Degree of Difficulty, pt. 1

I've been complaining a lot lately about the way that we discuss -- or rather, don't discuss -- difficulty in fiction.  To recap, it seems to me that the critical response to a "tough" or "inaccessible" book often falls into one of two categories: either the reviewer feigns comprehension, praising and criticizing so vaguely and so respectfully that calling him out on his confusion is nigh well impossible, or, perhaps even worse, the reviewer adheres to the Lev Grossman school of preemptive anti-intellectualism, declaring that the whole project of the novel or story collection in question is defunct, academic, "a drag," with no real regard for the specific approaches, techniques, and aesthetic of the work in question.

The problem with both of these approaches, in my opinion, is that they're motivated by something other than the writer's attempt to convey his own experience of a particular book.  They are political, not in the sense of national party politics, but in the more general sense in which we might describe "office politics" at a company or "campus politics" at a college or university.  The writer who pens, for example, exclusively positive reviews of experimental or avant-garde works is trying to pony up a readership, not so much for the book in question, but for other books of the same ilk, including, perhaps, his own; he also may hope to curry favor with other, more successful writers, meaning that the review is not, in fact, intended as a communication with other potential readers, but with the author of the book under review -- on the street, we call this "sucking up." 

On the other hand, the anti-intellectual reviewer, while seeming to go on the offensive, actually is also playing defense, trying to protect the novelistic conventions (and pleasures) of yore from what he sees as an invading tribe of egg-headed marauders.  Like the Fox News nutjobs who remind us every year that Christmas is under attack, these bozos seem to think that the works of Dickens and Austen (and Franzen and Updike) are in dire peril of being crowded off the shelves by the likes of Joy Williams and Gilbert Sorrentino.  It's all a game of literary politics, and like any other form of politics, those politics cast every statement made under them in the seedy light of half-truth and overgeneralization. 

Yet, what is it that actually makes a book difficult?  And why are some kinds of perceived difficulty considered more impenetrable than others?

Perhaps the most extreme form of difficulty can be found in books that are difficult at the level of the sentence.  The obvious example that springs to mind here is James Joyce, though he's not really an author I can handily cite.  Confession time: I have never read Finnegan's Wake, and to be completely honest, it is likely that I will be nothing but a rotten smell behind a locked apartment door long before I ever attempt it.  I have, however, opened it, and this is what greeted me within:

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.  Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen-core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Lauren's County gorgios while they went double their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick..."

This is the kind of prose that sends me reeling through the stacks in the direction of the T's, groping around for Thurber's collected works as an antidote.  I don't claim this is a universal reaction.  But what, exactly, makes it so off-putting to me? 

I'll admit it: there are some things I'd rather not find on my bookshelf.

I'd like to point out a couple of things that have occurred to me.  The first is that, although I certainly don't know the meanings of all the words in the preceding passage, I don't think the issue is strictly one of vocabulary.  As Lewis Carroll definitively proved in his wonderful poem "Jabberwocky," it's possible to have a piece of writing that thrives not on the reader's facility with the language used but simply with the context.  Here's a brief passage from that poem that illustrates my point:

"He took his vorpal sword in hand: / Long time the manxome foe he sought – / So rested he by the Tumtum tree, / And stood awhile in thought. / And, as in uffish thought he stood, / The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame, / Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, / And burbled as it came!"

At least seven of the words in those eight short lines are nonsense words, words that literally no one could possibly understand.  Yet Carroll does two things to keep the verse from becoming incomprehensible.  The first is that he keeps the sentence structure simple.  We're never perplexed about what part of speech a word is.  It's especially clear to us who the two subjects of these sentences are – "he" and "the Jabberwock" – and the verbs Carroll uses are action verbs, placing these subjects in motion.  This gives us the illusion that we can visualize the scene he's laying out, although we of course supply our own meaning to both "Jabberwock" and "whiffling" in the second sentence.  The second thing Carroll does is place the "difficult" (i.e. nonsense) words mostly in what I'd describe as low-impact locations in the sentences.  By this I mean that the difficult words are most often used as modifiers (specifically here, as adjectives, five out of seven times in this passage), which could be removed without significantly changing the sentence's meaning.  For example:

"He took his sword in hand: / Long time the foe he sought – / So rested he by the tree, / And stood awhile in thought. / And, as in thought he stood..."

