Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  So far, the statically presented structure of the sentence has put two other minds in motion: that of the character whose thoughts are being described, and that of a hypothetical Reader. The former is an active, fictive movement of thought, the latter a devoted process of attention. An additional mind of which the sentence must make us aware is that of the capitalized Author, the constructor, for it is certainly worth realizing that although the character feels, in that sentence, insightful, there is no reason to suppose she feels lyrical. She may feel frightened, moved, unsettled; but the author’s mind is in a poetic mode, calm, measured, allusive. The author never thought these phrases in their printed order. The author never thought the sentence the way one might think: What time’s lunch? The author did think a great many other things while in the so-called throes of composition. He wrote many more versions, tried numerous combinations, flopped about as awkwardly as a boated fish, said the words to himself time after time in a displeased mumble, but hoped they sang nevertheless; since the sentences he wants to make are like these roaches, firm, immobile, shaped, with their shell the same as their soul—that’s what he, the writer, is thinking while he writes—and they are also like a residue the reader will find in the morning; for every sentence allowed to remain upon the page will resemble the dazed survivors of a battle, after the dead and wounded have been carried away, when their alternatives have been rejected and erased, to leave some words still standing on the field, but standing as markers over graves.

  Of course, in the case of this particular sentence, written in the first person but in the past tense, the movement of the narrator’s mind is itself multiple. There is what she thought at the time—that is suggested—and there is how she has chosen to think about it later, how she now describes it (which might be as lyrically as the author does, but also might not).

  In any event, and after many years of scribble and erasure, I came finally to the belief that sentences were containers of consciousness, that they were directly thought itself, which is one thing that goes on in consciousness, but they were other things as well, in more devious, indirect ways. Insofar as the words referred, they involved—through those designations—our perceptions; thus a good sentence had to see and hear and smell and touch or taste whatever it was supposed to see and hear and smell and touch or taste; that acuity and accuracy of sensation was, in those sentences that invoked it, essential. Even in sentences that describe a thought instead of a perception, the thought has to be well seen.

  The narrator is writing about the legs of the roach. Both kinds, she says,

  had legs that looked under a glass like the canes of a rose, and the nymph’s were sufficiently transparent in a good light you thought you saw its nerves merge and run like a jagged crack to each ultimate claw.

  The writer has to be sufficiently accurate about the world, he preserves his authority, but what is crucial is not testability; it is, rather, the precision and clarity of the construction, because what the writer is doing is creating a perception his character is supposed to have, and since the story is about “eye-openers,” then the sentence had better seem open-eyed.

  In reading what the character sees, the reader sees; but what the reader sees, of course, is not the thing but a construction. Since we know that we are witnessing a perception, we are, in effect, seeing an act of seeing, not merely an object, which might be seen in a number of ways, because in the text there are no more ways than are written. There is no more object than the object which is made by its description. John Hawkes is the American master of the sentence that sees. When his prose perceives a horse, that horse becomes visual as though for the first time. But what makes Hawkes’s horse so magical is not merely the way it is made of precise visual detail—any vet might equal that—but the sense of responsiveness and appreciation, relish, worship, in the eye’s sight.

  The sentence is a literal line of thought, then, but also an apprehension, sometimes of a thought, often of some sensation. It is also aimed. It has energy, drive, direction, purpose. Now we are dealing, in our artificial consciousness, with the element of desire. Some sentences seem to seep, others to be propelled by their own metrical feet. Some sentences are ponderous, tentative, timid; others are quick, burly, full of beans. Consciousness is equally flaccid or energized; or, in more complex cases, some aspects are nearly asleep, others wholly on the qui vive. The short declarative fragment, brisk and direct as it is, can also, with its calm assurance and its confident closure, reduce the sense of urgency in the sentence, even introduce a feeling of unsleepy repleteness. For instance, in this brief list of the properties of a place:

  The shade is ample, the grass is good, the sky a glorious fall violet; the apple trees are heavy and red, the roads are calm and empty; corn has sifted from the chains of tractored wagons to speckle the streets with gold and with russet fragments of the cob, and a man would be a fool who wanted, blessed with this, to live anywhere else in the world.

