Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  “Limitations of means determines style.” That is the pat answer to many a talk-show question. “With one hand tied behind my back …” is the common boast. The simple can be a show of strength; it can place a method or a bit of material under significant stress so as to see what it is capable of, what its qualities can achieve. In the small and simple atom is a frightful force, a heat equivalent to a nation’s hate, if it is unanimously released, as meaning in a lengthy sentence sometimes waits to the last syllable to explain itself, or a life of persistent disappointment bursts suddenly down the barrel of a gun, years of pent-up letdowns set loose.

  Simplicity can be a boast—“See how I deprive myself”; it can be an emblem of holiness, a claim to virtues that might otherwise never be in evidence: the peasant-loving prince, the modest monarch, unspoiled star, humble savior, rich man’s downcast door. But most of all it is a longing: for less-beset days, for clarity of contrast and against the fuddle of grays, for certainty and security, and the deeper appreciation of things made possible by the absence of distraction, confusion, anxiety, delay. Simplicity understands completeness and closure, the full circle, something we can swing a compass round, or—to hammer out the line—get really straight.

  What it does not understand so well is exuberance, abundance, excess, gusto, joy, absence of constraint, boundless aspiration, mania, indulgence, sensuality, risk, the full of the full circle, variation, elaboration, difference, lists like this, deviousness, concealment, the pleasures of decline, laughter, polyphony, digression, prolixity, pluralism, or that the devil is the hero in the schemeless scheme of things. If our North Pole is Samuel Beckett and our South Pole is Anton Webern, our equator is made by François Rabelais with Falstaff’s belt.

  Thinking now of how complex simplicity is, perhaps we have an answer (though I do not remember previously posing any question). Before the buzzing, blooming abundance of every day, facing the vast regions of ocean and the seemingly limitless stretch of empty space; or—instead—wincing at the news in the daily papers (you had not thought the world—as wide as earth, water, and air are—could contain so much crime, such immense confusion, this daunting amount of pain); or—instead—reading the novels of Henry James and James Joyce and Melville and Mann, or living in Proust or traveling in Tolstoy, you are again impressed by immensity, by the plethora of fact, by the static of statistics and the sheer din of data, by the interrelation of everything, by twists and turns and accumulations, as in this sentence going its endless way; yet as one proceeds in science, as one proceeds through any complex esthetic surface, as one proceeds, the numerous subside in the direction of the few (the Gordian knot is made, it turns out, of a single string), the power of number grasps vastness as though each Milky Way were the sneeze of a cicada; so that slowly perhaps, steadily certainly, simplicity reasserts itself. The simple sentence is achieved.

  Thinking, then, of how simple complexity turns out to be, I can understand, when we began with a bowl chipped from a bit of wood, how its innocence drew suitors. Simplicity disappeared the way a placid pool is broken when a bit of bread brings a throng of greedy carp to boil, or when the mind turns plain mud or simple wood into moving molecules, those into atoms orbiting alarmingly, these into trings, trons, and quarks, until the very mind that made them gives up trying to calculate their behavior. At such times, and in such times as these, don’t we desire the small garden into which we can carry our battered spirit, or perhaps a small room at the top of some tower, a hut in a forest, a minibike instead of a Toyota, a bit of smoked salmon on an impeccable leaf of lettuce, a small legacy from a relative long forgotten whose history is no burden and no embarrassment? only one servant?

  Tanizaki explains to us how the high shine of lacquerware (whose surface under electric light is so harsh and vulgar) becomes softly luminous in the candlelight it was meant for; how the voluminous folds of a lady’s garment may hide her body from us, only to permit her to seduce us with her wit. He allows us to see that the simplest step is nevertheless a step in a complex series, a series whose sum is simple. Cultures are both complex and simple, the way the world is. Having reached that world, with the poet’s help, from a grain of sand, and found that stretch of sand peopled with every sort of sunbather, we must remember to disembody bather and sand again, to simplify the beach and its sighing surf, so that now we watch the water run up that sand, as full of foam as ale is, only to slow and subside and slip back into the sea again, leaving a line at each wave lap—a line as pure as a line by Matisse, a line as purely sensuous as the outline of some of those bathers, lying on a beach one grain of which we’d begun with, when we said we could see the world in a bit of grit.

