John Crowley’s, Charlotte Bacon’s, and Rikki Ducornet’s—indeed, just about every writer known for both beauty of language and vivid scene painting. The reason to call it a “trick,” rather than a technique, strategy, or method, is because it doesn’t always work in every instance with every reader every time. It rarely works in the same way with the same reader in repeated readings of the same text. Because it’s fundamentally psychological, its success tends toward a statistical existence across a general audience. Yet, statistically, readers find it highly pleasurable, even though three or four readers will often argue over why it works and when, indeed, it doesn’t. This book several times discusses how it’s done. If you can wrap your mind around it, it’s interesting to try.
Before we get on to the “how,” though, let’s talk a bit about the “why” and the “what.”
VI
During a recent conversation I was having with a friend, he picked up his well-read Vintage paperback of Ulysses, opened it to page 36, and said, “Listen to this: ‘On his wise shoulders through the checkerwork of leaves the sun flung spangles, dancing coins.’ Now, I love that sentence. But why is it better to write that than, say, ‘Sunlight fell on him through leaves’? Or even to omit it altogether and get on with the story, our day in Dublin?”
Actually my friend had already given the reason: because he loves it. A possible reason to love it is because it makes two things pop up in the mind more vividly than does the sentence “Sunlight fell on him through leaves.” One is what specifically happened at that particular time when light fell through those particular leaves; it has been described. In some light, in some venues, when someone walks under a tree, the bits of light simply slide over him or her. In others, such as this one, when, yes, a breeze is passing, they dance. The second thing that pops up is your awareness of the possibilities for the person in that space of shadow and light—in Joyce’s case the jocularly anti-Semitic Mr. Deasy, whose know-nothing claim that there are no Jews in Ireland sets up a controlling irony for the novel: Leopold Bloom, who represents Ulysses to Stephen’s Telemachus, is a Dublin Jew. The combination of specific description and strong implication (in this case, the irony in the word “wise”) is one that, to a statistically large sampling of readers, affords a more vivid reading experience than the simple “statement of information.” As well, because the sentence mimes what it describes—that is, it dances—in a manner I discuss in the essay “After Almost No Time at All the String on Which He had Been Pulling and Pulling Came Apart into Two Separate Pieces So Quickly He Hardly Realized It Had Snapped, or: Reflections on ‘The Beach Fire,’” it calls up a chain of further implications about the way perceptions and words dance and are flung about through the day, which the reader can take as far as he or she wishes.
Now, such combinations of presentation and implication are a trick—though it’s one used by the J-Writer who wrote many of the really good parts in the early books of the Bible (the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, for instance), by Homer throughout the Iliad and the Odyssey, and by Shakespeare in his plays and sonnets; also by Joyce, Woolf, and Nabokov. (Pater located it as an element in the true genius of Plato, above and beyond any of his specific philosophical arguments.) I persist in calling it a trick because of these, yes, intermittent successes. But it works for enough readers, enough of the time, to keep writers such as G. K. Chesterton and Djuna Barnes in print, when the political (or, in Chesterton’s case, religious) content of their work has become highly out of favor, if not downright repellent. We love a sentence only partially because of what it means, but even more for the manner and intensity through which it makes its meaning vivid.
People with whom the trick tends not to work include people who are just learning the language and/or who have no literary background in their own or any other language before they start. It tends to include people who know exactly what they’re reading for, and who are not interested in getting any other pleasure from a book except the one they open the first page expecting.
The vividness comes from a kind of surprise, the surprise of meeting a series of words that, one by one, at first seem to have nothing to do with the topic—striding under a tree on a June day—but words that, at a certain point, astonish us with their economy, accuracy, and playful vitality. Again, some of it will work on one reader, whereas others will only find it affected. But it’s managed to remain of part of literature for several thousand years.
Now, “Sunlight fell on him through leaves” has a precise economy and its own beauty. We can enjoy that, too. But the other—through that combination of specific statement and implication—puts a higher percentage of readers closer to the pulse and texture of the incident. Rhetorically, it makes a greater number of educated readers feel there’s a shorter distance between words and occurrence. What we are talking about here is the (very real) pleasure of good writing versus the delight of writerly talent.
If an early nineteenth-century essayist had written, “The true and the beautiful are largely the same and inextricably entailed. That is one of the few self-evident facts of the modern world. Indeed, I believe, if you have understood that, you can pretty much negotiate the whole of modern life,” I doubt anyone would remember it today.
But around 1820, at the conclusion of his poem in five ten-line-stanzas, “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” Keats wrote:
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.
The economy, symmetry, and specificity here—the performance of its meaning through implication, accuracy, and bodily rhythm (the rhythmic and alliterative emphasis on “all,” “need,” and “know”; its encompassing of both wonder and “on earth” despair)—lift it to a level of immediacy that won’t shake loose from the mind. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” is, of course, in the same rhetorical mode as “Sunlight fell through leaves.” But “—that is all / ye know on earth and all ye need to know” is a statement that implies a broad and complex argument. As you unravel those implications, you can find yourself facing a declaration of the tragic limits of what, indeed, can be known: you really don’t know anything else, and the bare sufficiency of that basis for knowledge has been the universe’s great gift to humanity, a gift from which all law and science and art have been constructed. For behind all we presume to be knowledge, whether correct or incorrect, some correspondence between elements in the world must have been noted at some time or other, a correspondence that was once assumed beautiful, fascinating, or at least interesting—before anyone could go on to judge it useful, efficient, or functional. A correspondence must be noticed before it can be evaluated, can be judged. What makes us notice anything is always some aspect of the aesthetic. The three categories—the useful, the efficient, the functional—already must at least begin as aesthetic constructions, which, only after they have been established through aesthetic correspondences, can go on to support usable judgments on what subsequently we can find in them. That is how all knowledge—however useful—has its basis in the apperception of the beautiful—even to the hideously ugly and the painful. When Keats’s words have impelled my thoughts in this direction, his lines have made me weep the way the tragic knowledge we took with us on our expulsion from Eden occasionally does.
To have that response to the Garden of Eden story, I have to read the text very slowly, leaving out the first chapter of Genesis that contains the famous seven days of creation (introduced by the P-Writer—or Priestly Writer—some three hundred years later). I have to follow what the J-Writer in the eighth century BCE alone put down, word by word, phrase by phrase; and I have to follow the Hebrew version beside two or three English translations, as my own Hebrew is simply not good enough to read it in the original unassisted. I have to pay particular attention to the humor of the text (“I bet you thought snakes always crawled on the ground,” the J-Writer, who first wrote her tale in the later years of the Court of David, jests with her audience; “I bet you thought all human beings had been born out of women for all time.”
