Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  Some tunes are rinky-dink indeed, and confined to the carnival, but I get the impression that most of these complaints about the music of prose are simply the fears of lead-eared moralists and message gatherers, who want us to believe that a man like Dreiser, who can’t get through three minutes of high tea without blowing his nose on his sleeve, ought to model our manners for us, and tell us truths as blunt and insensitive, but honest and used, as worn shoes.

  What they wish us to forget is another kind of truth: that language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of the sentence, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination too; it is the allocation of the things of the world to their place in the world of the word; it is the configuration of its concepts—not to neglect them—like the stars, which are alleged to determine the fate of we poor creatures who bear their names, suffer their severities, enjoy their presence of mind and the sight of their light in our night … all right … all right … okay: the glow of their light in our darkness.

  Let’s remind ourselves of the moment in Orlando when the queen (who has, old as she is, taken Orlando up as if he were a perfumed hanky, held him close to her cleavage, and made plans to house him between the hills of her hope) sees something other than her own ancient figure in her household mirror:

  Meanwhile, the long winter months drew on. Every tree in the Park was lined with frost. The river ran sluggishly. One day when the snow was on the ground and the dark panelled rooms were full of shadows and the stags were barking in the Park, she saw in the mirror, which she kept for fear of spies always by her, through the door, which she kept for fear of murderers always open, a boy—could it be Orlando?—kissing a girl—who in the Devil’s name was the brazen hussy? Snatching at her golden-hilted sword she struck violently at the mirror. The glass crashed; people came running; she was lifted and set in her chair again; but she was stricken after that and groaned much, as her days wore to an end, of man’s treachery.

  Where shall we begin our praise of this passage, which, in Orlando, is merely its norm? And what shall we observe first among its beauties? perhaps, in that simple opening sentence, the way the heavy stresses which fall on “mean-,” “while” (and equally on the comma’s strong pause), “long,” “win-,” “months,” “drew,” and finally “on” again, make those months do just that (the three on’s, the many m’s and n’s don’t hurt, nor does the vowel modulation: een, ile, ong, in, on, ou, on), or the way the river, whose flow was rapid enough reaching “ran,” turns sluggish suddenly in the middle of the guggle in that word. Or maybe we should admire the two and’s which breathlessly connect a cold, snowy ground with shadowy rooms and barking stags; and then, with confidently contrasting symmetry, how the three semicolons trepidate crashing, running, lifting, while enclosing their two and’s in response. Or should we examine, instead, the complex central image of the figure in the glass, and the way the two clauses beginning with “which” are diabolically placed? or the consequent vibration of the sentence from the public scene of Orlando in embrace to the queen’s personal shock at what she’s seen out the open door, thanks to her “magic” mirror. Nor should the subtle way, through word order mainly, that Virginia Woolf salts her prose with a sense of the era—her intention quite serious but her touch kept light in order to recall the Elizabethan period without parody—be neglected by our applause.

  It is precisely the queen’s fear of spies and murderers which places the mirror where it can peer down the corridor to the cause of her dismay—that is the irony—but it is the placement of the reasons (“which she kept for fear of spies always by her,” etc.) between the fragments of the perceptions (“through the door,” “a boy,” and so on) that convinces the reader of the reality of it. It is not enough to have a handful of ideas, a few perceptions, a metaphor of some originality, on your stove, the writer must also know when to release these meanings; against what they shall lean their newly arrived weight; how, in retrospect, their influence shall be felt; how the lonely trope will combine with some distant noun to create a new flavor.

  What is said, what is sounded, what is put in print like a full plate in front of the reader’s hungry eye, must be weighed against what is kept back, out of view, suggested, implied. The queen, in her disappointed rage, has fallen to the floor, but we are told only that she was lifted and put back in her chair again. And nothing will henceforth be the same in the last, morose moments of her life. On account of a kiss caught by a mirror through a door kept ajar out of fear of another sort of assault.

