588

It’s a commonplace that every book needs to find its own form, but how many do?

589

If you want to write serious books, you must be ready to break the forms.

590

All great works of literature either dissolve a genre or invent one. Let Us All Now Praise Famous Men. Nadja. Cane. Oh, What A Blow That Phantom Gave Me! “The Moon in Its Flight.” Wisconsin Death Trip. Letters to Wendy’s.

591

We evaluate artists by how much they are able to rid themselves of convention.

592

Jazz as jazz—jazzy jazz—is pretty well finished. The interesting stuff is all happening on the fringes of the form where there are elements of jazz and elements of all sorts of other things as well. Jazz is a trace, but it’s not a defining trace. Something similar is happening in prose. Although great novels—novelly novels—are still being written, a lot of the most interesting things are happening on the fringes of several forms.

593

Still (very still), at the heart of “literary culture” is the big, blockbuster novel by middle-of-the-road writers, the run-of-the-mill four hundred-page page-turner. Amazingly, people continue to want to read that.

594

The Corrections, say: I couldn’t read that book if my life depended on it. It might be a “good” novel or it might be a “bad” novel, but something has happened to my imagination, which can no longer yield to the earnest embrace of novelistic form.

595

Is it possible that contemporary literary prizes are a bit like the federal bailout package, subsidizing work that is no longer remotely describing reality?

596

If literary terms were about artistic merit and not the rules of convenience, about achievement and not safety, the term “realism” would be an honorary one, conferred only on work that actually builds unsentimental reality on the page, that matches the complexity of life with an equally rich arrangement in language. It would be assigned no matter the stylistic or linguistic method, no matter the form. This, alas, would exclude many writers who believe themselves to be realistic, most notably those who seem to equate writing with operating a massive karaoke machine.

597

A novel, for most readers—and critics—is primarily a “story.” A true novelist is one who knows how to “tell a story.” To “tell a story well” is to make what one writes

resemble the schemes people are used to—in other words, their ready-made idea of reality. But a work of art, like the world, is a living form. It’s in its form that its reality resides.

598

Urgency attaches itself now more to the tale taken directly from life than one fashioned by the imagination out of life.

599

I want the veil of “let’s pretend” out. I don’t like to be carried into purely fanciful circumstances. The never-never lands of the imagination don’t interest me that much. Beckett decided that everything was false to him, almost, in art, with its designs and formulae. He wanted art, but he wanted it right from life. He didn’t like, finally, that Joycean voice that was too abundant, too Irish, endlessly lyrical, endlessly allusive. He went into French to cut down. He wanted to directly address desperate individual existence, which bores many readers. I find him a joyous writer, though; his work reads like prayer. You don’t have to think about literary allusions, but experience itself. That’s what I want from the voice. I want it to transcend artifice.

600

This is life lived on high alert.

601

Nearly all writing, up to the present, has been a search for the “beautiful illusion.”

602

Nowhere do you get a feeling of a writer deforming his medium in order to say what has never been said before, which is to me the mark of great writing.

603

Very well. I am not in search of the “beautiful illusion.”

604

Critics can’t believe that the power to make us feel our one and only life, as very few novelists actually do these days, has come from a memoirist, a nonfiction truth-speaker who has entered our common situation and is telling the story we now want told. But it has.

605

There’s inevitably something terribly contrived about the standard novel; you can always feel the wheels grinding and going on.

606

If you write a novel, you sit and weave a little narrative. If you’re a romantic writer, you write novels about men and women falling in love, give a little narrative here and there, etc. And it’s okay, but it’s of no account. Novel qua novel is a form of nostalgia.

607

There is more to be pondered in the grain and texture of life than traditional fiction allows. The work of essayists is vital precisely because it permits and encourages self-knowledge in a way that is less indirect than fiction, more open and speculative.

608

One would like to think that the personal essay represents basic research on the self, in ways that are allied with science and philosophy.

609

The poem and the essay are more intimately related than any two genres, because they’re both ways of pursuing problems, or maybe trying to solve problems—The Dream Songs, the long prologue to Slaughterhouse-Five, pretty much all of Philip Larkin and Anne Carson, Annie Dillard’s For the Time Being. Maybe these works succeed, maybe they fail, but at least what they all attempt to do is clarify the problem at hand. They’re journeys, pursuits of knowledge. One could say that fiction, metaphorically, is a pursuit of knowledge, but ultimately it’s a form of entertainment. I think that, at the very least, essays and poems more directly and more urgently attempt to figure something out about the world. Which is why I can’t read novels anymore, with very few exceptions, the exceptions being those novels so meditative they’re barely disguised essays. David Markson’s This Is Not a Novel, Reader’s Block, Vanishing Point, The Last Novel. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello. Kundera’s Immortality. Most of Houellebecq. Doctorow’s The Book of Daniel. Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe. Lydia Davis, everything.

