Some Thoughts that Begin with Kafka and Bernhard but Wind up Straying Rather Far Afield Indeed
Jonathan Callahan
In several prolix conversations a few years back with a friend who cares a lot about sentences, I did my best to articulate a distinction between what I then liked to refer to as phrase- and sentence-level virtuosity. Readers inclined to chalk up the afternoons in question to time we might’ve found more fruitful uses for will be forgiven whatever hesitations they might have with respect to tucking into a longish essay that will attempt to revisit the theme, but are sort of politely urged to hear me out, as this eventually gets interesting in ways I wouldn’t necessarily have anticipated at the outset.
If you read The Collagist you probably read a fair amount of contemporary prose, and there being such an abundance of stuff out there to choose from, if you’re anything like me, it’s almost always some quality of the prose that hauls you into a work of fiction—of any length—and keeps you reading beyond the first paragraph or so. I’ve heard this almost-impossible-to-pin-down quality described variously as “flow,” “punch,” “kick,” “savor,” a “crackle” or “click”—the heterogeneity of metaphor deployed in this obviously non-exhaustive list perhaps indicating the difficulty inherent in trying to express exactly what writing like this does. But we seem to be able to agree that it does something, and from here it’s a short step for the analytically-inclined to start constructing patterns and theoretical schemes. The paradigm I tried to foist on my friend involved a subdivision of prose that possessed this crackle or punch into the two broad categories of phrasal and syntactic effect. At the time he remained unconvinced, or maybe I just never made myself clear, and eventually he seemed to get justifiably tired of talking about it, but my recent reading of several novels in translation—including Thomas Bernhard’s Yes, Wittgenstein’s Nephew, and Kafka’s The Castle—has me thinking through this opposition again, about what it means to call a writer's use of phrase or syntax “virtuosic,” and, a bit less narrowly, wondering why the need to articulate the distinction at that time, as a very-fledgling-indeed aspiring young fiction-writer, seemed like such a big deal to me.<
Maybe it’s best to begin by considering what it actually means to achieve effects on the reader at either of these levels. “Phrase-level” effects, as I conceive of them, reflect the writer's scrupulous attention to individual words and his meticulous shaping of these words into the little phrase sculptures we tend to associate with writing that’s lauded as anything from “lyric” or “beautiful,” to “startling” or “uncanny” (or maybe in some quarters dismissed as “opaque”). There are all kinds of phrasal effects available to the rigorous writer, of course, and writers variously adept at making use of them compose a long gamut that runs from, say, the saguaro-like jut of certain singular phrasings in the stories of Denis Johnson and Amy Hempel, Gary Lutz and early Sam Lipsyte, through the quilted prose-poems of Michael Ondaatje or Anne Carson, into Don DeLillo’s uncanny, disorienting hyper-precision, the entrancing syllabic cadences and capering puns to be found in Martin Amis (by way of Nabokov) or Donald Antrim’s alliterative, consonance-rich lilt, all the way through the lingual looking-glasses conjured in the works of Donald Barthelme and Ben Marcus—but the common element is a kind of lexical manipulation. This is where the writer rejects the easy, familiar, or prefabricated phrase, vigorously resists the stale and timeworn, dismantles easy idiom, dispenses altogether with overused figures of speech, and not infrequently is forced to discard reams of what he ultimately deems superfluous or weak.
I have to be careful here, because the reason writers who give a damn about their sentences work so hard to sculpt each phrase is, when you come down to it, a pretty good one: when language isn’t fresh it often fails to say much of anything. As plenty of people have pointed out before me, clichés possess the interesting property of being simultaneously profound and banal, the profundity often being in direct proportion to the degree that its simplistic expression has become banal. Truisms are frequently truths that have seemingly become too commonplace to merit contemplation. So the search for fresh expression becomes a kind of quest to deliver to the reader a satori-like flash of apprehension, a re-seeing of some insight or truth we perhaps already know perfectly well—and can in fact paraphrase or refer to in shorthand via any number of axioms, adages, hoary formulations or outright clichés—but have ceased to be able to feel. Fresh language peels away the patina-like crust of familiarity that discourages contemplation of ideas we maybe ought to be perpetually peering into, and allows us, briefly, to see.