  In music, sounds form phrases; in prose, phrases form sounds. The sentence fragment almost immediately above was written to demonstrate this, for it naturally breaks into units: “On account of a kiss/caught by a mirror/through a door kept ajar/out of fear of another/sort of assault.” These shards, in turn, can be subdivided further: “On account/of a kiss.…” Certain pieces of the pattern act like hinges: “kiss/caught” “door/kept,” for instance, while possessives play their part, and the grammatical form that consists of an article and a noun (“a count/a kiss/a mirror/a door/a jar/a nother/a sault”) stamps on the sentence its special rhythm.

  Words have their own auditory character. We all know this, but the writer must revel in it. Some open and close with vowels whose prolongation can give them expressive possibilities (“Ohio,” for instance); others are simply vowel heavy (like “aeolian”); still others open wide but then close sharply (“ought”), or are as tight-lipped as “tip,” as unending as “too,” or as fully middled as “balloon.” Some words look long but are said short (such as “rough” and “sleight”); some seem small enough but are actually huge (“otiose” and “nay”). A few words “whisper,” “tintinnabulate,” or “murmur,” as if they were made of their meanings, while “Philadelphia” (already admired) is like a low range of hills. Some words rock, and are jokey, like “okeydokey.” Or they clump, like “lump” and “hump” and “rump” and “stump,” or dash noisily away in a rash of “ash/mash/bash” or “brash/crash/smash/flash” or “gnash/lash/hash/stash/cash” or “clash/trash/splash/potash/succotash.” Vowel changes are equally significant, whether between “ring,” “rang,” and “rung,” “scat” and “scoot,” “pet” and “pat,” “pit” and “pot,” or “squish” and “squooze.”

  The Latinate measures of the great organist Henry James find an additional function for the music of prose. Here all it takes is a parade of the past tense (“he had”) down a street paved with negations.

  He had not been a man of numerous passions, and even in all these years no sense had grown stronger with him than the sense of being bereft. He had needed no priest and no altar to make him for ever widowed. He had done many things in the world—he had done almost all but one: he had never, never forgotten. He had tried to put into his existence whatever else might take up room in it, but had failed to make it more than a house of which the mistress was eternally absent.

  If some men are has-beens, poor Stransom (in James’s judgment) is a had-not-been. The passage is crammed with loss: “bereft,” “widowed,” “failed,” “absent,” in addition to the doubling of “sense,” “no,” “never,” in succeeding sentences, and the gloomy repetition of the past tense, particularly “been” and “done.” Our hero, we cannot help but hear, is a transom. He only looks on. But the music of the passage ties terms together more firmly than its syntax: “being,” for instance, with “bereft,” “done” with “one,” “never” with “ever,” and “what-” with “ever” as well. Each sentence, all clauses, commence with poor Stransom’s pronoun, or imply its presence: “he had, he had, he had” trochee along like a mourning gong.

  Musical form creates another syntax, which overlaps the grammatical and reinforces that set of directions sometimes, or adds another dimension by suggesting that two words, when they alliterate or rhyme, thereby modify each other, even if they are not in any normally
modifying position. Everything a sentence is is made manifest by its music. As Gertrude Stein writes:

  Papa dozes mamma blows her noses.

  We cannot say this the other way.

  Music makes the space it takes place in. I do not mean the baroque chamber, where a quartet once competed against the slide of satin, the sniff of snuff, or the rustle of lace cuffs; or the long symphonic hall full of coughing, whispered asides, and program rattle; or the opera house, where the plot unfolding on the stage plays poorly against the ogling in the boxes and the distractions in the stalls; or even the family’s music room, where heavy metal will one day leave its scratches like chalk screech on the windowpanes—none of these former or future pollutions of our pleasure; but again in that hall of the head (it holds so much!) where, when the first note sounds behind the lids, no late arrivals are allowed to enter, and when the first note sounds as if the piano were putting a single star down in a dark sky, and then, over there, in that darkness, another, the way, for instance, the 1926 sonata of Bartók begins, or a nocturne of Chopin’s, slowly, so we can observe its creation, its establishment of relation; because we do see what we hear, and the music rises and falls or feels far away or comes from close by like from the lobe of the ear, and is bright or dim, wide or thin, or forms chains or cascades, sometimes as obvious as a cartoon of Disney’s, splashy and catchy, and sometimes as continuous and broad and full as an ocean; while at other times there is only a ding here and a ping there in a dense, pitchlike lack of action, and one waits for the sounds to come back and fill the abyss with clangor, as if life were all that is.