  Desire, thought, perception … next, passion: each inhabits the sentence it is made from. Feeling infuses the thought, is pleased or confounded by what is heard or touched or seen, is made despondent by what it expects, or eagerly awaits the fulfillment of its needs. Repetition, diction, the way the language is caressed, spat out, or whispered by the writer—every element, as always—combines to create for the sentence its feeling. I think of it as a kind of conceptual climate. Gertrude Stein believed that emotions were the property of paragraphs, not sentences by themselves, though a sentence might often act as uppity as a paragraph. Here is another sample of my own method of mood management.

  For we’re always out of luck here. That’s just how it is—for instance in the winter. The sides of the buildings, the roofs, the limbs of the trees are gray. Streets, sidewalks, faces, feelings—they are gray. Speech is gray, and the grass where it shows. Every flank and front, each top is gray. Everything is gray: hair, eyes, window glass, the hawkers’ bills and touters’ posters, lips, teeth, poles and metal signs—they’re gray, quite gray. Cars are gray. Boots, shoes, suits, hats, gloves are gray. Horses, sheep, and cows, cats killed in the road, squirrels in the same way, sparrows, doves, and pigeons, all are gray, everything is gray, and everyone is out of luck who lives here.

  Above all, I believe, consciousness is the residence and nurturing place of the imagination. Without impudent comparisons, without freewheeling fancy, without dreams, without invention, without the transformations of metaphor, the burglaries of meaning that symbols commit: without such aeration, prose deflates, our tires turn on air; flat, they will only leave their rubber on the highway; but, in addition, the other elements of the good sentence—desire, feeling, sensation, thought—require the imagination for their construction. Let us go back a moment to the bugs, whose armatures are their armor, for a comparison of their state with our own.

  I suspect if we were as familiar with our bones as with our skin, we’d never bury dead but shrine them in their rooms, arranged as we might like to find them on a visit; and our enemies, if we could steal their bodies from the battle sites, would be museumed as they died, the steel still eloquent in their sides, their metal hats askew, the protective toes of their shoes unworn, and friend and enemy would be so wondrously historical that in a hundred years we’d find the jaws still hung for the same speech and all the parts we spent our life with tilted as they always were—rib cage, collar, skull—still repetitious, still defiant, angel light, still worthy of memorial and affection.

  The finest writing is for the voice. There are several good, not to say decisive, reasons for this. No word is a word by itself. Every word is multiple, and not simply because there are homonyms and homophones hanging around, pretending to be friends. A word is made of sounds. A word is made of marks. A word is made of the little muscle movements in the throat which accompany our interior speech—that invisible, inaudible, yet clearly heard interior talk of which Samuel Beckett made himself the master. So there are two spoken tongues to set against the one we write. A
nd if we allow the written word to stand for the spoken one, and silent speech to precede both, then the written word works in three realms at once, not just one.

  The mouth is our sustainer: with it our body is fed and our soul made articulate. Orality as a developmental stage is as early as any, near to our deepest and often most desperate feelings. The spoken language is learned at the point, and in the manner, in which we learned to live; when we heard love, anger, anxiety, expectation, in the tones of the parental voice, and later began to find the words we had heard forming in our own mouths as if the ear had borne their seed. Moreover, we still communicate at the daily and most personal level by speaking, not by writing, to one another. If the telephone suggests physical closeness at the price of spiritual distance, E-mail promotes that impersonal intimacy sometimes experienced by strangers. Writing has even lost the kinetic character the hand once gave it, or the portable conveyed through its worn and pounded keys. Prefab letters pop onto a screen in full anonymity now, as if the mind alone had made them, our fingers dancing along over the keyboard as unnoticed as breathing until something breaks or the error beep sounds. As Plato feared, the written word can be stolen, counterfeited, bought, released from the responsibility of its writer, sailed into the world as unsigned as a ship unnamed or under borrowed registry. Suppose politicians were required to compose their own lies, use their own poor words, instead of having their opinions catered—how brief would be their hold on our beliefs; how soon would their souls be seen to be as soiled as their socks.

