A Muse and a Maze: Writing as Puzzle, Mystery, and Magic
Page 22
But if we’re looking for an interesting experience, if the stream is quiet, the stepping stones can be smaller or farther apart. If the stream is wide and the water is rushing by, we want the security of flat, broad stones. Eventually, some of us will seek out greater adventure—a deep, rushing stream and small, uneven stones that are a long, uncertain stride apart—but if that experience goes on too long, we’re likely to grow exhausted (or fall and be swept to our death; happily, such a dire fate is unlikely when we tackle Absalom! Absalom! or Ulysses).
Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter is a fictionalized biography of the trumpet player Buddy Bolden, a mythic and enigmatic figure sometimes credited as a founder of jazz. No recording of his music is known to exist, and the verifiable historical record of Bolden’s life is full of blanks; even the most scholarly biography of him contains numerous conjectures. Ondaatje’s novel is based on the historical record but also on apocryphal tales, misinformation, and original research that has nothing to do directly with Bolden. The novel’s narrator has access to Bolden’s thoughts. Ondaatje moves historical figures through time and space for his own purposes, and he invents a number of characters, including a writer Ondaatje’s age who sees his own artistic trials reflected in Bolden’s life story.
What makes the book difficult? Let’s start at the beginning.
Ondaatje’s novel is not titled “The Buddy Bolden Story,” or “The Founder of Jazz.” It’s titled Coming Through Slaughter, and the meanings of that title remain unclear for quite a long time.
The first page of the novel features a distressed historical photograph of six musicians holding their instruments.
Beneath the picture is a paragraph that is not a caption:
Buddy Bolden began to get famous right after 1900 come in. He was the first to play the hard jazz and blues for dancing. Had a good band. Strictly ear band. Later on Armstrong, Bunk Johnson, Freddie Keppard—they all knew he began the good jazz. John Robichaux had a real reading band, but Buddy used to kill Robichaux everywhere he went. When he’d parade he’d take the people with him all the way down Canal Street. Always looked good. When he bought a cornet he’d shine it up and make it glisten like a woman’s leg.
Beneath that paragraph and to the right is the name “Louis Jones.”
The photograph looks like an actual historical document (and it is, although the negative has been flipped). The paragraph implies that Buddy Bolden is a significant figure in the book, and the last sentence might lead the reader to assume he is the man in the photograph holding a cornet. “Louis Jones” is not identified. Even so, the photograph and the paragraph seem to work together. They make sense.
The second page of the novel holds, at the top of the page, a curious black-and-white image. A paragraph at the bottom of the page tells us that the image represents three sonographs of dolphin sounds, or “squawks.” It ends, “No one knows how a dolphin makes both whistles and echolocation clicks simultaneously.”
Most readers will not see much immediate connection between the information on the first two pages, beyond the fact that they are both about sound or music. An energetic reader with a passion for metaphor might begin wondering how Buddy Bolden is and is not like a dolphin. The game has begun, but it feels a little as if we’ve been given one piece of a jigsaw puzzle and one Scrabble tile.
The third page of the novel features the number 1.
The fourth page begins with the two-word paragraph, “His geography.”
By this point, as readers, we understand that we will be required to do some heavy lifting. We might tentatively decide that “His” refers to Buddy Bolden, but not with much confidence. There has been no explicit repetition, no patterns have been established, and the narrator who offered up the photographs and quotations doesn’t even provide us the comfort of a complete sentence.
The next paragraph begins, “Float by in a car today and see the corner shops. The signs of the owners obliterated by brand names. Tassin’s Food Store which he lived opposite for a time surrounded by Drink Coca Cola in Bottles, Barq’s, or Laura Lee’s Tavern. . . . This district, the homes and stores, are a mile or so from the streets made marble by jazz.”
This description begins to ground us. We’re still off-balance, but we feel something like gratitude for this coherent paragraph that looks more like the beginnings of other novels we know.
The next paragraphs are unsettling. There is no more reference to Buddy Bolden, to “him,” or, for that matter, to dolphins. The narrator tells us, “Here there is little recorded history,” then proceeds to offer colorful details and anecdotes—about a woman beaten to death with her own wooden leg, about prostitutes selling “Goofer Dust and Bend-Over Oil,” and about the notorious Oyster Dance. While those opening photographs and the prose near them seem to have been forgotten, we’re getting what feels like background for a long story; we’re content to wait.
The narrative begins leaping back and forth through time, shifting between glimpses of Bolden’s daily life and more distant discussions of the era. While the shifts are sometimes disorienting, we understand that everything we’re reading either helps to convey a sense of New Orleans during the time Bolden lived or shows us a fragment of Bolden’s imagined life. If it weren’t for that sonograph, we might even feel comfortable. But then, on page 17, we see, in italics, the words “Nora’s Song” and something that does not look like a song lyric:
Dragging his bone over town. Dragging his bone over town.