Though the modifiers are necessary aesthetically – the verse clearly would lose its unique sound, and the imaginative landscape it evokes, without them – they are not completely essential for meaning.  (Sidenote: interestingly enough, the verse in the poem that uses the most nonsense words at high-impact points in the sentence ["Twas brillig, and the slithy toves..."] is even itself a kind of large-scale modifier, setting the scene just before and after the in-scene action takes place.)  Thus, the reader can appreciate these words as decoration, embellishment, without relying on them for comprehension.  These words function like the hippy chick friend who sees the world as poetry, who's moved almost to tears by the indoor rainbow that hangs in the air, however briefly, one afternoon in the mall when the fire alarm goes off and the ceiling sprinklers rain down unnecessarily.  Having her there makes everything more beautiful, more meaningful, but you don't necessarily want to copy her notes from trigonometry class.

Yet in the passage I quoted from Finnegan's Wake, the sentence structure works against the reader's attempt to contextualize the unfamiliar words.  The first sentence – or perhaps I should say mid-sentence – is in fact the more comprehensible of the two I quoted.  The second sentence, in addition to its difficult language, immediately presents several grammatical challenges.  For one thing, at least in American English, we're accustomed to "neither/nor" used in tandem as a conjunction.  Since the sentence doesn't use a "neither," the "nor" that then appears immediately sent me looking back, assuming I'd missed something.  For another, the sentence structure doesn't place the words that are (to me) difficult or incomprehensible at low-impact spots; it doesn't even make the parts of speech obvious (is "avoice" being used as a noun?). 

I'm not saying any of this as a judgment, positive or negative, of the sentences in question, but merely as a statement of fact: the James Joyce sentences repel me, not primarily because they employ words that I don't recognize, but because they don't seem to anticipate my lack of recognition of those words.  Opening Finnegan's Wake is like opening a novel and discovering it's in German: there's a sense in which I feel that this wasn't written for me.

Yet, there are times in my own experience as a reader when a work that was difficult at the level of the sentence did speak to me, even if that wasn't apparent at first.  The obvious example of this, as I've noted before on this site, is the work of Thomas Pynchon.  At the sentence level, Pynchon is, I think, a lot more easily parsable than late-period Joyce, but here's an example of a sentence from the opening section of Gravity's Rainbow that offers its own brand of WTF.  Here, Pynchon starts describing one of Captain Geoffrey "Pirate" Prentice's famous banana breakfasts that he cooks for his men:

"Now there grows among all the rooms, replacing the night's old smoke, alcohol and sweat, the fragile, musaceous odor of Breakfast: flowery, permeating, surprising, more than the color of winter sunlight, taking over not so much through any brute pungency or volume as by the high intricacy to the weaving of its molecules, sharing the conjurer's secret by which – though it is not often Death is told so clearly to fuck off – the living genetic chains prove even labyrinthine enough to preserve some human face down ten or twenty generations... so the same assertion-through-structure allows this war morning's banana fragrance to meander, repossess, prevail."

Whew.  What's puzzling in this sentence is different from what was puzzling the earlier examples: with the exception of a single word ("musaceous"), I'm familiar with all the vocabulary employed here.  Even at the larger level of images, there's nothing evoked that I can't easily translate to a concrete visual.  "Old smoke, alcohol and sweat," "winter sunlight," even "living genetic chains" are all perfectly clear, straightforward, and not particularly unfamiliar.  Yet what confuses readers here – or at least what I found confusing upon first encountering it – is the rhetorical structure in which these component parts are placed.  In comparing the scent of the banana breakfast with DNA, Pynchon is not trying to better or more clearly evoke the sensory experience of the breakfast.  He skips from the level of description (which the reader anticipates at this junction) and goes straight to the level of themes, making a direct argument about the way an object's internal intricacy, its encoding, allows it to survive despite external threat.

This is a move that many traditional writers make – but at important moments, moments when the characters themselves might step back to observe the world around them with heightened clarity.  Pynchon, though, just drops this in almost at random, in the middle of a scene establishing the men's daily routine.  A lot of readers find this technique jarring and intrusive, and I can certainly see why.  The effect of it – and several other sentences like it over the course of the book – is to create a world so densely riddled with rich veins of meaning that the present action often seems distant or absurd by comparison.