  The sentence—its shape, its sound, the space it makes, its importance to consciousness, its manifestation of the mind/body problem (meaning and thing fastened to the same inscription)—is it in my obsession with the ontology of the word that I find the ground for my own practice? Is that why I emphasize the music of the language, alliterate with the passionate persistence of old poems, wallow in assonance, clutter the otherwise open space of concepts with the clatter and click of dentals and other consonants? Are these the reasons I want the reader’s mouth to move as if reading were being in that moment mastered, and the breath were full of chewable food? No. The reason is that I cannot seem to write in any other way; because sound sometimes rushes ahead of sense, and forces such sense, gasping and panting, to catch up. I often think, overhearing myself at work, that I do not write; I mumble, I whisper, I declaim, I inveigh. My study is full of static when it is full of me.

  Harmonium, Wallace Stevens called one of his books. Harmonica, I’d like to call mine—rude mouth music. That’s because every mark on the page, apart from its inherent visual interest, is playing its part in the construction of a verbal consciousness, and that means commas must become concepts, pauses need to be performed, even the margins have to be sung, the lips rounded as widely as the widest vowel, round as the edges of the world. Oh as in “oral.”

  For that’s where every good idea should be found, melting like a chocolate in the curl of the tongue, against the roof of the mouth.

  If we insist that we write to be spoken (though no one shall speak us; neither time nor training nor custom incline our rare reader to it), then a concept crucial to the understanding of literature and its effects is “voice.” Even when we write in the first person and construct a voice for our invented narrator to speak in, there is always an overvoice in which our character finds a place: the author’s voice, the style which tells us, whoever is speaking—Lear or Hamlet or Juliet—that it is Shakespeare nevertheless, in whose verbal stream they are swimming; or we hear the unmistakable tones of Henry James, of Flaubert or Faulkner, in each rednecked, red-earthed farmer, in every bumbling bourgeois or bewildered American lady.

  Who better to speak than Thoreau of the sound around one, for he chose the quietest of woods to inhabit.

  I kept neither dog, cat, cow, pig, nor hens, so that you would have said there was a deficiency of domestic sounds; neither the churn, nor the spinning-wheel, nor even the singing of the kettle, nor the hissing of the urn, nor children crying, to comfort one. An old-fashioned man would have lost his senses or died of ennui before this. Not even rats in the wall, for they were starved out, or rather were never baited in,—only squirrels on the roof and under the floor, a whip-poor-will on the ridge-pole, a blue jay screaming beneath the window, a hare or woodchuck under the house, a screech owl or a cat owl behind it, a flock of wild geese or a laughing loon on the pond, and a fox to bark in the night. Not even a lark or an oriole, those mild plantation birds, ever visited my clearing. No cockerels to crow nor hens to cackle in the yard. No yard! but unfenced nature reaching up to your very sills. A young forest growing up under your windows, and wild sumachs and blackberry vines breaking through into your cellar; sturdy pitch pines rubbing and creaking against the shingles for want of room, their roots reaching quite under the house. Instead of a scuttle or a blind blown off in the gale,—a pine tree snapped off or torn up by the roots behind your house for fuel. Instead of no path to the front-yard gate in the Great Snow,—no gate—no front-yard,—and no path to the civilized world.

  Even so, even when we hear the unmistakable voice of our friend in the next room, find the cadences of Colette on the page (as, once again, Plato warned us), we cannot be certain what part of the soul is speaking (the spoken language, like the soul, is triply tiered); because when desire, or praxis, says “love,” it is eros that is invoked; when the spirited part of the soul, or doxa, says “love,” it is philia, or friendship, which is suggested; and when reason, the logos, says “love,” it is agape or contemplation which is meant.