Writers adept at manipulating phrase can be challenging to wade through, but (for me at least), the work is a kind of bracing exhilaration akin to stepping into the sun’s full fulguration after a long stretch indoors under dim artificial light. It’s the pure joy of communicating with first things, or at least shadows cast a bit less far afield from the essences we’re in the end even in the best of circumstances only able to feebly hint at, gesture towards, approximate. The following passage from Don DeLillo’s famous opening salvo in Underworld is less dense than some of his earlier work, but no less lyrically masterful, a kind of massive word-engraving I simply cannot imagine taking any other shape than its own:
He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.
It’s a school day, sure, but he’s nowhere near the classroom. He wants to be here instead, standing in the shadow of this old rust-hulk of a structure, and it’s hard to blame him—this metropolis of steel and concrete and flaky paint and cropped grass and enormous Chesterfield packs aslant on the scoreboards, a couple of cigarettes jutting from each.
Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a local yearning, but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous with thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the day—men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game.
In the event this isn’t obvious, it’s worth remarking up front that these notes emphatically won’t be a knives-drawn assault on this kind of rigor at the level of word choice and phrase. None of what I will argue ought to be construed as a kind of concession to familiarity, or communicative ease—that way staleness lies, and if I want to read sentences that fail to say anything to me, I’ll page through a newspaper, bestseller, or popular magazine. I love nearly all of the writers listed above, and note with approval the shared emphasis on eradicating cliché, the search for the perfect word, the relentless quest to mine meaning from lunar juxtapositions and startling about-faces of phrase. Certainly if your prose is sagging you could do worse than to begin by attending more closely to its words. But in the following pages I’d like to propose that when lexical manipulation becomes the exclusive measure of a piece of prose’s stylistic worth, the writer is in danger of neglecting an equally potent aesthetic element. I’ve read authors whose command of the phrase seems preternaturally acute yet who can’t seem to write sentences that “click,” and I’ve decided not to bother with books loaded with little lexical miracles. This might seem like a paradox, or else that I’m essentially making the dubious claim that sometimes prose can be too good for its own good, but, sometimes, when the prose-maker becomes so narrowly focused on the undeniable richness of stylistic effect possible at the molecular, lexical level, the sentences these molecules are intended in combination to construct can feel paradoxically vacant of effect, impoverished—lacking something else. But what else is there?
What about syntax? It seems to me that a work of electrifying prose can also crackle with a kind of syntactical current. Just as the writer can surprise the reader with a language’s infinitely malleable lexicon, she can also work innumerable effects through the patterns and shapes, not of single words or phrases, but of whole clauses, the makeup of the sentences those words and phrases are fused together to form. The lexical maestro surprises you with his ingenuity of phrase, or even the piquancy of an oddly apt single word; the master of syntax may not stun you with his phrasings (a car may merely "swerve" into the next lane, rather than, say, "shark” in, to borrow an image from the opening page of Money by Martin Amis), but there's something else happening. The first time I read the above-cited passage I was stunned; but the first time I read this bit from David Foster Wallace’s “Another Pioneer" I was equally, if quite differently, amazed:
It was a continuation of some much longer flight, perhaps even Transatlantic, and the two passengers had evidently been seated together on the flight’s first leg, and were already deep in conversation when he boarded; and the crux here is that the fellow said he missed the first part of whatever larger conversation it was part of. Meaning that there was no enframing context or deictic antecedent as such surrounding the archetypal narrative as of course there is with all of us together here this afternoon. That it appeared to come, as the fellow described it, out of nowhere. Also that he had evidently been seated in the particular medial exit row that is always nearest the wing’s large jet engine, the overwing exit often in I believe on this type of aircraft Row 19 or 20, whereat in an evacuation you are required to turn two handles in two separate and opposed directions and supposedly then to somehow pull the entire window apparatus out of the jetliner’s fuselage and stow it in some very complicated way all detailed in glyphs on the instructional safety card that on so many commercial airlines is very nearly impossible to interpret with any confidence.
