water in the pot and left it. An hour later she locked the flat, went down the stoop, signaled a high-topped taxicab to carry her to the train at Dreary Station. Hurrying she gave no thought to people on the streets. She was a girl with a band on her finger and poor handwriting, and there was no other world for her. No bitters in a bar, slick hair, no checkered vests. She was Banks’ wife by the law, she was Margaret, and if the men ever did get hold of her and go at her with their truncheons or knives or knuckles, she would still be merely Margaret with a dress and a brown shoe, still be only a girl of twenty-five with a deep wave in her hair.
Hawkes’ phrasal effects shade more toward the relentlessly acoustical than do those of Amis or Joyce, yet they, too, would be nearly impossible to duplicate in another tongue. One reason Hawkes’ pages read with a kind of dreamy lilting motion is that he exerts laboratory-precise control over every sentence’s meter. I scan the end of the first paragraph in the above quoted passage as follows:
And one night wouldn’t a cherubim’s hand or arm or curly head come flying through our roof? Some dislodged ball of saintly brass palm or muscle or jagged neck find its target in Lily Eastchip’s house? But I wasn’t destined to die with a fat brass finger in my belly.
Note how “And” and “hand” form a perfect rhyming iambic frame around the troche and twin anapests of “one night wouldn’t a cherubim’s hand,” as the sentence then glides into the lilting sequence of iambs—“or arm or curly head come flying through our roof? Some dislodged ball of saintly”—that is suddenly demolished with the troche that “palm” unexpectedly converts “brass palm” into, the crashing irruption into the sentence’s cadence a precise metrical mirror of the destruction it describes. And again in the last sentence, three waltzing dactyls—“I wasn’t destined to die with a”—are similarly swatted aside with the spondee–troche combination of “fat brass finger,” again puncturing the sentence’s gentle rhythm in a mimetic approximation of the imagined brass finger puncturing the narrator’s stomach.
This is insane technical mastery, and we won’t even touch on the similarly remarkable control over interplay between each syllable’s sounds because the point is simply that I cannot imagine this degree of precise control over the available English could possibly survive translation intact. I sort of doubt that most readers scan every line of every novel’s meter for clues as to how they’re operating—I certainly don’t—but if you take the time with Hawkes (and, similarly, with Nabokov or, famously, Joyce) you find that much of the effect you sense without quite knowing its source is of course no accident, but rather is complexly orchestrated. The composer has arranged his symphony to make the fullest possible use of his available instruments, right down to the timbre and pitch of English’s syllabic textures and aural curves. And I’d argue you need a fairly strong sense of how these instruments work, of what each one can do, in order to appreciate their seamless integration into a true master’s symphony.
To witness an analogous function in a different medium, try watching 2001 sometime with an audience accustomed to the pace of, say, Michael Bay. It isn’t elitism so much as good old journalistic integrity to observe that some of the more operatic floating-around-outside-the-space-station-for-twenty-nearly-soundless-minutes stuff generally doesn’t go over well with viewers primarily keen to discover whom Hal intends to take out first. Lexical mastery, then, as I’m sort of provisionally defining it here, is the writer’s ability to reconfigure her language’s molecules of expression in such a way that the reader is pleased insofar as she is able to appreciate both the comprehensive grasp and relentless, magical ingenuity, the sheer word-lust required for such legerdemain, and to enjoy the effort of decrypting meaning from language that, if not utterly alien (a la Finnegans Wake), is always challenging and fresh. Lexical mastery is a mastery over the intercourse between the language's words and the physical world they're asked to approximate or, in the best of cases, conjure up. It’s what I think most people mean (or ought to mean) when they use the term “lyrical.”
And the earlier reference to Flaubert is pertinent, I think, because, as the myriad translations of Bovary make manifest, lyricism is very difficult to communicate perfectly across borders between languages, since much of what makes the writing lyric comes from a comprehensive, intimate engagement with the language itself. Another way of saying this would be to suggest that a passage of writing is lyrical (or evinces "lexical mastery") to the precise degree that it would resist being uprooted from the language it was not only conceived in but is—the degree to which it would lose value in translation. The measure of its lyricism is the measure of what would be lost. Pace the parade of less-linguistically impressive short stories translated by son Dimitri and posthumously published, the only person who could satisfactorily translate Nabokov was Nabokov pére himself. And even he had a tough time.