  And when we hear, we hear; when we see, and say: “Ah! Sport!” we see; our consciousness of objects is ours, don’t philosophers love to say? and though we share a world, it is, from the point of view of consciousness, an overlapping one: I see the dog with delight, you with fear; I see its deep, moist eyes, you its cruel wet mouth; I hear its happy panting, you its threatening growl; and I remember my own loyal pooch, and you the time a pug pursued you down the street; so we say the same word, “dog,” yet I to welcome and you to warn, I to greet and you to cringe; and even when we think of what our experience means and ponder the place of pets in the human scheme, thus sharing a subject, as we have our encounter, we will pursue our problem differently, organize it in dissimilar ways, and doubtless arrive at opposite ends.

  But I can shape and sound a sentence in such a way my sight of things, my feeling for what I’ve seen, my thoughts about it all, are as fully present as the ideas and objects my words by themselves bear. D. H. Lawrence, for instance, in that great chapter of Sea and Sardinia called “The Spinner and the Monks,” does not simply tell us he saw two monks walking in a garden.

  And then, just below me, I saw two monks walking in their garden between the naked, bony vines, walking in their wintry garden of bony vines and olive trees, their brown cassocks passing between the brown vine-stocks, their heads bare to the sunshine, sometimes a glint of light as their feet strode from under their skirts.

  Anyone can put a pair of monks in a garden and even hang around to watch their no-doubt sandaled feet flash, but Lawrence is a whole person when he perceives, when he repeats, when he plans his patterns; so that, just as he himself says, it is as if he hears them speaking to each other.

  They marched with the peculiar march of monks, a long, loping stride, their heads together, their skirts swaying slowly, two brown monks with hidden hands, sliding under the bony vines and beside the cabbages, their heads always together in hidden converse. It was as if I were attending with my dark soul to their inaudible undertone. All the time I sat still in silence, I was one with them, a partaker, though I could hear no sound of their voices. I went with the long stride of their skirted feet, that slid springless and noiseless from end to end of the garden, and back again. Their hands were kept down at their sides, hidden in the long sleeves and the skirts of their robes. They did not touch each other, nor gesticulate as they walked. There was no motion save the long, furtive stride and the heads leaning together. Yet there was an eagerness in their conversation. Almost like shadow-creatures ventured out of their cold, obscure element, they went backward and forwards in their wintry garden, thinking nobody could see them.

  And we go to and fro here, too, as the sentences do, passing between vowel and idea, perception and measure, moving as the syllables move in our mouth, admiring the moment, realizing how well the world has been realized through Lawrence’s richly sensuous point of view.

  They clothe a consciousness, these sounds and patterns do, the consciousness the words refer to, with its monks and vines, its stilled observant soul, its sense of hearing them speak as well as seeing them striding along together, the quality of mystery and community the passage presents by putting them in the light of a late winter afternoon.

  And I noticed that up above the snow, frail in the bluish sky, a frail moon had put forth, like a thin, scalloped film of ice floated out on the slow current of the coming night. And a bell sounded.

  A beautiful, precise image, translucent itself, is carried forward by an arrangement of f’s and l’s, o’s and u’s, with such security their reader has to feel he’s heard that bell even before it sounds.

  Suddenly the mind and its view have a body, because such sentences breathe, and the writer’s blood runs through them, too, and they are virile or comely, promising sweetness or cruelty, as bodies do, and they allow the mind they contain to move, and the scene it sees to have an eye.

