Where the Stress Falls (3 page)
Read Where the Stress Falls Online
Authors: Susan Sontag
Wisdom in the contemporary novel is more likely to be retrospective, intimate-sounding. The vulnerable, self-doubting voice is more appealing and seems to be more trustworthy. Readers crave the display—the intrusion—of personality; that is, of weakness. Objectivity is suspect; it’s thought to be bogus or cold. Generalizations
can be proposed, but wryly. (Pathos and self-doubt are always welcome flavors.) Certitude seems like arrogance. “This is the saddest story I have ever heard” is the famous opening sentence of
The Good Soldier
. Sad stories exude signs, like sweat, which a squeamish narrator voice will undertake, with many hesitations and doubts, to decipher.
can be proposed, but wryly. (Pathos and self-doubt are always welcome flavors.) Certitude seems like arrogance. “This is the saddest story I have ever heard” is the famous opening sentence of
The Good Soldier
. Sad stories exude signs, like sweat, which a squeamish narrator voice will undertake, with many hesitations and doubts, to decipher.
While a narration conducted in the third person can create the illusion of a story happening now, freshly told, a first-person narrator’s story is inevitably one from the past. Telling is retelling. And where there is self-conscious retelling, witnessing, there is always the possibility—no, the likelihood—of error. A first-person novel with anything to mourn on its mind will be a feast of reflection on what makes that backward look so error-prone: the fallibility of memory, the impenetrability of the human heart, the obscuring distance between past and present.
Evoking that distance at the start of a novel narrated in the first person is a strong new opening move. Thus
The Pilgrim Hawk
gives us a blur of a year, “May of 1928 or 1929,” since which so much has changed, and follows that with a bit of decade-mongering: the twenties, which were, “needless to say,” very different from the thirties and the “now” of the forties. Elizabeth Hardwick’s novel
Sleepless Nights
(1979) opens with another tease of a time-marker:
The Pilgrim Hawk
gives us a blur of a year, “May of 1928 or 1929,” since which so much has changed, and follows that with a bit of decade-mongering: the twenties, which were, “needless to say,” very different from the thirties and the “now” of the forties. Elizabeth Hardwick’s novel
Sleepless Nights
(1979) opens with another tease of a time-marker:
It is June. This is what I have decided to do with my life just now. I will do this work of transformed and even distorted memory and lead this life, the one I am leading today. Every morning the blue clock and the crocheted bedspread with its pink and blue and gray squares and diamonds. How nice it is—this production of a broken old woman in a squalid nursing home. The niceness and the squalor and sorrow in an apathetic battle—that is what I see. More beautiful is the table with the telephone, the books and magazines, the
Times
at the door, the bird-song of rough, grinding trucks in the street.
Times
at the door, the bird-song of rough, grinding trucks in the street.
If only one knew what to remember or pretend to remember. Make a decision and what you want from the lost things will present itself. You can take it down like a can from a shelf. Perhaps. One can would be marked Rand Avenue in Kentucky …
The weird specificity of a month, June, minus the year; the statement of the project (“transformed and even distorted memory”); the inventory of homely comforting objects (clock and bedspread) followed by the plunge into the world of the disfavored (the broken old woman in the nursing home), a foretaste of much of the book’s raw feeling and unease; the brave assumption of possibly erroneous subjectivity (“that is what I see”); the return to the comforts enjoyed by the narrator with a more sophisticated inventory (books, magazines, the
Times
at the door); the worry about knowing what to attempt to retrieve, in memory, from the past; and, finally, the wistful stipulativeness of the venture (“this is what I have decided to do with my life just now”)—such incomparably rapid modulations of tone and tale are a signature aspect of Hardwick’s method as a writer.
Times
at the door); the worry about knowing what to attempt to retrieve, in memory, from the past; and, finally, the wistful stipulativeness of the venture (“this is what I have decided to do with my life just now”)—such incomparably rapid modulations of tone and tale are a signature aspect of Hardwick’s method as a writer.
Like
The Pilgrim Hawk, Sleepless Nights
is a book of judgments about human relations, with special attention to marriage, and, like Wescott’s novel, is told by a somewhat veiled first-person narrator who is (what else?) a writer. Hardwick’s feat is to make that narrator—a version of herself—both the protagonist of the book and the voice of detached, brilliant spectatorship. In
Sleepless Nights
there is not one narrative but many, and the “I” is not at the center but to the side of most of the stories she chooses to retell—conjuring up, talking to, reproving, grieving over ghosts.