610

The kinds of novels I like are ones which bear no trace of being novels.

611

Only the suspect artist starts from art; the true artist draws his material elsewhere: from himself. There’s only one thing worse than boredom—the fear of boredom—and it’s this fear I experience every time I open a novel. I have no use for the hero’s life, don’t attend to it, don’t even believe in it. The genre, having squandered its substance, no longer has an object. The character is dying out; the plot, too. It’s no accident that the only novels deserving of interest today are those in which, once the universe is disbanded, nothing happens—e.g., Tristram Shandy, Notes from Underground, Camus’s The Fall, Thomas Bernhard’s Correction, Duras’s The Lover, Barry Hannah’s Boomerang.

612

What the lyric essay inherits from the public essay is a fact-hungry pursuit of solutions to problems, while from the personal essay it takes a wide-eyed dallying in the heat of predicaments. Lyric essays seek answers yet seldom seem to find them. They may arise out of a public essay that never manages to prove its case, may emerge from the stalk of a personal essay to sprout out and meet “the other,” may start out as travelogues that forget where they are or begin as prose poems that refuse quick conclusions, may originate as lines that resist being broken or full-bodied paragraphs that start slimming down. They’re hybrids that perch on the fence between the willed and the felt. A lyric essay is an oxymoron: an essay that’s also a lyric, a kind of logic that wants to sing, an argument that has no chance of proving out.

613

An essay that becomes a lyric is an essay that has killed itself.

614

There are no facts, only art.

615

What actually happened is only raw material; what the writer makes of what happened is all that matters.

616

Once upon a time there will be readers who won’t care what imaginative writing is called and will read it for its passion, its force of intellect, and for its formal originality.

617

Never again will a single story be told as though it were the only one.

I came to language only late and only peculiarly. I grew up in a household where the only books were the telephone book and some coloring books. Magazines, though, were called books, but only one magazine ever came into the house, a now-long-gone photographic general-interest weekly commandingly named Look. Words in this household were not often brought into play. There were no discussions that I can remember, no occasions when language was called for at length or in bulk. Words seemed to be intruders, blown into the rooms from otherwhere through the speakers of the television set or the radio, and were easily, tinnily, ignorable as something alien, something not germane to the forlornities of life within the house, and readily shut off or shut out. Under our roof, there was more divulgence and expressiveness to be made out in the closing or opening of doors, in footfalls, in coughs and stomach growlings and other bodily ballyhoo, than in statements exchanged in occasional conversation. Words seemed to be a last resort: you had recourse to speech only if everything else failed. From early on, it seemed to me that the forming and the release of words were the least significant of the mouth’s activities—and more by-products of those activities than the reason for them. When words did come hazarding out of a mouth, they did not lastingly change anything about the mouth they were coming out of or the face that hosted the mouth. They often seemed to have been put in there by some force exterior to the person speaking, and they died out in the air. They were not something I could possess or store up. Words certainly weren’t inside me.

A word that I remember coming out of my parents’ mouths a lot was imagine—as in “I imagine we’re going to have rain.” I soon succumbed to the notion that to imagine was to claim to know in advance an entirely forgettable outcome. A calendar was hung in the kitchen as if to say: Expect more of the same.

I thus spent about the first thirteen or fourteen years of my life not having much of anything to do with language. I am told that once in a while I spoke up. I am told that I had a friend at some point, and this friend often corrected my pronunciations, which tended to be overliteral, and deviant in their distribution of stresses. Any word I spoke, often as not, sounded like two words of similar length that had crashed into each other. Word after word emerged from my mouth as a mumbled mongrel. I was often asked to repeat things, and the repeated version came forth as a skeptical variant of the first one and was usually offered at a much lower volume. When a preposition was called for in a statement, I often chose an unfitting one. If a classmate asked me, “When is band practice?” I would be likely to answer, “At fifth period.” I did not have many listeners, and I did not listen to myself. Things I spoke came out sounding instantly disowned.