  The soul, when it loves, has a body it must use. Consequently, neither must neglect the other, for the hand that holds your hand must belong to a feeling being, else you are caressing a corpse; and that loving self, unless it can fill a few fingers with its admiration and concern, will pass no more of its passion to another than might a dead, dry stick.

  The music of prose, elementary as it is, limited as it is in its effects, is nonetheless far from frivolous decoration; it embodies Being; consequently, it is essential that that body be in eloquent shape: to watch the mimsy paddle and the fat picnic, the snoozers burn and crybabies bellow … well, we didn’t go to the beach for that.

  THE BOOK AS A CONTAINER OF CONSCIOUSNESS

  “So! You’ve written a book! What’s in it?”

  When Hamlet was asked what he was reading, he replied, “Words, words, words.” That’s what’s in it.

  Imagine words being “in” anything other than the making mouth, the intervening air, the receiving ear. For formerly they were no more substantial than the rainbow, an arch of tones between you and me. “What is the matter, my lord?” Polonius asks, to which Hamlet answers, “Between who?” twisting the meaning in a lawyerlike fashion, although he might have answered more symmetrically: Pages, pages, pages … that is the matter … paper and sewing thread and ink … the word made wood.

  Early words were carved on a board of beech, put on thin leaves of a fiber that might be obtained from bamboo and then bound by cords, or possibly etched in ivory, or scratched on tablets made of moist clay. Signs were chiseled in stone, inked on unsplit animal skin stretched very thin and rolled, or painted on the pith of the papyrus plant. A lot later, words were typed on paper, microfilmed, floppy-disked, Xeroxed, faxed. As we say about dying, the methods vary. Carving required considerable skill, copying a lengthy education, printing a mastery of casting—in every case, great cost—and hence words were not to be taken lightly (they might have been, indeed, on lead). They were originally so rare in their appearance that texts were sought out, signs were visited like points of interest, the words themselves were worshiped; therefore the effort and expense of writing them was mostly devoted to celebrating the laws of the land, recording community histories, and keeping business accounts.

  These marks, each and every one, required a material which would receive them, and a space where they might spread out, since they were becoming visible for the first time, made formerly from air and as momentary as music. They were displacing themselves from their fam
iliar source: the lips, teeth, tongue, the mouth, from which they normally emerged on their journey to an ear; for words were once formed nearly as easily as breathing, heard without effort, taken in automatically, along with their normal surroundings, which were also essential to their understanding—the tone and timbre of the speaker’s voice, a scowl or smile crossing the face like a fox across a clearing, inflections accompanied by gestures as well as confirmed or contradicted by the posture of the body—and shaped into sentences made, as Socrates suggested, by the soul who felt them first, thought them, brought them forth like symptoms of an inner state, and was responsible for them, too, accountable because the psyche itself was their author and knew well the consequences of the word when accurately aimed, when deployed like a phalanx, armored and speared.

  Before there was writing and paper and printing, before words remained in the trail left by their maker like the ashes of a fire or the spoor of a deer, another sort of stability had to be achieved; since it would scarcely do the speaking soul much good or the listener any harm if words were no more felt than a breeze briefly touching the cheek, or no more remembered than the distant ding of cattle bells, or no more noticed than the sounds of breathing, those soft sighs that are with us always, next our ear like a pillow. As we know, many of language’s earliest formations have a mnemonic purpose. They made play with the materialities of speech, breaking into the stream of air that bore their sounds—displaying speed and vehemence, creating succession—and working with the sounds, the ohs and ahs themselves, possibly because, like the baby’s babbling, it was fun, and a fresh feat for a new life, but more practically because when the sense of a sentence or a saying was overdetermined and the words connected by relations other than the ideas they represented by themselves, then they were more firmly posted up in memory and might like a jest be repeated, and like a jingle, acted on, leading to the casting of a vote or the purchase of bread, to the support of the very cause that the sentence, wound like that snake around one of Eve’s limbs to beguile her, had slyly suggested.