The Pilgrim Hawk, Sleepless Nights
is a book of judgments about human relations, with special attention to marriage, and, like Wescott’s novel, is told by a somewhat veiled first-person narrator who is (what else?) a writer. Hardwick’s feat is to make that narrator—a version of herself—both the protagonist of the book and the voice of detached, brilliant spectatorship. In
Sleepless Nights
there is not one narrative but many, and the “I” is not at the center but to the side of most of the stories she chooses to retell—conjuring up, talking to, reproving, grieving over ghosts.
“Back to the ‘long ago.’” Trawling through the past, memory makes a narrow, arbitrary-seeming selection of what to relate (“You can take it down like a can from a shelf”), then, guided by the steady streaming and fitful damming up of associations, makes a montage of that. There is remembering for remembering’s sake. You can even remember for others. (“Dear old Alex: I will remember this for you.”) To remember is to voice—to cast memories into language—and is, always, a form of address. There is more invocation of others than self-description, and none of the usual appetite in autobiographical fiction for the describing of injury to the self. The injuries described—and there are many—are those borne by others.
Many of the memories are discomfiting; some reek of spent painfulness. In contrast to what understanding accomplishes in
The Pilgrim Hawk
, the awareness garnered in
Sleepless Nights
is cathartic. It is felt
and it is composed, written down, wrung out, speeded up. In
The Pilgrim Hawk
, the narrator has only himself to talk to, a self—one has the impression—he doesn’t really like (or at any rate upon whom he is reluctant to seem to be bestowing any kind of approval). In
Sleepless Nights,
the narrator has the gallery of all the people who are remembered, fondly or ruefully, to talk to, and the wry magnanimity she extends to most of those she describes she extends to herself as well. Some memories are brought to life and quickly dismissed, while others are allowed to dilate and fill many pages. Everything is there to be questioned; everything, in retrospect, is drenched with poignancy. Not a breath of complaint (and there is much to complain of): whatever it was, it’s gone now, part of the past, the nothing-to-be-done, the was-it-really-like-that, all retold in a voice that is both absorbed by and indifferent to self. (“Can it be that I am the subject?”) The doubts and the pungent astuteness complement each other.
The Pilgrim Hawk
, the awareness garnered in
Sleepless Nights
is cathartic. It is felt
and it is composed, written down, wrung out, speeded up. In
The Pilgrim Hawk
, the narrator has only himself to talk to, a self—one has the impression—he doesn’t really like (or at any rate upon whom he is reluctant to seem to be bestowing any kind of approval). In
Sleepless Nights,
the narrator has the gallery of all the people who are remembered, fondly or ruefully, to talk to, and the wry magnanimity she extends to most of those she describes she extends to herself as well. Some memories are brought to life and quickly dismissed, while others are allowed to dilate and fill many pages. Everything is there to be questioned; everything, in retrospect, is drenched with poignancy. Not a breath of complaint (and there is much to complain of): whatever it was, it’s gone now, part of the past, the nothing-to-be-done, the was-it-really-like-that, all retold in a voice that is both absorbed by and indifferent to self. (“Can it be that I am the subject?”) The doubts and the pungent astuteness complement each other.
When the commenting, summing-up observer is impervious to doubts, the register inevitably shifts to the comic. Take that most assured of fictional people-watchers, the “I” voice of Randall Jarrell’s awesomely witty
Pictures from an Institution
(1914). It starts by being unidentified, although, as cultural conventions would have it, a voice that is so attractively superior—reflective, learned, cheeky—would be assumed to be that of a man. All we do come to know is that he (and it is a he) is on the faculty of Benton College, a “progressive” college for women not far from New York City, where the famous novelist Gertrude Johnson has arrived to teach for a semester, and that he is married.
Pictures from an Institution
(1914). It starts by being unidentified, although, as cultural conventions would have it, a voice that is so attractively superior—reflective, learned, cheeky—would be assumed to be that of a man. All we do come to know is that he (and it is a he) is on the faculty of Benton College, a “progressive” college for women not far from New York City, where the famous novelist Gertrude Johnson has arrived to teach for a semester, and that he is married.
It’s even a while before we realize there is a first-person narrator, someone with a small role in the story. Recounting matters that only an omniscient narrator could know, the novel’s first seven pages point irrefutably in the other direction. Then, speeding through a hilarious riff on the vanity and presumption of his writer-monster, Jarrell delivers a little surprise:
Gertrude thought Europe overrated, too; she voyaged there, voyaged back, and told her friends; they listened, awed, uneasy somehow. She had a wonderful theory that Europeans are mere children to us Americans, who are the oldest of men—why I once knew: because our political
institutions are older, or because Europeans skipped some stage of their development, or because Gertrude was an American—I forget.
institutions are older, or because Europeans skipped some stage of their development, or because Gertrude was an American—I forget.