***
Since I don't speak any German, I'm compelled to read writers like Kafka and Bernhard in translation. Each of these men may or may not have flaunted in his native tongue the kind of audacious lexical mastery I've attempted to describe above—I have no way of knowing either way. Whatever rhythmic phrasings akin to the ones Don DeLillo uses to carve his effects into the walls of the lexically-receptive sector of my brain (wherever the hell this is, by the way: I keep reading conflicting accounts assigning it to different cerebral locales) Kafka may have relied on to similarly scar the German reader are largely, necessarily, absent in my translation, because I have no idea what those effects would have looked like in the first place. I don't know what prosaic German prose would look like; how can I begin to imagine what its antithesis would be? In trying to communicate Kafka's brilliance to me, even an incredibly gifted translator is restricted access to an entire portion of the palette first employed by the author during composition. So what's left? Something must be, because I (and I'm obviously not alone here) am profoundly affected by both of these authors' works, even though I know I may be missing a lot. And it’s more than a question of content or theme—skipping over for now the problem of whether it’s possible to achieve thematic resonance without some kind of formal success, I feel like it’s fairly safe to say—and I think the passage I quote below will support me here—that on its surface The Castle is phenomenally boring: a mediocre bureaucrat bumbles around a village at the base of a castle he can’t find his way into; he never does. And yet I find the book tremendously moving, uproariously bleak, and I would argue that it’s not achieving these effects in spiteof itself, that there’s an enabling stylistic component to my enjoyment, and as I’ve argued, this can’t be lexical, because I’m deaf to the music of the German tongue.
Well, again, one thing that’s left is syntax. Now, I'm not overlooking the obvious point that certain syntactical aspects of a language will not survive translation either, and perhaps “syntax” is a more technical term than what I strictly mean—i.e., we won’t be rolling back sleeves for an in-depth inspection of the two languages’ grammatical structures, not least because, as I've already noted, I have zero German; but, as an example of what I admit might be syntactically lost in translation, there’s a grammatical construction in Japanese such as in the sentence Watashi wa, Dan ni bi–ru o nomareta, which is a passive statement that roughly means, “I was in some way annoyed by the fact that Dan drank beer,” the implication probably being that in fact Dan drank my beer, though this isn’t necessarily the case, I might just dislike Dan when he gets going with the beer, but which literally translates to something more like “I was beer-drinken by Dan,” where "beer-drinken" is the rough equivalent of "rained on," only instead of being rained on by Dan I had beer drunk by Dan—the point being that we don’t have a construction exactly like this in English, and any translation has to approximate as well as it can. That said, the case I'd like to make for reading an author like Kafka or Bernhard in translation is that even if sentences cannot be transposed word-for-word across languages, shades of an author's syntactic style—the crests and troughs, the hurtles forward and circlings-back; that is, the shape of his thought—can often survive translation where the subtlest textures of his lexical manipulations may not. Consider the following passage from late in The Castle:
The little cart halted before most doors, which generally opened, and the relevant files, sometimes only a single sheet—in cases like that a brief conversation arose between the room and the corridor, the servant was probably being chided—were handed into the room. If the door remained closed, the files were carefully stacked on the threshold. In such cases it seemed to K. that the movement of the doors in the immediate vicinity was not lessening, even though the files had already been distributed there as well, but increasing. Perhaps the others were peering longingly at the files on the threshold, which still hadn't been picked up and were, incomprehensibly, still lying there; they couldn't understand how someone who had only to open his door to gain possession of his files could possibly fail to do so; perhaps it was even possible that any files left lying there were later distributed among the other gentlemen, who by making frequent checks were already trying to establish whether the files were still lying on the threshold and whether there was therefore still hope for them. Besides, most of the remaining files were in especially large bundles and K. assumed that they had been temporarily left there out of a certain boastfulness or malice or even out of justified pride, as a way to encourage the colleagues. Confirming him in this assumption was the tendency every now and then, always just when he wasn't looking, for the pile, after it had been on show for a sufficiently long time, to be suddenly and hastily pulled into the room and then the door remained as quiet as it had been earlier; then the other doors in the vicinity also calmed down, disappointed or even satisfied that this object of constant annoyance had finally been disposed of, but they gradually started moving again.