Dragging his bone over town. Dragging his
Bone over town. Dragging his bone
Over and over dragging his bone over town.
Then and then and then and then
Dragging his bone over town
And then
Dragging his bone home.
We can make at least provisional sense of this. “Bone” is a colloquial reference to a brass instrument, in this case Bolden’s cornet; and as he is nonmonogamous, the word may carry another meaning. At the same time, the passage departs from the conventions of prose and presentation that have been established. The anxious reader might hesitate to turn the page, scared of what she might find. The more adventurous reader is eager to go forward, not only assuming but hoping for both coherence and more surprises. And that latter reader is not disappointed. Coming Through Slaughter is unusual in that it offers new challenges very nearly to the last page. While the narrative follows Bolden to the end of his life, the final pages also include “Selections from A Brief History of East Louisiana State Hospital by Lionel Gremillion,” a variety of quotations, what could be song lyrics, and notes juxtaposed on nearly blank pages, followed by three pages of summaries of transcripts of a recorded interview we’re told is stored in the Tulane library. Almost nothing in those three pages speaks directly about the characters or plot of the novel, though at the end there is an oblique reference to Bolden. In this way, Ondaatje enacts Bolden’s becoming a footnote in musical history, a figure about whom little is known aside from anecdote. Ondaatje’s novel may look different from many books we know, in that it is composed of many small sections containing different kinds of information, with great variety in how words and blank spaces are deployed on the page, but the strategy it illustrates is common to many other books. By deliberately moving his readers between stages of frustration and satisfaction, of tension and release—or, let’s say, between difficulty and ease—Ondaatje keeps the reader in the flow state.
Words in the first column are synonyms, of a sort, of words in the second column. In the same way that a bit of melted butter could be called an expat, you may need to imagine the words respaced or hyphenated.
(1)
stagecoach
beach bum
battle cry
automate
hearing aid
drama teacher
tangent
chieftain
carpooler
warrant
clanking
gavel
 
; (2)
opts
bowl over
Robin Hood
say a blessing
coquette
tower
adverse
at ease
dog race
jingle
tugboat
shutout score
(3)
decimal
Lilliputian
domain
seafood seller
standoffish
searing
atoll
off the old lady
bedroll
often
minuteman
act funny
YOU AND I KNOW, ORDER IS EVERYTHING
You know, I order everything.
You know everything I order.
I know everything you order.
You order everything—and I know.
I order everything—and you know.
Everything I order, you know.
Everything I know, you order.
I order you: know everything.
Order everything! I know you.
The most basic level on which the order of information influences our comprehension is the arrangement of letters and spaces. The sequence of letters is crucial to the word, as any jumble-solver knows, and as most of us recognized at an early age with dismay (as we struggled with lessons in spelling) and pleasure (as we mastered those lessons and began to play games with the arrangement of letters). A child doesn’t need to be named Hannah or Otto to recognize the strange delight of palindromes; Mom and Dad know the midcentury classic “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama,” but they may not know the comic response “A dog, a plan, a canal: pagoda,” the more exotic “Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas,” the potentially erotic “Kay, a red nude, peeped under a yak,” or the elegant lament, “‘Reviled did I live,’ said I, ‘as evil I did deliver.’”
Other letter-arrangement games include finding as many words as possible in a larger one (when I was in elementary school, that longer word was one constant, pliant Constantinople), Word Golf (word wood good gold golf—How easily can love turn to hate? How close is dirt to bath? Word Golfers know), and codes (even Homastay Effersonjay wrote youthful letters in pig Latin). We all know about the dyslexic atheist who doesn’t believe in dog, we dare to read, and Nabokov revealed that therapist is the rapist.35 A single omission changes everything: a young student discovered that an unfortunate typing error turned a quite serious story into something else when a woman requested a private meeting with her counselor so they could discuss her elf-inflicted wounds.
But typically we think of words as our most fundamental elements, and we use them to create phrases and sentences. Syntax creates meaning. It can provide clarity, but it can also create mystery and tension. Mystery and tension, syntax can create. Created is mystery; also . . . tension.
Here is the first sentence of Thomas Bernhard’s novel Correction:
After a mild pulmonary infection, tended too little and too late, had suddenly turned into a severe pneumonia that took its toll of my entire body and laid me up for at least three months at nearby Wels, which has a hospital renowned in the field of so-called internal medicine, I accepted an invitation from Hoeller, a so-called taxidermist in the Aurach valley, not for the end of October, as the doctors urged, but for early in October, as I insisted, and then went on my own so-called responsibility straight to the Aurach valley and to Hoeller’s house, without even a detour to visit my parents in Stocket, straight into the so-called Hoeller garret, to begin sifting and perhaps even arranging the literary remains of my friend, who was also a friend of the taxidermist Hoeller, Roithamer, after Roithamer’s suicide, I went to work sifting and sorting the papers he had willed to me, consisting of thousands of slips covered with Roithamer’s handwriting plus a bulky manuscript entitled “About Altensam and everything connected with Altensam, with special attention to the Cone.”