Who is this “I” who once knew, who forgets? Not someone worried about his memory lapses. Though the first-person voice of
Pictures from an Institution
pipes up belatedly, it is in canonical fashion, with an avowal of incertitude. But this is a mock avowal, surely, by a nimble and self-possessed mind. We wouldn’t expect the narrator to recall every one of Gertrude’s glib pronouncements; to have forgotten some is rather to his credit. In the world of Jarrell’s novel, genuinely doubt-ridden narrators need not apply.
Pictures from an Institution
pipes up belatedly, it is in canonical fashion, with an avowal of incertitude. But this is a mock avowal, surely, by a nimble and self-possessed mind. We wouldn’t expect the narrator to recall every one of Gertrude’s glib pronouncements; to have forgotten some is rather to his credit. In the world of Jarrell’s novel, genuinely doubt-ridden narrators need not apply.
Only the tragic—or the bleak—can accommodate, even promote, incertitude. Comedy depends on certitude, the certitude about what is foolish and what is not, and on characters who are “characters,” that is, types. In
Pictures from an Institution
they come in pairs (for this, too, is a marriage novel): Gertrude and her husband; the composer, the sociologist, the college’s professionally boyish president, and their amusingly discontented or complacent spouses—all in residence at this school of fools and apt targets, all, for the narrator’s genial, inspired mockery. To poke fun at
everyone
might have made Jarrell seem churlish. He obviously preferred to risk being sentimental, and added to the mix a paragon of sincerity and niceness by the name of Constance. No bashfulness about showing himself to be feverishly erudite, proteanly intelligent, terminally droll, and a wizard phrase-maker. On the contrary (
autre temps, autres mœurs),
these were clearly glorious assets. But perhaps there was a shade of anxiety about being, or being thought to be, too mordant. An adorable, tenderhearted young woman who is first glimpsed working in the office of the president, Constance sees generously what the narrator sees fiercely. Her indulgence allows him to go on.
Pictures from an Institution
they come in pairs (for this, too, is a marriage novel): Gertrude and her husband; the composer, the sociologist, the college’s professionally boyish president, and their amusingly discontented or complacent spouses—all in residence at this school of fools and apt targets, all, for the narrator’s genial, inspired mockery. To poke fun at
everyone
might have made Jarrell seem churlish. He obviously preferred to risk being sentimental, and added to the mix a paragon of sincerity and niceness by the name of Constance. No bashfulness about showing himself to be feverishly erudite, proteanly intelligent, terminally droll, and a wizard phrase-maker. On the contrary (
autre temps, autres mœurs),
these were clearly glorious assets. But perhaps there was a shade of anxiety about being, or being thought to be, too mordant. An adorable, tenderhearted young woman who is first glimpsed working in the office of the president, Constance sees generously what the narrator sees fiercely. Her indulgence allows him to go on.
The true plot of Jarrell’s novel, such as it is, consists of the flow of coruscating descriptions of characters—above all, the inexhaustibly fascinating, appalling Gertrude. Characters need to be described over and over, not because they ever act “out of character” and so surprise us, or because the narrator, like Tower in
The Pilgrim Hawk,
changes his mind about them. (The characters in Wescott’s novel can’t be types:
The Pilgrim Hawk,
changes his mind about them. (The characters in Wescott’s novel can’t be types:
it’s precisely the function of the narrator’s attention to them to make them ever more complicated.) In
Pictures from an Institution
, the “I” keeps on describing his characters because he continues to devise new, ingenious, giddy, ever more hyperbolic phrases to sum them up. They keep on being foolish, and he—the narrative voice—keeps on being inventive. His restlessness is lexical, or rhetorical, not psychological or ethical. Is there yet one more way to pin these follies down verbally? Forward!
Pictures from an Institution
, the “I” keeps on describing his characters because he continues to devise new, ingenious, giddy, ever more hyperbolic phrases to sum them up. They keep on being foolish, and he—the narrative voice—keeps on being inventive. His restlessness is lexical, or rhetorical, not psychological or ethical. Is there yet one more way to pin these follies down verbally? Forward!
HOW TO CIRCUMSCRIBE
and refine a story and how to open up a story are two sides of the same task.
and refine a story and how to open up a story are two sides of the same task.
To explain, to inform, to amplify, to connect, to color in—think of the essayistic digressions in
Lost Illusions and A Harlot High and Low, Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, The Egoist, War and Peace, In Search of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain.