These sentences’ ophidian coils whip the reader around one blind curve after another, so that there is no way to foresee a coming clause’s effect until it’s already been achieved. Consider, for instance, the jarring reorientation wrought by the third sentence in the excerpt’s final subordinate clause—“as of course there is with all of us together here this afternoon”—which abruptly knocks the reader out of the air with the “two passengers” on their Transatlantic flight and into a nebulous external narrative frame that would seem to account for (and make light of) the pedagogic pomposity of the narration’s language (“enframing,” “deictic,” etc.) itself. I see less of this kind of syntactic virtuosity (or if, like me, you concede the late Wallace’s blistering syntax will not likely be matched, let’s say prose that even gestures in this stylistic direction) in self-consciously written contemporary prose—and I wonder if the culprit, counterintuitive as it may at first seem, might not be too much initial attention to the phrase-focused portion of the prose-artist’s palette, a problem to which we return in a bit.
But first, it may be worth positing that one mark of lexical mastery is how it defies or really flat-out rejects successful translation. The easiest way to demonstrate this is to cite a writer whose lexically-accomplished stylistic effects—phrasings, wordplay, the poetics and tricks of his word-by-word prose—would be very difficult to transfer undiminished into another language. For instance, I find it pretty much impossible to imagine reading Donald Barthelme’s short fiction in translation (I’m thinking in particular of pieces like “The Indian Uprising,” or “The Emerald,” whose lexical ingenuity is the art, but I suspect a good three-fourths of his fiction would be rendered somewhere between perplexing and incomprehensible in, say, Japanese, though I suppose some folks do read him here.) However, I’d actually prefer to come at this inversely: People frequently cite Madame Bovary as an archetype of perfectly-sculpted lyric prose. Flaubert was famously painstaking, merciless in his insistence on the diamond-hard perfection of every word of every polished phrase. Certainly the edition I’ve read had its share of word-precision and nicely buffed phrases, but the fact remains I have literally no idea what Flaubert actually accomplished in the French, because much of that accomplishment could only have been accomplished—or rather it represented the uniquely Flaubertian accomplishment—in French. Readers who have read English-language stylistic virtuosos whose virtuosity obtains primarily in their manipulation of the English lexicon, its pliable diction, its cadence and sound, the array of available poetic devices, the syllabic idiosyncrasies, the beats, the color and feel of English as it's spoken and heard and even visually rendered on the page, may intuitively grasp that some of it would be difficult to transmit intact to readers interpreting in some other tongue. I would go further and suggest that in order to truly appreciate a Barthelme, a Hempel, a DeLillo or Amis, a reader would require an absolute mastery of English lexicon and usage—a mastery matched by a tiny portion of the literate populace and only substantially bettered or outstripped by the very authors whose virtuosic ultra-mastery this sort of second-tier mastery enables a reader to appreciate, admire, be stunned by, or just plain enjoy. (Joyce's career sort of makes this point concrete, as I think the achievement of each successive work in the Dubliners–Portrait–Ulysses–Finnegans sequence is to better its predecessor, at least as a measure of phrasal virtuosity, by the very degree to which Joyce's ultra-mastery has dilated—and the books become correspondingly difficult, culminating in a universally acknowledged masterpiece that hardly anyone seems to have actually understood.) In other words, I am able to appreciate Joyce exactly to the extent that I am myself a skilled manipulator of English phrasings and able to discern how badly my mastery is embarrassed by his.
Or consider the following passage from John Hawkes’ The Lime Twig:
We were so close to the old malevolent station that I could hear the shifting of the sandbags piled round it and could hear the locomotives shattering into bits of iron.
And one night wouldn’t a cherubim’s hand or arm or curly head come flying through our roof? Some dislodged ball of saintly brass palm or muscle or jagged neck find its target in Lily Eastchip’s house? But I wasn’t destined to die with a fat brass finger in my belly.
[. . .]