None of the information in that sentence is difficult to comprehend, but the arrangement is disorienting. A variety of information passes by that seems quite worthy of being the subject of the sentence—or of a sentence—and of our attention, but the syntax, as well as the length of the sentence, seems to make everything subordinate. We’re confronted with surprising qualifiers: “the field of so-called internal medicine,” “a so-called taxidermist.” There’s even a syntactical joke, via a parenthetical clause: “went on my own so-called responsibility straight to the Aurach valley and to Hoeller’s house, without even a detour to visit my parents in Stocket, straight into the so-called Hoeller garret.” That mention of not taking a detour is a detour on our voyage through the sentence. The end of that voyage—the mention of Roithamer’s manuscript—feels oddly anticlimactic. We might think of a sentence as carrying us forward in our progression through a narrative, but this sentence seems at least as interested in going sideways; it feels as wide as it is long. After a rush of relief that the sentence has finally ended, our first impulse might be to go back and look again at all the things the narrator has alluded to, the narrative premise he’s suggested.
What four consecutive letters of the alphabet can be arranged to spell a familiar four-letter word?
Long sentences, unorthodox punctuation, repeated words and phrases, and the use of attributives as a rhythmic device are defining elements of Bernhard’s prose. He requires readers to choose their own places to stop and reflect. In the Vintage paperback edition, Correction is 271 pages long. It’s divided into two chapters, each of which consists of a single paragraph.
The syntax of the sentences draws us forward, and the lack of paragraphs creates some anxiety about where to pause; at the same time, the length and structure of the sentences forces us to slow down to make sense of what we’re reading. We need to be patient with this prose; we need to attend carefully to repetition and significant variation; and we need to be prepared to engage with abstractions since, as is often the case in Bernhard’s work, there is very little action, at least in the present. In Correction, the narrator arrives at Hoeller’s garret, has dinner with the family, contemplates his friend’s papers, and reflects on the past. In the second half he sorts and orders excerpts from Roithamer’s writings, quoting from and revising—“correcting”—them at length. At the end of the book, so far as we know, the narrator is still sitting with Roithamer’s papers. The narrative’s drama has little to do with physical movement, everything to do with expression—conveying understanding and emotion in words.
Sixteen pages into the novel, our narrator is standing in Hoeller’s garret, contemplating the task ahead of him—going through his deceased friend’s papers and, more important, trying to comprehend his life’s work. The narrator says,
As I stood there looking around Hoeller’s garret it was instantly clear to me that my thinking would now have to conform to Hoeller’s garret, to think other than Hoeller-garret-thoughts in Hoeller’s garret was simply impossible, and so I decided to familiarize myself gradually with the prescribed mode of thinking in this place, to study it so as to learn to think along these lines, entering Hoeller’s garret and learning to adjust, to entrust and subject oneself to these mandatory lines of thought and make some progress in them is not easy.
Even as the narrator is explaining his own actions, Bernhard, the author, is talking to us, his readers, about the challenge he knows he’s given us; and he is, in his way, offering instruction, encouragement.
It may be obvious that to read Bernhard we must, like his narrator, familiarize ourselves “with the prescribed mode of thinking in this [book], to study it so as to learn to think along those lines . . . [because] to entrust and subject oneself to these mandatory lines of thought and make some progress in them is not easy.” This is what we discovered for ourselves, but may not have articulated in the same way, as we learned to read “difficult” writers, which, depending on your own tastes, could mean Joyce, Faulkner, Borges, Proust, Pynchon, Gertrude Stein, or even, for some readers, Alice Munro or Mavis Gal
lant. Work commonly described as difficult decades ago might seem less so now, as other, similar work has served to make its techniques and strategies less exotic. Similarly, writing we found difficult earlier in our reading lives is likely to seem less so now, because its methods have grown familiar to us.
I once heard a respected teacher and writer bravely admit to having been unable to read Hemingway for many years, not because she disagreed with his attitudes or disliked the stories; she just didn’t get it, didn’t understand what the stories were doing. I say “bravely” because it can be embarrassing to admit that we don’t understand something that everyone else seems to have read and understood. This is a kind of embarrassment we need to outgrow if we’re to develop as readers and as writers. Teachers—and, for that matter, parents—see the other side of this experience. We urge a poem or story on someone because we “think they’re ready for it,” the way we might put a child on a bike without training wheels because it’s time to take the next step—or rather, to discover what it means to be balanced on two wheels. Yes, it’s difficult at first; it might even seem impossible. But then the reader/rider gets accustomed to it and moves on to the next challenge (pedaling up a steep hill, for instance). That’s life.