  Of course, every philosophical catastrophe is a literary opportunity. Gertrude Stein finally concluded that the “I” who writes masterpieces had to be the “I” of the transcendental ego, the universal “I,” making the text timeless and transcultural. But I am greedy. I like best the “I” that speaks for every layer of the self, sometimes harmoniously, sometimes in discord, as the occasion and the project require. I like ideas best, as I’ve said, when they are most concrete; when, when you think them, you fry them like eggs; when, when you eat them, the yoke is runny with the softest of dreams.

  If words find comfort in the sentence’s syntactical handclasp, and sentences find their proper place like pieces of furniture in the rhetorical space of the paragraph, what shall control each scene as it develops, form the fiction finally as a whole?

  Well, the old answer was always: plot. It’s a terrible word in English, unless one is thinking of some second-rate conspiracy, a meaning it serves very well. Otherwise, it stands for an error for which there’s no longer an excuse. There’s bird drop, horse plop, and novel plot. Story is what can be taken out of the fiction and made into a movie. Story is what you tell people when they embarrass you by asking what your novel is about. Story is what you do to clean up life and make God into a good burgher who manages the world like a business. History is often written as a story so that it can seem to have a purpose, to be on its way somewhere; because stories deny that life is no more than an endlessly muddled middle; they beg each length of it to have a beginning and end like a ballgame or a banquet. Stories are sneaky justifications. You can buy stories at the store, where they are a dime a dozen. Stories are interesting only when they are floors in buildings. Stories are a bore. What one wants to do with stories is screw them up. Stories ought to be in pictures. They’re wonderful to see.

  Still, a little story gets into everything. Thank the Ghost of Fictions Past for that.

  My stories are malevolently anti-narrative, and my essays are maliciously anti-expository, but the ideology of my opposition arrived long after my antagonism had become a trait of character. Like most kids, I loved the nineteenth-century novel with its wealth of colorful detail, its heroes and villains, its sympathy for the common and the ordinary, its smarmy coziness, its clear-cut characters, its unambiguous values (I was born bourgeois); I lapped up its sweet sentimentality; I allowed to beat in my chest its vulgar material heart. Implicit in much of the novel’s melodrama, and e
xplicit in the critics and readers who praised it and made it popular, was the idea that its value rested not on its language, its artifice, its drama, but on its representation of reality. I have no problem with Martin Chuzzlewit as a creature caught in a myth. I can believe in the triumph of the orphan and the importance of “doing good,” at least for as many pages as it takes to complete the text.

  Early on I learned that life was meaningless, since life was not a sign; that novels were meaningful, because signs were the very materials of their composition. I learned that suffering served no purpose; that the good guys didn’t win; that most explanations offered me to make the mess I was in less a mess were self-serving lies. Life wasn’t clear, it was ambiguous; motives were many and mixed; values were complex, opposed, poisoned by hypocrisy, without any reasonable ground; most of passion’s pageants were frauds, and human feelings had been faked for so long, no one knew what the genuine was; furthermore, many of the things I found most satisfactory were everywhere libelously characterized or their very existence was suppressed; and much of adult society, its institutions and its advertised dreams, were simply superstitions that served a small set of people well while keeping the remainder in miserable ignorance.

  Above all, I was struck by the traditional novel’s vanity on behalf of man. When I looked at man, I did not see a piece of noble work, a species whose every member was automatically of infinite worth and the pinnacle of Nature’s efforts. Nor did history, as I read it, support such grandiose claims. Throughout human time, men had been murdering men with an ease that suggested they took a profound pleasure in it, and like the most voracious insect, the entire tribe was, even as I watched, even as I participated, eating its host like a parasite whose foresight did not exceed its greed. Hate, fear, and hunger were the tribal heroes. In Trollope and Thackeray, as skillful as their satire was, flaws became foibles, wickedness the result of poor upbringing, too much port, and a bad digestion. Flaubert saw how things were and told the truth, as if that mattered.