  THE MUSIC OF PROSE

  To speak of the music of prose is to speak in metaphor. It is to speak in metaphor because prose cannot make any actual music. The music of prose has the most modest of inscriptions. Its notes, if we could imagine sounding them, do not have any preassigned place in an aural system. Hence they do not automatically find themselves pinned to the lines of a staff, or confined in a sequence of pitches. Nor is prose’s music made of sounds set aside and protected from ordinary use as ancient kings conserved the virginity of their daughters. In the first place, prose often has difficulty in getting itself pronounced at all. In addition, any tongue can try out any line; any accent is apparently okay; any intonation is allowed; almost any pace is put up with. For prose, there are no violins fashioned with love and care and played by persons devoted to the artful rubbing of their strings. There are no tubes to transform the breath more magically than the loon can by calling out across a lake. The producers of prose do not play scales or improve their skills by repeating passages of De Quincey or Sir Thomas Browne, although that might be a good idea. They do not work at Miss iss ip pi until they get it right. The sound of a word may be arbitrary and irrelevant to its meaning, but the associations created by incessant use are strong, so that you cannot make the sound m o o n without seeming to mean “moon.” By the time the noun has become a verb, its pronunciation will feel perfectly appropriate to the mood one is in when one moons, say, over a girl, and the “moo” in the mooning will add all its features without feeling the least discomfort. In music, however, the notes are allowed to have their own way and fill the listeners’ attention with themselves and their progress. Nonmusical associations (thinking of money when you hear do-re-me played) are considered irrelevant and dispensable.

  In sum, prose has no notes, no scale, no consistency or purity of sound, and only actors roll its r’s, prolong its vowels, or pop its p’s with any sense of purpose.

  Yet no prose can pretend to greatness if its music is not also great; if it does not, indeed, construct a surround of sound to house its meaning the way flesh was once felt to embody the soul, at least till the dismal day of the soul’s eviction and the flesh’s decay.

  For prose has a pace; it is dotted with stops and pauses, frequent rests; inflections rise and fall like a low range of hills; certain tones are prolonged; there are patterns of stress and harmonious measures; there is a proper method of pronunciation, even if it is rarely observed; alliteration will trouble the tongue, consonance ease its sounds out, so that any mouth making that music will feel its performance even to the back of the teeth and to the glottal’s stop; mellifluousness is not impossible, and harshness is easy; drum roll and clangor can be confidently called for—lisp, slur, and growl; so there will be a syllabic beat in imitation of the heart, while rhyme will recall a word we passed perhaps too indifferently; vowels will open and consonants close like blooming plants; repetitive schemes will act as refrains, and there will be phrases—little motifs—to return to, like the tonic; clauses will be balanced by other clauses the way a waiter carries trays; parallel lines will nevertheless meet in their common subject; clots of concepts will dissolve and then recombine, so we shall find endless variations on the same theme; a central idea, along with its many modifications, like soloist and chorus, will take their turns until, suddenly,
all sing at once the same sound.

  Since the music of prose depends upon its performance by a voice, and since, when we read, we have been taught to maintain a library’s silence, so that not even the lips are allowed to move, most of the music of the word will be that heard only by the head and, dampened by decorum, will be timorous and hesitant. That is the hall, though, the hall of the head, where, if at all, prose (and poetry, too, now) is given its little oral due. There we may say, without allowing its noise to go out of doors, a sentence of Robert South’s, for instance: “This is the doom of fallen man, to labour in the fire, to seek truth in profundo, to exhaust his time and impair his health and perhaps to spin out his days, and himself, into one pitiful, controverted conclusion”; holding it all in the hush of our inner life, where every imagined sound we make is gray and no more material than smoke, and where the syllables are shaped so deeply in our throats nothing but a figment emerges, an eidolon, a shadow, the secondhand substance of speech.

  Nevertheless, we can still follow the form of South’s sentence as we say it to ourselves: “This is the doom of fallen man.…” What is?

  … to labour in the fire …

  … to seek truth in profundo …

  … to exhaust his time …

  and … [to] impair his health …

  and perhaps … to spin out his days …

  and … [to spin out] himself …

  “into one pitiful, controverted conclusion.” That is, we return again and again to the infinitive—“to”—as well as to the pileup of “his” and “him,” and if we straighten the prepositions out, all the hidden repeats become evident:

  … to labour into one pitiful, controverted conclusion …

  … to seek truth in one pitiful, controverted conclusion …

  … to exhaust his time in one pitiful, controverted conclusion …

  … [to] impair his health [obtaining] one pitiful, controverted conclusion …

  … to spin out his days into one pitiful, controverted conclusion …

  … [to spin out] himself into one pitiful, controverted …

  To labour, seek, exhaust, impair, spin out … what? Work, truth, time, health, days, himself. Much of this tune, said sotto voce in any case, doesn’t even get played on any instrument, but lies inside the shadow of the sentence’s sound like still another shadow.

  So South’s prose has a shape which its enunciation allows us to perceive. That shape is an imitation of its sense, for the forepart is like the handle of a ladle, the midsections comprise the losses the ladle pours, and the ending is like a splashdown.

  This is the doom of fallen man, to labour in the fire,

  to seek truth in profundo,

  to exhaust his time

  and impair his health

  and perhaps to spin out his days,

  and himself,

  into one pitiful, controverted conclusion.

  In short, one wants South to say: “pour out his days …” “in two one pit eee full, conn trow verr ted conn clue zeeunn …” so as to emphasize the filling of the pit. However, “spin” does anticipate the shroud which will wrap around and signify “the doom of fallen man.”