The underlined clauses constitute a certainly not exhaustive list of instances in this tiny passage, which is more or less typical of Kafka's style throughout the novel, wherein the winding, wily, unpredictable, abruptly hilarious movement of Kafka's thought seems to me fairly apparent. I've deliberately chosen phrasings that are pedestrian (there is, e.g., nothing remarkable about "therefore still hope for them" except perhaps for its remarkable plainness—and yet I find it the perfect final touch to the steady accretion of administrative comedy stacked up clause by clause in this sneakily amusing sentence), that nevertheless achieve marked effects, in order to illustrate that the strength of Kafka's sentences—and in writing that survives translation generally—lies not in their individual phrasings but in the deft arrangement and manipulation of those phrases in the larger syntactical context of sentences and even the paragraphs as a whole.
I suppose what I'm arguing is that it isn't easy and may even be impossible to translate lexical mastery, but syntax—which is essentially a plaster cast of the author's patterns of thought—can remain largely intact, at the very least some of its cumulative effects can, which is why I can enjoy Kafka even though his pages, as rendered in the editions I am forced to read, are littered with unexciting or even somewhat-stilted-in-contemporary-English phrases like "finally been disposed of," "being chided," "a certain boastfulness," and so forth. It’s not just that Kafka (“Kafka” here obviously meaning “Kafka in English translation”) can’t compose Nabokov's sentences, because he simply lacks the lexical palette, but that if someone, say Martin Amis, were to take a crack at composing the above-quoted bit, he would not have been able to replicate what I love about Kafka, even though, word for word, phrase for phrase, I don't doubt that Amis could write circles around Kafka (“Kafka”)—and that for this reason, it is actually dangerous for a certain strain of writer to constrict himself with exclusive considerations of phrase, the effort expended akin to Kafka wracking his brains for a cleverer way to say "hope."
To return to the topic of that conversation I had with my prose-concerned old friend: I think my interest was a reflection of a partiality I have as a reader plus an ongoing frustration I have as a writer—namely, that I'm in my bones at least as interested in the way living sentences and paragraphs can thrash and kick, just like actual thought can do, as I am in seeing each facet of each gem-cut sentence polished to a luminous gleam. Once in a while (as in Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, or the young David Foster Wallace), you get both, but not all of us are Nabokov, and one consequence of excess attention to lexical flair can be a kind of prose whose phrases’ coagulated richness lacks the light, jaunty glee of sentences that trace the vertiginous anarchy of actual, uninhibited thought. Yet the feel of what it’s like to be inside consciousness, within thought, is of course the feel of what it’s like to be alive, and in this sense, when communicated, surely ought to be considered its own kind of stylistic feat. So that when thinking about aesthetic accomplishment or mastery, I think we probably ought to include aspects of a prose-maker’s craft that, while potentially representing a different kind of virtuosity, are nonetheless equally potent generators of terror and beauty, sorrow, madness and joy, and the whole range of sensations that make being alive such a lively comedy of pain.
There’s no better progenitor of this kind of madness than Thomas Bernhard when he really gets going. Unfortunately Bernhard tends to get going over page-spanning paragraphs that really don’t excerpt well for the purpose of short essays (though I’m going to try). For some visceral support of the case I’m trying to make here, it’s really best to see him in action over the course of a whole book. Pick up just about any novel (maybe start with The Loser or Concrete) and read until he’s hauled you chortling (he’s very funny) into his narrator’s misery-hole—and then retrace the responsible passage: you’ll be hard-pressed to point to the specific flashy phrasing responsible for the soul-pummeling, and yet a pummeling has taken place. There’s a relentless, mad, recursive logic that wings back on itself again and again with ferocious, seemingly inexhaustible intensity. Here is a passage taken from Wittgenstein's Nephew, a novel I don’t like quite as much as the aforementioned two, but that is unfortunately what I have with me here in good old Fukuoka:
All my forebears were afflicted by the same restlessness and could never bear to stay in one place for long. Three days in Vienna and I have had enough—three days in Nathal and I have had enough. In the last years of his life my friend adopted the same rhythm and often accompanied me to Nathal and back. Once in Nathal I ask myself what I am doing here, and I ask myself the same question when I arrive in Vienna. Basically, like nine tenths of humanity, I always want to be somewhere else, in the place I have just fled from. In recent years this condition has, if anything, become worse: I go to and from Vienna at diminishing intervals, and from Nathal I will often go back to some other big city, to Venice or Rome and back, or to Prague and back. The truth is that I am happy only when sitting in the car, between the place I have just left and the place I am driving to. I am happy only when I am traveling; when I arrive, no matter where, I am suddenly the unhappiest person imaginable. Basically I am one of those people who cannot bear to be anywhere and are happy only between places.
