Week 4: Analytic Narrative
Daily Themes is an interactive course in reading and writing, based on the teaching materials of the late poet and critic John Hollander
Dear Subscribers,
We’re back after a short break with Week 4 of Daily Themes. This one features a series of playful exercises on ‘Showing, Telling, and Explaining How’ and examples from James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Joan Didion.
If you enjoy these exercises, please send us your work!
P.S. New subscribers can find previous editions of Daily Themes, including an introduction explaining the origins of the project, at our Substack homepage and on our website.
Exercises
During the past weeks, we have considered scale (in relation to description) and scope (in relation to the referential breadth of a piece of writing). We have also touched on the build, or the story of its own unfolding and developing, of a paragraph or page of text. This week we'll try to have our prose passages keep pace with time and with sequence of events, instead of just scanning spaces (as in descriptions( or surveying the limits of ‘topics’ or ‘subjects’ (as in the brief ‘essays’).
1. How do you (does one, do we) get from your room to your earliest morning class? The aim of this narrative – whether in the first, third, or second person – should be to enable the reader to make that journey without mishap.
2. Today imagine yourself starting out from a totally different room: if you live near the classroom in question in 1), now purport to live far away from it (in a different part of town, or in the country), or, of course, vice versa. Using approximately the same number of words as you used in 1), write a similar instructive account of this different journey.
3. Take the route in 1) or 2), whichever is the shorter one. Now try to take the reader along with it again, not with a view toward his or her accomplishing the journey as efficiently as possible, but, rather, pleasantly.
4. Now, instruct a reader how to make, unmake, prepare, repair, dismantle, appropriately destroy, or whatever, something. Without ever directly declaring your feelings, reveal clearly (but, if possible, subtly) that you find the whole process, the result, or some of the parts or stages of either of these, disgusting.
5. Explain another process, a totally different one, this time for the benefit of a reader you consider fits one of the following labels:
(a) intelligent, but naive
(b) very sophisticated and well-informed
(c) aggressively uninterested
(d) not over-bright
Examples:
1) He extinguished the candle by a sharp expiration of breath upon its flame, drew two spoonseat chairs to the hearthstone, one for Stephen with its back to the area window, the other for himself when necessary, knelt on one knee, composed in the grate a pyre of crosslaid resintipped sticks and various coloured papers and irregular polygons of best Abram coal at twenty-one shillings a ton from the yard of Messrs Flower and M'Donald of 14 D'Olier street, kindled it at three projecting points of paper with one ignited lucifer match, thereby releasing the potential energy contained in the fuel by allowing its carbon and hydrogen elements to enter into free union with the oxygen of the air.
(James Joyce, Ulysses)
2) Now Erskine's room was always locked, and the key in Erskine's pocket. Or rather, Erskine's room was never unlocked, nor the key out of Erskine's pocket, longer than two or three seconds at a stretch, which was the time that Erskine took to take the key from his pocket, unlock his door on the outside, glide into his room, lock the door again on the inside and slip the key back into his pocket, or take the key from his pocket, unlock his door on the inside, glide out of his room, lock the door again on the outside and slip the key back into his pocket. For if Erskine's room had been always locked, and the key always in Erskine's pocket, then Erskine himself, for all his agility, would have been hard set to glide in and out of his room, in the way he did, unless he had glided in and out by the window, or the chimney. But in and out by the window he could not have glided, without breaking his neck, nor in and out by the chimney, without being crushed to death. And this was true also of Watt.
(Samuel Beckett, Watt)
3) I have said that all atoms are in motion, and that there is a constant struggle between some form of attractive force which would draw all the atoms together and this motion which would keep them independent. The existence of an attractive force which we here take into account as something very important does not at first seem to be reconcilable with the atomic structure we have just considered, because in this we supposed that the outer shells of electrons would prevent the atoms from coming too close to each other. It is a difficult point, because both views are entirely correct. It is, no doubt, our present ignorance of the nature of these forces that prevents us from arriving at a clear understanding. We have seen how it can happen that when two atoms approach each other at great speeds they go through one another, while at moderate speeds they bound off each other like two billiard balls. We have to go a step further, and see how, at very slow speeds of approach, they may actually stick together. We have all seen those swinging gates which, when their swing is considerable, go to and fro without locking. When the swing has declined, however, the latch suddenly drops into its place, the gate is held and after a short rattle the motion is all over. We have to explain an effect something like that. When the two atoms meet, the repulsions of their electron shells usually cause them to recoil; but if the motion is small, and the atoms spend a longer time in each other's neighbourhood, there is time for something to happen in the internal arrangements of both atoms, like the drop of the latch-gate into its socket, and the atoms are held. It all depends on some structure of the atoms which causes a want of uniformity over its surface, so that there is usually a repulsion; but the repulsion will be turned into attraction if the two atoms are allowed time to make the necessary arrangements, or even if at the outset they are presented to each other in the right way.