There are many, many other ways that fiction can be difficult at the level of the sentence.  Another obvious one that springs to mind is when the book is written in the voice of a character or narrator whose dialect does not match the reader's: a classic case of "what's tough for me may be easy for you," and probably a secondary issue for American readers like me tackling Irish writers like Joyce.  But I guess my main purpose here, rather than cataloging every variety of difficulty at the level of the sentence, is to point out the perhaps obvious fact that a writer's style is not merely a superficial element, a mannerism to be "gotten past." 

Sentences are what a novel is made of, the air you have to breathe when you're inside the book.  When sentences are difficult, I think that more than a book's length or subject matter or themes, they are the biggest impediment to the work reaching a broad audience.  However, I also think that, if used purposefully, difficult sentences can allow writers to communicate ideas and images to their admittedly more limited audience that could not be expressed any other way.  The question, in evaluating a work, shouldn't be, "Is this hard to read?" but "What makes this hard to read, and why?"  Our desire to look past the language to the thing/world/character being conveyed is so strong, though, sometimes it makes this question tough to ask, let alone answer.

Writing in a Material World, or: When Wishing Makes It So

At the end of the children's novel The Neverending Story by Michael Ende, the kingdom of Fantasia has been destroyed by the Nothing, an all-consuming force that literally obliterates everything in its path. But a scrap of hope remains in the protagonist Bastian, a confused kid who got sucked into this magical land by reading about it in a dusty old book. Moon Child, Fantasia's empress, appears before him and explains that the future of her kingdom is in his hands: "Fantasia will be born again through your wishes, my Bastian. Through me they become reality." Bastian asks how many wishes he gets. Moon Child replies, "As many as you want -- the more, the better. Fantasia will be all the more rich and varied." In the face of this unlimited freedom, Bastian chokes, his mind suddenly blank, and Moon Child grows concerned. If he can't think of anything, she warns him, "there won't be any more Fantasia."

I will use any excuse to put pictures of cute dogs on this blog.

You do not have to be Gilbert Sorrentino to detect some metafictional hijinks going on in this passage. Back when I read it, circa 1993, I still licked "scratch-and-sniff" stickers to see if they tasted as good as they smelled and considered non-matching socks a couture fashion statement. Yet even I could see a glimmer of something self-conscious here, a statement about the make-believe aspect of the book's own fictive universe. This was the first, and perhaps truest, lesson I absorbed about the nature of the writer's task: that the more wishes you make -- the more images and characters and scenarios you articulate in language -- the richer your fantasy grows.

Around the same time, I remember thinking hard about the lyrics of "Hark the Herald Angels Sing," a chart-topper during our Advent-season chapel services in my Christian school. In one of the later verses, there's a line that goes, "veiled in flesh the God-head see/hail incarnate deity," referring, of course, to baby Jesus's grand entrance through the fabled virginal meat curtains. There was something I found particularly entrancing about the words "veiled in flesh," the same kind of twisted logic I associated with another favorite at the time, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. After all, in reality, a veil hides something visible -- usually flesh, in fact. But if the flesh itself is a veil, what does it conceal? Isn't the bare flesh, by definition, naked? If you stripped the flesh (and blood and bone) from a person, what would be revealed? Wouldn't you just be left with nothing? Or at the very least, nothing you could sing about?

Religious folks would no doubt have a smart answer to this question, but I'm not religious and I never claimed to be smart. And I'm not trying to make a religious point here, but an aesthetic one, which is this: in a piece of writing, there are two forces, the force of Something and the force of Nothing. Something is just what it sounds like: it's the stuff of the world and the imagination, falling out onto the page. Something is made of images, characters, names -- it's flesh. You can claim there's a god* under there somewhere, but you'd be hard pressed to see him if there wasn't skin on top. Then there's the force of Nothing. Nothing doesn't have to be a bad thing, and in fact, it's essential at the beginning of a project. Nothing is the whole roaring universe of possibility. In a way, I could just as easily call it the force of Anything, since the beauty of Nothing is that it doesn't preclude any choice the author can make. The problem comes when, like Bastian, the author freezes in the face of this dizzying array and finds himself unable to choose -- unable to veil his god in anything the reader can see.