And again:
We shared another obsession, which can also be classified as a disease. This is the counting disease, from which Bruckner also suffered in his later years. For whole weeks and months I have a compulsion, whenever I take a streetcar into the city, to look out of the windows and count the spaces between the windows of the buildings along the route, or the windows themselves, or the doors, or the spaces between the doors; the faster the streetcar travels, the faster I have to count, and I feel I have to go on counting until I am almost demented. Thus, when traveling by streetcar through Vienna or some other city, I have often tried to escape this counting sickness by making a point of not looking out of the window and fixing my eyes on the floor, but this requires tremendous self-control, of which I am not always capable.
More:
And we shared another habit that often drives me to distraction: when walking along the sidewalk he would not, like other people, step on the paving stones indiscriminately but had to proceed according to a carefully thought-out system: for instance, after two whole paving stones he had to place his foot precisely at either the top or the bottom end of the third, not indiscriminately in the middle. With people like us nothing could be left to chance or carelessness—everything had to be thought out with geometrical, symmetrical, and mathematical precision. I observed Paul’s counting disease and his eccentric walking habits right from the beginning.
The effect here is cumulative with each paragraph’s steady accretion of psyche-ward pseudo-logic, the style used to describe a kind of madness manifesting as madness itself that the selectively deployed italics heighten to a kind of controlled hysteria.
As noted, it was while reading Kafka and Bernhard’s fiction in translation that I first began to think back through the distinction I’ve attempted to hash out here, and for good reason: a work necessarily stripped of at least some of its phrasal flair will need to do something else pretty well in order for me to continue reading without sort of holding my nose and grimly trudging along through each page or chucking the book at the back of one of my overworked colleagues’ heads. But in order for these observations to have any relevance to a working writer, it’s probably necessary to reiterate that not only translated prose is capable of achieving this kind of syntactical brilliance. I bring David Foster Wallace back into the discussion for two reasons. One is kind of personal: it first dawned on me that I might be beating my head against the wrong wall (or at least against the wrong panel of the right wall), when, as an undergraduate, I read Infinite Jest, which, while undeniably pyrotechnic at just about every turn of phrase, is also—in my opinion, even more so—spectacular in the way its sentences careen down labyrinthine thought-corridors and hurtle through long, penetrating disquisitions on just about every shade imaginable of physical and psychic pain. At the time I was really struggling to write pages of fiction that remotely approximated the potential material I felt churning around inside—one source of this frustration having been a poetry professor who’d taken me under her wing but whose scorched-earth editorial approach to a given text was kind of like William Sherman’s approach to the Confederate South, and whose work I frankly didn’t want whatever I was one day able to produce to look anything like. On reading Wallace’s Jest I first realized that it might be possible to accelerate my sentences a bit without sacrificing their aspirations toward art. More on this in a bit, but the second reason is that it’s easy to point to Kafka or Bernhard and express admiration without realistically believing it would be possible to write, in 2010 American English, sentences that look anything like theirs. Perhaps you wouldn’t even want to. But I think the stories in Oblivion potently demonstrate that it is possible to write sentences that astound with their circling syntax—but that an emphasis on this aspect of the prose might necessarily entail a slight curbing of the impulse toward phrasal ingenuity in the name of creating work that succeeds in other ways.