  In short, in this case, and in a manner that Handel, his contemporary, would approve, the sound (by revealing the spindle “to” around which the sentence turns and the action that it represents is wound) certainly enhances the sense.

  However, South will not disappoint us, for he plays all the right cards, following our sample with this development: “There was then no pouring, no struggling with memory, no straining for invention.…” We get “pour” after all, and “straining” in addition. The pit is more than full; it runneth over.

  Often a little diction and a lot of form will achieve the decided lilt and accent of a nation or a race. Joyce writes “Irish” throughout Finnegans Wake, and Flann O’Brien’s musical arrangements also dance a jig. Here, in O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, Mr. Shanahan is extolling the virtues of his favorite poet, that man of the pick and people, Jem Casey:

  “Yes, I’ve seen his pomes and read them and … do you know what I’m going to tell you, I have loved them. I’m not ashamed to sit here and say it, Mr. Furriskey. I’ve known the man and I’ve known his pomes and by God I have loved the two of them and loved them well, too. Do you understand what I’m saying, Mr. Lamont? You, Mr. Furriskey?

  Oh that’s right.

  Do you know what it is, I’ve met the others, the whole lot of them. I’ve met them all and know them all. I have seen them and I have read their pomes. I have heard them recited by men that know how to use their tongues, men that couldn’t be beaten at their own game. I have seen whole books filled up with their stuff, books as thick as that table there and I’m telling you no lie. But by God, at the heel of the hunt, there was only one poet for me.”

  Although any “Jem” has to sparkle if we’re to believe in it, and even though his initials, “JC,” are suspicious, I am not going to suggest that “Casey” is a pun on the Knights of Columbus.

  “No ‘Sir,’ no ‘Mister,’ no nothing. Jem Casey, Poet of the Pick, that’s all. A labouring man, Mr. Lamont, but as sweet a singer in his own way as you’ll find in the bloody trees there of a spring day, and that’s a fact. Jem Casey, an ignorant Godfearing upstanding labouring man, a bloody navvy. Do you know what I’m going to tell you, I don’t believe he ever lifted the latch of a school door. Would you believe that now?”

  The first paragraph rings the changes on “known” and “loved,” while the second proceeds from “know” and “met” to “seen” and “heard,” in a shuffle of sentences of the simplest kind, full of doubled vowels, repeated phrases, plain talk, and far-from-subtle rhyme, characteristics that lead it to resemble the medieval preacher’s rhythmic prose of persuasion. It is the speech, of course, of the barroom bore and alcoholic hyperbolist, a bit bullyish and know-it-all, even if as empty of idea as a washed glass, out of which O’Brien forms an amusing though powerful song of cultural resentment.

  It is sometimes said that just as you cannot walk without stepping on wood, earth, or stone, you cannot write without symbolizing, willy-nilly, a series of clicks, trills, and moans; so there will be music wherever prose goes. This expresses an attitude both too generous and too indifferent to be appropriate. The sentence with which Dreiser begins his novel The Financier, “The Philadelphia into which Frank Algernon Cowperwood was born was at his very birth already a city of two hundred and fifty thousand and more,” certainly makes noise enough, and, in addition to the lovely “Philadelphia,” there are “Algernon” and “Cowperwood,” which most people might feel make a mouthful; but the words, here, merely stumble through their recital of facts, happy, their job done, to reach an end, however lame it is. Under different circumstances, the doubling of “was” around “born” might have promised much (as in Joyce’s paradisal phrase “when all that was was fair”); however, here it is simply awkward, and followed unnecessarily by another “birth,” the reason, no doubt, for Dreiser’s mumpering on about the population. After another sentence distinguished only by the ineptness of its enumeration (“It was set with handsome parks, notable buildings, and crowded with historic memories”), the author adds fatuousness to his list of achievements: “Many of the things that we and he knew later were not then in existence—the telegraph, telephone, express company, ocean steamer, or city delivery of mails.” “We and he” do ding-dong all right, but rather tinnily. Then Dreiser suffers a moment of expansiveness (“There were no postage-stamps or registered letters”) before plunging us into a tepid bath of banality whose humor escapes even his unconscious: “The street-car had not arrived, and in its place were hosts of omnibuses, and for longer travel, the slowly developing railroad system still largely connected with canals.” It makes for a surreal image, though: those stretches of track bridged by boats; an image whose contemplation we may enjoy while waiting for the streetcar to arrive.

  “Bath of banality” is a bit sheepish itsel
f, and brings to mind all the complaints about the artificiality of alliteration, the inappropriateness of rhyme in prose, the unpleasant result of pronounced regular rhythms in that workaday place, the lack of high seriousness to be found in all such effects: in short, the belief that “grand” if not “good” writing undercuts its serious and sober message when it plays around with shape and the shape of its sounds; because, while poetry may be permitted to break wind and allow its leaves to waltz upon an anal breeze, prose should never suggest it had eaten beans, but retain the serious, no-nonsense demeanor of the laboring man in At Swim-Two-Birds.