I'm saying all this before returning to the subject of my last post because, to me, these ideas are all connected with the act of naming, not just characters, but the stuff of a character's world. One way that the Nothing can win is obvious: it's writer's block, when the author finds himself unable or unwilling to choose a single path from amid the myriad that present themselves. Thomas Mann once said, "A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people," and while that sounds like a pretentious bullshit excuse for drinking during the day, there is a grain of truth to it. The more a person reads and writes, the more possibilities and approaches appear, and the larger the Nothing becomes. But the second way the Nothing can win is more insidious, occurring within the work itself.

When I was in a writing workshop during college, we read a couple of student stories where the gender of the first person narrator went unspecified. The class was somewhat divided about whether to regard this as a problem or not, and rightly so. There are certainly times when ambiguity -- about gender, race, etc. -- can itself be a distinct and provocative choice. But I remember being bothered at the time not just by the fact the genders were going unstated, but by the attitudes of some of the students, including the author of one of the stories, who said it "didn't matter."

On one hand, of course, this is inarguably true: it's not as though fictional characters are real people who will eventually be faced with, for example, having to choose the men's or women's restroom in a crowded movie theater whether the author likes it or not. But the author's willingness to relinquish such a basic aspect of her own creation, not out of hopes of making a statement but simply out of apathy, needled me deeply. One might suggest, of course, that I'm misreading the statement, "It doesn't matter." Perhaps the author herself believes gender shouldn't matter, and wants that attitude to be reflected in her fiction, by creating a world where it doesn't. Even if this is case, though, the author still has to sketch in that world for us, because it's a place no one currently living on earth has ever visited. Alternately, one might suggest that the narrator's gender doesn't matter to the narrator. Yet if the narrator's gender does not matter to the narrator, the fact of regarding oneself as genderless in a gendered world is an interesting enough character trait to merit the story's attention.
Again, I'm not arguing that there aren't times when ambiguity isn't the most powerful choice. But a writer can't use that as an excuse to avoid making a choice at all. The problem here, I think, is that when writers see an opportunity not to make a decision, not to pin something down, they often seize it. To paraphrase Yogi Berra, if they see a fork in the road, they take it. And this goes not just for student writers, but a lot of published ones too. A favorite teacher of mine once sadly observed, "In contemporary fiction, nobody has a last name or a job." It's worth wondering why not.


*I use "god" here as a stand-in for any intangible quality of fiction — its "heart," its "soul," etc.

Name That Loon

Names in fiction have a curious power, a meaning that stretches far beyond what they literally denote. The names of characters often supply basic expository information about gender, ethnicity, social class, and age, and they may smuggle in allusions or thematic hints as well. But in a more intuitive sense, characters' names stand in for those characters' physiognomies on the page: the stems, extenders, cross-strokes, and tails express, almost subliminally, qualities of the individuals' interior lives and the nature of their relationship to the world.

Names are ripples rising to the surface of language that mark a stirring in its murky, inexpressible depths. Even the most vivid physical descriptions -- occurring as they do just once each -- do not stick if they are at odds with a character's name, which is repeated dozens of times in a story and hundreds (or more) in a novel, linked inextricably with her every appearance in the text. More than once in writing workshops, I've observed widespread confusion about the identity of a character who was randomly or carelessly named, both on the part of readers ("Wait -- so Julie is the endocrinologist? I thought that was Patty.") but more importantly on the part of the author ("Oh, shit -- it's supposed to say 'Patty' there."). In my own writing life, I've certainly noticed that I can't connect fully with a character until I've found the perfect name for her, a condition that's led to sleepless nights and lots of obsessive overthinking. Plus, you'd be surprised at the looks you get in Rite Aid buying a baby name book along with condoms and beer.

Little Ender will have a wonderful childhood.

As I've suggested in the past, I am a big believer that, all arguments to the contrary, creative writing can be taught, and that most writers benefit from studying it rigorously: it's a craft, and like any craft it requires discipline and the mastery, or at least understanding, of certain fundamental techniques. Yet in a way, naming represents all the things about writing that I don't think can be taught. It's something that arises out of a personal, nearly tactile relationship with language; like the made-up words Quentin Coldwater utters during his entrance exam at the magic academy in The Magicians, it's a private, idiosyncratic means of expression erupting into something that everyone can see. There are no guidelines for it, no rules. (OK, maybe one: don't name a superintendent "Mr. Duper," unless you're Thomas Pynchon.) But you know before anyone else does when you're doing it wrong.

Riddle Me This

Knock knock.
Who's there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock knock.
Who's there?
Orange.
Orange who?
Orange you glad I didn't say banana again?