The David Foster Wallace of Oblivion has dispensed with many of the phrasal fireworks he began his career with and packed the incomparable Infinite Jest with, yet I find the stories in the final collection to be staggering artistic achievements in their own right. “Good Old Neon,” “Oblivion,” “The Soul Is Not a Smithy,” and “Another Pioneer” are all narrated in a style lacking much of the ferocious phrase-level wordplay readers accustomed to Jest and the earlier story collections (compare the early masterpiece, “John Billy”) might have come to expect, yet are all preposterous exhibitions of syntactical wizardry. The following passage from “Good Old Neon” is somewhat typical of the later prose style’s sentence-level tendency to widen and deepen into even larger syntactical labyrinths, although this narrator’s diction is particularly, emphatically unliterary, for reasons that in this case make more and more sense as the story proceeds. It’s worth noting that many of Wallace’s stories in Oblivion are narrated by a first-person, none of whom is a poet in the Nabokovian John Shade-mode, or even especially literary. In other words, Wallace effectively hands off each story to a narrator who doesn’t so much eschew phrasal flourishes and lyric touches as lack the literary chops to deploy them, who is generally using his narrative platform to explain himself as best he can, often in unusual circumstances, such as, in the case of the subsequent passage’s narrator, from beyond the grave. This is a bit long, but especially apt in that it not only pretty potently demonstrates the kind of prose I’ve been trying to define here but also provides its own running meta-commentary on what it’s trying to do:
Once again, I’m aware that it’s clumsy to put it all this way, but the point is that all of this and more was flashing through my head just in the interval of the small, dramatic pause Dr. Gustafson allowed himself before delivering his big reductio ad absurdum argument that I couldn’t be a total fraud if I had just come out and admitted my fraudulence to him just now. I know that you know as well as I do how fast thoughts and associations can fly through your head. You can be in the middle of a creative meeting at your job or something, and enough material can rush through your head just in the little silences when people are looking over their notes and waiting for the next presentation that it would take exponentially longer than the whole meeting just to try to put a few seconds’ silences’ flood of thoughts into words. This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are the ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc.—and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows that it’s a charade and they’re just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant. The internal head-speed or whatever of these ideas, memories, realizations, emotions and so on is even faster, by the way—exponentially faster, unimaginably faster—when you’re dying, meaning during that vanishingly tiny nanosecond between when you technically die and when the next thing happens, so that in reality the cliché about people’s whole life flashing before their eyes as they’re dying isn’t that far off—although the whole life here isn’t really a sequential thing where you’re born and then you’re in the crib and then you’re up at the plate in Legion ball, etc., which it turns out that that’s what people usually mean when they say ‘my whole life,’ meaning a chronological series of moments that they add up and call their lifetime. It’s not really like that. The best way I can think of to try to say it is that it all happens at once, but that at once doesn’t really mean a finite moment of sequential time the way we think of time while we’re alive, plus that what turns out to be the meaning of the term my life isn’t even close to what we think we’re talking about when we say ‘my life.’ Words and chronological time create all these total misunderstandings of what’s really going on at the most basic level. And yet at the same time English is all we have to try to understand it and try to form anything larger or more meaningful and true with anybody else, which is yet another paradox.
Part of what I like about this passage is how plainspoken its phrases are, how wise it all feels, how it seems simultaneously desperate in its long switchback sentences to get onto the page, yet philosophic about the futility of ever doing justice to the unnameable essence it wishes it could adequately say (a tone that’s appropriate to a narrator no longer oppressed by the motion of time). It would probably be pointless to argue that this is either better or worse than a passage of Nabokovian sumptuousness, but I will argue that I honestly don’t think “Good Old Neon” would work if narrated by Nabokov. And yet I find the prose here ferociously, heartbreakingly good.
What I suppose I was probably laboring to express over the course of the conversations with my friend—who was actually my instructor in a graduate writing program, and with whom my conversations about sentences and novels and, generally, Life probably constituted the single most lastingly valuable feature of two years one might charitably describe the cost of as a bit steep—was that in “workshops” when we talked about style (and it’s true that we only occasionally talked about style, preferring to devote the better part of our energies to back-and-forth over John Hawkes’ three famous antagonists of the novel), the debates seemed almost exclusively confined to the merely phrasal perfection or imperfection of an author’s prose, which aspect might indeed constitute one dimension of the prose-art we were striving to create, but in focusing so intently on it we were failing to acknowledge the reality that the prose in some of the books we—or at least I—had first been so affected by that we’d decided to give our lives to writing works of our own quite often bore very little resemblance, from one sentence to the next, to the particular kind of prose we seemed by consensus to be dutifully whittling ours down to. Not that this kind of lexical iridescence can’t be art—of course it can—but, as I’ve attempted to argue, sentences can shimmer in more than one way.