Childhood in my generation, an unpivotal generation, wasn’t necessarily a witnessed phenomenon. Large portions of my day went unobserved by anyone else, even in classrooms. Anybody glimpsing me for an instant might have described me as a kid with his nose stuck in a book, but nobody would have noticed that I wasn’t reading. I had started to gravitate toward books only because a book was a kind of steadying accessory, a prop, something to grip, a simple occupation for my hands. (Much later, I was relieved to learn that librarians refer to the books and other printed matter in their collections as “holdings.”) And at some point I started to enjoy having a book open before me and beholding the comfortingly justified lineups and amassments of words. I liked seeing words on parade on the pages, but I never got in step with them, I never entered into the processions. I doubt that it often even occurred to me to read the books, although I know I knew how. Instead, I liked how anything small (a pretzel crumb, perhaps) that fell into the gutter of the book—that troughlike place where facing pages meet—stayed in there and was preserved. A book was, for me, an acquisitive thing, absorbing, accepting, taking into itself whatever was dropped into it. An opened book even seemed to me an invitation to practice hygiene over it—to peel off the rim of a fingernail, say, and let the thing find its way down onto a page. The book became a repository of the body’s off-trickles, extrusions, biological rubbish and remains; it became a reliquary of sorts. I was thuswise now archiving chance fragments, sometimes choice fragments, of my life. I was putting things into the books instead of withdrawing their offered contents. As usual, I had things backward.

Worse, the reading we were doing in school was almost always reading done sleepily aloud, our lessons consisting of listening to the chapters of a textbook, my classmates and I taking our compulsory turns at droning through a double-columned page or two; and I, for one, never paid much mind to what was being read. The words on the page seemed to have little utility other than as mere prompts or often misleading cues for the sluggard sounds we were expected to produce. The words on the page did not seem to have solid enough a presence to exist independently of the sounds. I had no sense that a book read in silence and in private could offer me something. I can’t remember reading anything with much comprehension until eighth grade, when, studying for a science test for once, I decided to try making my way quietly through the chapter from start to finish—it was a chapter about magnets—and found myself forced to form the sounds of the words in my head as I read. Many of the words were unfamiliar to me, but the words fizzed and popped and tinkled and bonged. I was reading so slowly that in many a word I heard the scrunch and flump of the consonants and the peal of the vowels. Granted, I wasn’t retaining much of anything, but almost every word now struck me as a provocative hullabaloo. This was my first real lesson about language—this inkling that a word is a solid, something firm and palpable. It was news to me that a word is matter, that it exists in tactual materiality, that it has a cubic bulk. Only on the page is it flat and undensified. In the mouth and in the mind it is three-dimensional, and there are parts that shoot out from it or sink into its syntactic surround. But this discovery was of no help to me in English class, because when we had to write, I could never call up any of the brassy and racketing words I had read, and fell back on the thin, flat, default vocabulary of my life at home, words spoken because no others were known or available. Even when I started reading vocabulary-improvement books, I never seemed capable of importing into my sentences any of the vivid specimens from the lists I had now begun to memorize. My writing was dividered from the arrayed opulences in the vocabulary books. Language remained beyond me. My distance from language continued even through college, even through graduate school. The words I loved were in a different part of me, not accessible to the part of me that was required to make statements on paper.

It took me almost another decade after graduate school to figure out what writing really is, or at least what it could be for me; and what prompted this second lesson in language was my discovery of certain remaindered books—mostly of fiction, most notably by Barry Hannah, and all of them, I later learned, edited by Gordon Lish—in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude. These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy. As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself. I once later tried to define this kind of sentence as “an outcry combining the acoustical elegance of the aphorism with the force and utility of the load-bearing, tractional sentence of more or less conventional narrative.” The writers of such sentences became the writers I read and reread. I favored books that you could open to any page and find in every paragraph sentences that had been worked and reworked until their forms and contours and their organizations of sound had about them an air of having been foreordained—as if this combination of words could not be improved upon and had finished readying itself for infinity.

And as I encountered any such sentence, the question I would ask myself in marvelment was: how did this thing come to be what it now is? This was when I started gazing into sentence after sentence and began to discover that there was nothing arbitrary or unwitting or fluky about the shape any sentence had taken and the sound it was releasing into the world.

I’ll try to explain what it is that such sentences all seem to have in common and how in fact they might well have been written.

The sentence, with its narrow typographical confines, is a lonely place, the loneliest place for a writer, and the temptation for the writer to get out of one sentence as soon as possible and get going on the next sentence is entirely understandable. In fact, the conditions in just about any sentence soon enough become (shall we admit it?) claustrophobic, inhospitable, even hellish. But too often our habitual and hasty breaking away from one sentence to another results in sentences that remain undeveloped parcels of literary real estate, sentences that do not feel fully inhabitated and settled in by language. So many of the sentences we confront in books and magazines look unfinished and provisional, and start to go to pieces as soon as we gawk at and stare into them. They don’t hold up. Their diction is often not just spare and stark but bare and miserly.