Such pursuit of completeness plumps out a novel. Is there a verb “to encyclopedize”? There has to be.
Lost Illusions and A Harlot High and Low, Moby-Dick, Middlemarch, The Egoist, War and Peace, In Search of Lost Time, The Magic Mountain.
Such pursuit of completeness plumps out a novel. Is there a verb “to encyclopedize”? There has to be.
To condense, to pare away, to speed up, pile up, to be ready to renounce, to distill, to leap ahead, to conclude (even if one intends to conclude again and again)—think of the aphoristic glitter of
The Pilgrim Hawk, Pictures from an Institution, Sleepless Nights
. Such pursuit of celerity brings a novel’s weight and length down drastically. Novels driven by the need to summarize, to intensify inexorably, tend to be single-voiced, short, and often not novels at all in the conventional sense. Occasionally, they will go after the deadpan, mock smoothness of an allegory or fable, as does Donald Barthelme’s
The Dead Father
. Is there a verb “to angularize”? Or “to ellipsify”? There ought to be.
The Pilgrim Hawk, Pictures from an Institution, Sleepless Nights
. Such pursuit of celerity brings a novel’s weight and length down drastically. Novels driven by the need to summarize, to intensify inexorably, tend to be single-voiced, short, and often not novels at all in the conventional sense. Occasionally, they will go after the deadpan, mock smoothness of an allegory or fable, as does Donald Barthelme’s
The Dead Father
. Is there a verb “to angularize”? Or “to ellipsify”? There ought to be.
Compressed first-person narrations don’t tell any kind of story; they tend to project a few distinctive moods. A surfeit of experiences that bring worldly wisdom (and, usually, disenchantment) is often intimated. It’s hard to imagine a naïve narrator with a penchant for trenchant summary. Such moods color the whole span of the narration, which can darken but does not, strictly speaking, develop. In fictions narrated by a resident observer the end lies much closer to the beginning than in fictions enhanced by digressions. Not just because the novel is shorter but because the look is retrospective and the tale one
whose end is known from the beginning. However straightforward the narration tries to be, it can’t help registering a few tremors of anticipated pathos: the pathos of the already known, and the not prevented. The beginning will be an early variant on the end, the end a late, somewhat deflating variant on the beginning.
whose end is known from the beginning. However straightforward the narration tries to be, it can’t help registering a few tremors of anticipated pathos: the pathos of the already known, and the not prevented. The beginning will be an early variant on the end, the end a late, somewhat deflating variant on the beginning.
Stories kept lean by ellipsis and refined judgments rather than fattened by essayistic expansiveness may look like a quicker read. They’re not. Even with sentences that are fired like bullets, attention can wander. Every exquisite linguistic moment (or incisive insight) is a moment of stasis, a potential ending. Aphoristic finalities sap forward momentum, which thrives on more loosely woven sentences.
Sleepless Nights
—a novel of mental weather—enchants by the scrupulousness and zip of the narrative voice, its lithe, semi-staccato descriptions and epigrammatic dash. It has no shape in the usual novelistic sense. It has no shape as the weather has no shape. Like the weather, it arrives and departs, rather than, in the usual structured way, begins and ends.
Sleepless Nights
—a novel of mental weather—enchants by the scrupulousness and zip of the narrative voice, its lithe, semi-staccato descriptions and epigrammatic dash. It has no shape in the usual novelistic sense. It has no shape as the weather has no shape. Like the weather, it arrives and departs, rather than, in the usual structured way, begins and ends.
A first-person voice devoted to looking and reflecting is likely to be drawn to reporting its displacements, as if that were mainly what a solitary consciousness does with its time. These fictions with melancholy or frankly superior narrators are often travelers’ tales, stories of a wandering of some sort, or a halt in that wandering.
The Pilgrim Hawk
takes place among the peripatetic rich. The staid academic village depicted in
Pictures from an Institution
is full of successful professionals coming from or on their way to somewhere else. Such well-oiled travels are about as dramatic as the story gets. Perhaps the fictions that condense have to be relatively plotless, large brawling events being better accommodated in fat books.
The Pilgrim Hawk
takes place among the peripatetic rich. The staid academic village depicted in
Pictures from an Institution
is full of successful professionals coming from or on their way to somewhere else. Such well-oiled travels are about as dramatic as the story gets. Perhaps the fictions that condense have to be relatively plotless, large brawling events being better accommodated in fat books.
Many displacements are recorded in
Sleepless Nights,
none unconnected with a lifetime of incessant reading, fat books and thin:
Sleepless Nights,
none unconnected with a lifetime of incessant reading, fat books and thin:
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