When I have been able to write in a more phrase-focused mode, composition has almost invariably been a painstaking, word-by-word wrestling match with my inherent inclination to express ideas with the first shopworn approximations that, for example, spring to mind, so that I have to eke out a single sentence, clause, and not infrequently word at a time. It frankly isn’t much fun, though of course nobody said this was supposed to be fun. Meanwhile, my forays into more interesting syntactical effect have often had their genesis in handwritten detonations of thought, complete chaos I can barely keep pace with in legible script that, when typed up, tend naturally to be rich with more than their share of unimpressive—or even cringe-inducingly clichéd—phrasings that I then need to go back and engage and wrestle with, one at a time, in exactly the same way I’ve described above. The difference with this second approach is that now I’ve provided myself with the more syntactically elaborate framework of sentences that attempted from the start to express more complexly vigorous constructions of livewire thought. In my interview with this website for my story “The Consummation of Dirk,” I said that my method, if “method” isn’t a ridiculous word for the anarchy that attends my attempts to compose works of prose, was essentially to make an enormous mess and then do my best to clean it up. This approach isn’t for everyone—I spend most of the time between first draft and late-round revision in a kind of rabid, raw-nerved state of impotence and doubt—but maybe what I’m proposing is an inversion of the way writers who genuinely care about their sentences approach their whole process: beginning with looseness, or comparatively lax attention to the phrasal facet of language in the earlygoing, so as to allow for an elasticity, a free flow from inspiration to the page, which will then look frankly hideous, will confirm for you every doubt you’ve continued to harbor about your capacity to express a single worthwhile thought, and will dog you and pester you and render you shamefully inept during the tormenting hours in which you’re forced to perform whatever tasks your institution of employment requires you to perform in order to command your monthly or bi-weekly wage—until you pin down every single component phrase to satisfaction or at least exhaustion and despair, but will, sometimes, when things go well, have captured or recorded much more of whatever it was you sensed was sequestered inside you when you first sat down to coax that inchoate plasmic something into its sentence-casts on the page. This, at any rate, has been my occasional experience, and it has enabled me to come a bit closer, on arriving at the end of a long, almost-literally torturous process, to feeling like I might have at least touched on part of what I really wanted to say.
***
Which brings us to the point at which I attempt to explain why the hell any of this should matter. One question that seems to demand some attention is why I even need prose to deliver the punch I’ve tried to sort into separate analytical bins here in the first place. Which is another way of wondering, Why do I read a certain kind of prose fiction? And it doesn’t require much intermediary rumination to arrive at this line of thinking’s terminal question, i.e., Why do I read fiction? and its obverse, What kind of fiction do I really want to write?—which are of course two ways to put the same question a great many people have been asking for a pretty long time: What is Art? Tolstoy attempted an answer a century back in an essay or polemic, titularly encumbered or emboldened, in both cases depending on your perspective, by this very question. In the intervening century-plus answers have of course proliferated and passed through the levels of stupefying theoretical complexity that anyone passingly familiar with the Academy’s assorted Arts departments will have had at least a sampling of—for better or for worse is beyond the parameters of this essay to say. It at any rate seems to me almost beyond dispute that any theory of aesthetics will ongoingly need to account for or come to new terms with the hyper-accelerated rate at which the world Art is meant to reflect and engage has grown ever more unfathomably complex—i.e., aesthetic evolution as a necessary adaptation to increasingly complicated and difficult-to-grapple-with-or-even-really-make-any-kind-of-rudimentary-sense-of existential facts on the ground. But I wonder if the old man didn’t have the right idea back before he could conceptualize a mere thousandth of the horror-parade that was to constitute the next century's rather cartoonishly hideous history in dispensing with aesthetics altogether and getting to the heart of the matter. It’s tough not to disagree with long stretches of this essay (after discarding several card-catalogues’ worth of works he decides are not Art, Tolstoy provides the reader with a rather lean list of authors whose works are: Dostoevsky and Hugo, if memory serves, along with Dickens but only in the case of one or two books) but I think its heart is in the right place. Art is not mere artistry or artfulness. It’s not aesthetic achievement, technical accomplishment or even bravura exhibitions of virtuoso skill. Art certainly can and frequently does foreground the artist’s mastery of technique and form but this is only a possible quality of the work of art, not a prerequisite for its existence as Art; the converse—that is, that technical mastery does not guarantee a work the status of Art—is obviously also true. But then what’s Art?