Unfortunately for the adults in my life, the above is the first joke I learned as a small child, and for awhile, it was the only one I told.  I still remember the satisfaction it gave me.  There's a power in the structure of a joke: the set up (knock knock), the complication (which is this case is drawn out for an extra two beats: banana, banana, orange), and then the resolution ("Orange you glad I didn't say banana again?").  In this most basic sense, this is the structure of a conventional story.

In the mid-60's, a young man was dating a girl named Lorraine that his parents hoped he would marry.  However, he was in love with a hippy chick who played folk guitar and called herself "Clearly."  Despite his feelings he allowed himself to be pushed into an engagement with Lorraine.  Fortunately for him, on the day before their wedding, Lorraine unthinkingly stepped in front of a bus and was killed instantly.  Upon hearing the news, the young man declared, "I can see Clearly now, Lorraine is gone!"

The similarity between jokes and fables or parables is, to me, obvious.  Both "explain away" weird imagery or bizarre events with a punchline that all at once reveals the organizing force behind the narrative, a force that, up until that point, has gone unnoticed.  The moral of, say, the ant and the grasshopper ("Be prepared for lean times") may not be funny, but it reduces these characters and their situation as a tool we can apply to our own lives, in the same way that "I can see Clearly now, Lorraine is gone," reduces the proto-characters in the love triangle to the homophonious sounds of their names.  The last line releases us from our emotional investment in the dear departed Lorraine in the same way the moral releases us from our investment in the dear departed grasshopper.

Immediately the fairy gave a stroke with her wand, and in a moment all that were in the hall were transported into the prince's dominions. His subjects received him with joy. He married Beauty, and lived with her many years, and their happiness -- as it was founded on virtue -- was complete.

We expect a similar kind of release in the endings of longer stories.  The fairy tale's "happily ever after" is the most obvious example.  An ending of "happily ever after" moves the characters back from the specificity of a human situation unfolding in space and time into an abstract, purely fictive zone.  In the Disney film version of Beauty and the Beast, this is visually literalized: at the end the animated characters we've been watching for nearly the whole film freeze for all time into a still image made of stained glass.  But this is also true in many stories intended for adults.  Jane Austen's novels retreat into stasis: at the end of Sense and Sensibility, we are told in the last line that the two sisters, fundementally opposed throughout the novel, "live without disagreement between themselves, or producing coolness between their husbands."  And modern novels too: Joe Meno's The Boy Detective Fails concludes with the (up till now) solitary, nostalgic, and clinically depressed title character declaring, "It's all over now.  I'm not young anymore.  No more adventures, no more mysteries, no more secrets," to which his lady love gives the suitably vague response, "We'll make our own secrets now, maybe."  After endings like these, further action isn't just omitted; it's actually impossible under the terms of the story we've just witnessed.

I'm not categorically dismissing endings of this punchline- or "happily ever after"-variety, because I think they can be remarkably effective.  But they do bear more resemblance to the structure of a joke than to the structure (or rather non-structure) of "real life."  So why is it that some readers assume that the "meaning" of a story comes entirely at the end, in the same way the "meaning" of a riddle comes from its solution?

Je Ne Sais Quoi

In my first-ever writing workshop, the teacher had one rule for our discussions: you were not allowed to lift your eyes from the story's pages.  Any comment you made had to be a comment about something that was literally printed in the text.  A story is made up of words, and he felt that any criticism or praise of the story had to be criticism or praise of those actual words.  This seems obvious, but at least to me at the time, it was a revelation.

The craft of writing is not mysterious, or at least it is not inherently mysterious.  Words have definitions.  Sentences have grammar.  Paragraphs are long or short, have sentence variation or they don't.  And, at least in conventional fiction, story structures have a kind of grammar too (see my posts on the film A Serious Man).  Yet somehow, many readers feel that something in fiction is indefinable, that it can't be pinpointed, that it somehow exists beyond the words on the page, and that to look at it too closely can cause it to vanish. 

I am of two minds about all this.  A workshop professor who espouses such a view makes me about as nervous as a surgeon who's worried about cutting into a patient's soul.  But at the same time, I think we've all had moments when we scribbled something down, and though it wasn't yet ready for another reader's eyes, we knew we had found It, that spark that brings a piece of prose to life.  What's the deal with that?