“You’re the dear,” she repeated to herself in the kitchen. But she had not turned off the stove and the asparagus was burned. She put a little water in the pot and left it. An hour later she locked the flat, went down the stoop, signaled a high-topped taxicab to carry her to the train at Dreary Station. Hurrying she gave no thought to people on the streets. She was a girl with a band on her finger and poor handwriting, and there was no other world for her. No bitters in a bar, slick hair, no checkered vests. She was Banks’ wife by the law, she was Margaret, and if the men ever did get hold of her and go at her with their truncheons or knives or knuckles, she would still be merely Margaret with a dress and a brown shoe, still be only a girl of twenty-five with a deep wave in her hair.
Hawkes’ phrasal effects shade more toward the relentlessly acoustical than do those of Amis or Joyce, yet they, too, would be nearly impossible to duplicate in another tongue. One reason Hawkes’ pages read with a kind of dreamy lilting motion is that he exerts laboratory-precise control over every sentence’s meter. I scan the end of the first paragraph in the above quoted passage as follows:
And one night wouldn’t a cherubim’s hand or arm or curly head come flying through our roof? Some dislodged ball of saintly brass palm or muscle or jagged neck find its target in Lily Eastchip’s house? But I wasn’t destined to die with a fat brass finger in my belly.
Note how “And” and “hand” form a perfect rhyming iambic frame around the troche and twin anapests of “one night wouldn’t a cherubim’s hand,” as the sentence then glides into the lilting sequence of iambs—“or arm or curly head come flying through our roof? Some dislodged ball of saintly”—that is suddenly demolished with the troche that “palm” unexpectedly converts “brass palm” into, the crashing irruption into the sentence’s cadence a precise metrical mirror of the destruction it describes. And again in the last sentence, three waltzing dactyls—“I wasn’t destined to die with a”—are similarly swatted aside with the spondee–troche combination of “fat brass finger,” again puncturing the sentence’s gentle rhythm in a mimetic approximation of the imagined brass finger puncturing the narrator’s stomach.
This is insane technical mastery, and we won’t even touch on the similarly remarkable control over interplay between each syllable’s sounds because the point is simply that I cannot imagine this degree of precise control over the available English could possibly survive translation intact. I sort of doubt that most readers scan every line of every novel’s meter for clues as to how they’re operating—I certainly don’t—but if you take the time with Hawkes (and, similarly, with Nabokov or, famously, Joyce) you find that much of the effect you sense without quite knowing its source is of course no accident, but rather is complexly orchestrated. The composer has arranged his symphony to make the fullest possible use of his available instruments, right down to the timbre and pitch of English’s syllabic textures and aural curves. And I’d argue you need a fairly strong sense of how these instruments work, of what each one can do, in order to appreciate their seamless integration into a true master’s symphony.
To witness an analogous function in a different medium, try watching 2001 sometime with an audience accustomed to the pace of, say, Michael Bay. It isn’t elitism so much as good old journalistic integrity to observe that some of the more operatic floating-around-outside-the-space-station-for-twenty-nearly-soundless-minutes stuff generally doesn’t go over well with viewers primarily keen to discover whom Hal intends to take out first. Lexical mastery, then, as I’m sort of provisionally defining it here, is the writer’s ability to reconfigure her language’s molecules of expression in such a way that the reader is pleased insofar as she is able to appreciate both the comprehensive grasp and relentless, magical ingenuity, the sheer word-lust required for such legerdemain, and to enjoy the effort of decrypting meaning from language that, if not utterly alien (a la Finnegans Wake), is always challenging and fresh. Lexical mastery is a mastery over the intercourse between the language's words and the physical world they're asked to approximate or, in the best of cases, conjure up. It’s what I think most people mean (or ought to mean) when they use the term “lyrical.”
And the earlier reference to Flaubert is pertinent, I think, because, as the myriad translations of Bovary make manifest, lyricism is very difficult to communicate perfectly across borders between languages, since much of what makes the writing lyric comes from a comprehensive, intimate engagement with the language itself. Another way of saying this would be to suggest that a passage of writing is lyrical (or evinces "lexical mastery") to the precise degree that it would resist being uprooted from the language it was not only conceived in but is—the degree to which it would lose value in translation. The measure of its lyricism is the measure of what would be lost. Pace the parade of less-linguistically impressive short stories translated by son Dimitri and posthumously published, the only person who could satisfactorily translate Nabokov was Nabokov pére himself. And even he had a tough time.
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