That it will be very difficult to express what I’d like to say next without lapsing into precisely the kind of stock formulation of a familiar idea that, as I’ve noted, phrase-level rigor is a kind of ongoing battle against, will perhaps better support my case than anything I’ve said in the course of these notes, but for whatever it’s worth: As I see it, and have honestly always seen it, Art’s purpose is pain, the pain of being alive, and where Conrad has Marlow declare that “we live as we die, alone,” Art’s sole purpose is to force a single word into the formulation, to communicate—or really reiterate, since this is something we surely all already know—that we all live as we die, alone, but that the very commonality of this solitary confinement in pain may be the closest thing to grace or salvation any of us is going to get—so that when a work of Art succeeds in transmitting its particular shade of animating pain there is a brief fissuring of the chamber’s walls and a glimmer of light is allowed out—or in. The keyhole is another rather recognizable trope here, so in lieu of attempting my own revisitation I will now pitch this off to Thomas Stearns:
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
Hal Incandenza’s I am in here is just such a rumour, and Art is its whispering voice. If David Foster Wallace has figured more prominently in this discussion than any other author (and more than I’d originally intended, believe me), it’s for the simple reason that he came the closest for me among contemporary writers of fiction in English to touching in his work what it is I’m trying to get at here. Wallace’s prose, while almost universally lauded for its technical or aesthetic virtuosity, never seemed to me anything more than his very best attempt to put the key in the hole and turn it in the hopes that something would be unlocked for somebody. September 13, 2008, when I first learned of his death, was among the saddest days of my life—and for the record I’m not a particularly happy person—because Wallace, for lack of a less naked way to put this, was my hero. He seemed to bring to bear on the problem both an almost inexhaustible ability to make scintillating sentences and a clear-eyed understanding of what that ability ought to be for. There’s pure compassion in every sentence of Wallace’s work, and I guess what I really want to say is that this is what it has to be about: Art is the miracle by which I hear you or see you or know you—you—in your prison, and in that instant of intimacy am set free from mine. Art is, quite literally, Communion—here, as in a few other places, Christ had the right metaphor in mind: This is my body, broken, this is my blood, and in our shared partaking we commune. Together at the table we transcend the stupefying isolation of our lives’ separate torments and we come together in Life. A work that has this end in sight aspires to Art; all else is mere artistry that no matter how well-executed amounts to scratch-work illustrations on the prison cell’s walls.
Any honest endeavor toward this end can succeed as Art, any aesthetic philosophy, any technical approach, any degree of talent, even, can be converted to Art, though there is no guarantee (or indeed even likelihood) that it will—there is honestly only the Artist’s resistless pushing on, refusing to let go of the work until it’s become what it needs to be, if it ever can. If Art is a howl of and for compassion, then artistry is the way that the howl is wired out of the cell. If no artistry were needed we’d be able to gather at some pre-designated assembly hall on particularly shitty nights and engage in a kind of ensemble bay. (This actually sounds a lot like church). Or I could do this:
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
for several hundred pages and demand, justly, that you display my work alongside the triumphs of other prose masters. Of course the artist has to attend to the aesthetics of her Art. But when the artist’s primary focus shifts from the howl itself to some quality of the howl, she’s wandered away from the work of Art, and no amount of technical perfection will bring her any closer to what, in her zeal, she’s kind of ironically allowed to vanish from sight.