(Sir William Bragg, Concerning the Nature of Things)
4) Incidentally, I use the word reader very loosely. Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it. We have no physical organ (as we have the eye in regard to a painting) that takes in the whole picture and then can enjoy its details. But at a second, or third, or fourth reading we do, in a sense, behave towards a book as we do towards a painting. However, let us not confuse the physical eye, that monstrous masterpiece of evolution, with the mind, an even more monstrous achievement. A book, no matter what it is – a work of fiction or a work of science (the boundary line between the two is not as clear as is generally believed) – a book of fiction appeals first of all to the mind. The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should, be, the only instrument used upon a book.
(Vladimir Nabokov, ‘Good Readers and Good Writers’)
5) Anyone wishing to walk from Sibert's Junction to Wimberby must proceed along the Pell's Hollow road for some distance as it follows the crest of a hill; but then, just as it descends again toward the town of Pell's Hollow itself, he--or, rather, she, for this is the way taken by the local ladies on their visits--might do best to turn left at the fork there and continue on directly along the narrow lane that proceeds between two parallel, low stone walls. This path, leading eventually, and by a shorter route than the main road, to Wimberby, extends between the unbroken walls for its entire length, as if covering some old secret they had been keeping between them.
a) If you want to go to Wimberby from here, go along route 147a, take a right at Pell's Hollow onto 304, and keep right on going for five miles. Oh – 147a? Just keep on Main Street here in the direction you're facing, and turn left at the dirty movie house. You can't miss it.
b) I set out for Wimberby as usual that morning, going through Pell's Hollow and on along that delicious mile through the woods and along the brook, with scarcely a glance at the few houses and fewer places of business that compose the village of Grumm, and no thought at all that I should be spending the next month there.
c) When he got off the train at Sibert's Junction, having gone past his stop, he found that the last bus back to Thurber's Corners had just left. He ran after it and finally caught up with, and boarded it, puffing, only to find after ten minutes that the bus wasn't going to Thurber's Corners at all, but in the opposite direction, through Pell's Hollow and Grumm to a place called Wimberby.
(Variously adapted from James Thurber, Fables For Our Time)
6) Imagine Banyan Street first, because Banyan is where it happened. The way to Banyan is to drive west from San Bernardino out Foothill Boulevard, Route 66: past the Santa Fe switching yards, the Forty Winks Motel. Past the motel that is 19 stucco tepees: ‘SLEEP IN A WIGWAM – GET MORE FOR YOUR WAMPUM.’ Past Fonatana Drag City and Fontana Church of the Nazarene and the Pit Stop A Go-Go past Kaiser Steel, through Cucamonga, out to the Kapu Kai Restaurant-Bar and Coffee Shop, at the Corner of Route 66 and Carnelian Avenue. Up Carnelian Avenue from the Kapu Kai, which means ‘Forbidden Seas,’ the subdivision flags whip in the harsh wind. ‘HALF-ACRE RANCHES! SNACK BARS! TRAVERTINE ENTRIES! $95 DOWN.’ It is the trial of an intention gone haywire, the flotsam of the New California. But after a while the signs thin out on Carnelian Avenue, and the houses are no longer the bright pastels of the Springtime Home owners but the faded bungalows of the people who grow a few grapes and keep a few chickens out here, and then the hill gets steeper and the road climbs and even the bungalows are few, and here – desolate, roughly surfaced, lined with eucalyptus and lemon groves – is Banyan Street.
(Joan Didion, ‘Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream’)