If this all sounds pretty obvious that’s because it certainly is: we already know these things. I noted above the strange simultaneous potency and truth-vitrifying property of cliché; because so much of the language we possess to try to say something about these things has been more or less beaten to death by imprecision and careless overuse, it’s almost impossible to talk about matters of the heart and still be taken seriously—and yet many, many people want to make serious Art. But, understanding that the grave terrible thrashing thing they want to take out of themselves and put into their Art can’t take the form of expressions stenciled in fancy script onto the bits of folded pastel cardboard we like to pass around on holidays, they naturally begin with the best of intentions to bolster their artistry or technical chops, a process that, as anyone who has begun to get good at a musical instrument knows, has no upper limit, so that it isn’t long before the urge to avoid greeting-card slop is the same urge forbidding the car to simply “swerve” into the lane—let’s have it “shark” (and “shark” is naturally no limit)—and the conundrum is you need some kind of mastery or ability to get onto the road that might eventually take you to Art, you need to find a way into the work (an old instructor used to call it “getting onto the page,” which sounded much stupider to me then than it does now), but since artistry is simultaneously only the gateway and all but impossible to attain, is it any wonder that so many artists eventually falter and lose their way?
I still feel much as I did then, some years after I first started struggling to make it, that Art’s purpose is communion in pain. Art is basically just fellow-feeling, empathy, compassion. It's love. If this is hard to read without cringing, try to imagine just how hard it is to write. If I could advise a way to remember this in the face of our time’s knee-jerk need to cross-hair and dispatch with grim glee just about anything that evinces feeling, let alone unvarnished pain, it would be a lot easier to make Art that is more than mere artistry. The confusing thing is that artistry in the sense I’ve been using the term—that is, technical mastery of aesthetic effect—is pretty tough too. It’s easy to observe how hard you’re working to hammer your prose down to perfection and be persuaded that if you’re working this hard you must be in the throes of producing Art, but it isn’t necessarily so.
What I suppose I discovered in my recent reading of works in translation then is a kind of liberation: These books, in the form in which I read them, struck me as works of Art. They lacked so much of what I’d confined myself to think good writing had to display, that it was a kind of mild revelation to realize something that maybe shouldn’t have been so hard to grasp all along. As a kid I played a lot of guitar, and I naturally entertained notions of putting together a band and ultimately becoming the greatest guitarist of my generation. What started as a pretty fun, not to say cathartic, way to spend the daily several hours away from other people I needed in order not to think hard about swallowing some terminal quantity of pills wound up becoming its own kind of torture, as I stopped listening to music so much as evaluating musicians’ technical proficiency with the guitar. I would decide that I didn’t like a band if I could play (or imagined I could play) most of the lead guitarist’s licks. Eventually, as I acquired a little music theory, I began to disdain recognizable chord patterns, observing to myself with a sneer that I could have written the song in question if I’d wanted to. Things eventually devolved to the extent that I was frequently angry while listening to songs I actually liked, because they were so stupid and simple that I could have written them as many as several weeks prior, or whenever I’d acquired whatever insight I now understood rendered the song entirely without merit. This was a stupid way to listen to music, and I was recently beginning to read books in a similarly stupid way—for similarly stupid reasons, as somewhere along the line the book I hoped to write one day had been transformed in my imagination from a work of real compassion to the greatest novel of my generation. It was only while reading Kafka and Bernhard, and realizing that much of what I’d conditioned myself to respond to in prose was entirely absent here, yet my response was undeniable, that I began to think hard for the first time in a long time about what exactly I’m trying to do when I sit down with a notebook and pen and begin to write. Simply put, I remembered that the mastery I’m working hard to obtain and bring to bear on the fiction I continue to struggle to craft can only ever be a means to the end, if I ultimately really do want to make Art.
And I still care, as I did at the beginning of these notes, about really good prose. I still enjoy DeLillo’s sentences more than those of just about any other writer around. I still want to write sentences that blaze through my readers’ heads and leave a kind of pulsing afterglow long after the book’s been closed. But not for their own sake, and, ideally, not even for mine: the abiding purpose of every one of the phrasal or syntactic triumphs I want to fill my pages with has got to be to serve, to help the work achieve the one thing I’ve once again been reminded I want it to do, which is simply, to quote a very dear old friend, to tell you, Reader—in whatever words it takes—that you are loved.