There is another way to look at this:

The sentence is the site of your enterprise with words, the locale where language either comes to a head or does not. The sentence is a situation of words in the most literal sense: words must be situated in relation to others to produce an enduring effect on a reader. As you situate the words, you are of course intent on obeying the ordinances of syntax and grammar, unless any willful violation is your purpose—and you are intent as well on achieving in the arrangements of words as much fidelity as is possible to whatever you believe you have wanted to say or describe. A lot of writers—many of them—unfortunately seem to stop there. They seem content if the resultant sentence is free from obvious faults and is faithful to the lineaments of the thought or feeling or whatnot that was awaiting deathless expression. But some other writers seem to know that it takes more than that for a sentence to cohere and flourish as a work of art. They seem to know that the words inside the sentence must behave as if they were destined to belong together—as if their separation from each other would deprive the parent story or novel, as well as the readerly world, of something life-bearing and essential. These writers recognize that there needs to be an intimacy between the words, a togetherness that has nothing to do with grammar or syntax but instead has to do with the very shapes and sounds, the forms and contours, of the gathered words. This intimacy is what we mean when we say of a piece of writing that it has a felicity—a fitness, an aptness, a rightness about the phrasing. The words in the sentence must bear some physical and sonic resemblance to each other—the way people and their dogs are said to come to resemble each other, the way children take after their parents, the way pairs and groups of friends evolve their own manner of dress and gesture and speech. A pausing, enraptured reader should be able to look deeply into the sentence and discern among the words all of the traits and characteristics they share. The impression to be given is that the words in the sentence have lived with each other for quite some time, decisive time, and have deepened and grown and matured in each other’s company—and that they cannot live without each other.

Here is what I believe seems to happen in such a sentence:

Once the words begin to settle into their circumstance in a sentence and decide to make the most of their predicament, they look around and take notice of their neighbors. They seek out affinities, they adapt to each other, they begin to make adjustments in their appearance to try to blend in with each other better and enhance any resemblance. Pretty soon in the writer’s eyes the words in the sentence are all vibrating and destabilizing themselves: no longer solid and immutable, they start to flutter this way and that in playful receptivity, taking into themselves parts of neighboring words, or shedding parts of themselves into the gutter of the page or screen; and in this process of intimate mutation and transformation, the words swap alphabetary vitals and viscera, tiny bits and dabs of their languagey inner and outer natures; the words intermingle and blend and smear and recompose themselves. They begin to take on a similar typographical physique. The phrasing now feels literally all of a piece. The lonely space of the sentence feels colonized. There’s a sumptuousness, a roundedness, a dimensionality to what has emerged. The sentence feels filled in from end to end; there are no vacant segments along its length, no pockets of unperforming or underperforming verbal matter. The words of the sentence have in fact formed a united community.

Or, rather, if the words don’t manage to do this all by themselves—because maybe they mostly won’t—you will have to nudge them along in the process. You might come to realize that a single vowel already present in the sentence should be released to run through the consonantal frameworks of certain other prominent words in the sentence, or you might realize that the consonantal infrastructure of one word should be duplicated in another word, but with a different vowel impounded in each structure. You might wonder what would become of a word at one end of a sentence if an affix were thrust upon it from a word at the other end, or what might happen if the syntactical function of a word were shifted from its present part of speech to some other. And as the words reconstitute themselves and metamorphose, your sentence may begin to make a series of departures from what you may have intended to express; the language may start taking on, as they say, a life of its own, a life that contests or trumps the life you had sponsored to live on the page. But it was you who incited these words to shimmer and mutate and reconfigure even further—and what they now are saying may well be much more acute and more crucial than what you had thought you wanted to say.

I think this is the only way to explain what happens to my own sentences during those very rare occasions when I am writing the way I want to write, and it seems to account for how sentences by writers I admire have arisen from the alphabet. The aim of the literary artist, I believe, is to initiate the process by which the words in a sentence no longer remain strangers to each other but begin to acknowledge one another’s existence and do more than tolerate each other’s presence in the phrasing: the words have to lean on each other, rub elbows, rub off on each other, feel each other up. Among contemporary writers of fiction, there are few who have regularly achieved what I am calling an intra-sentence intimacy with more exquisiteness and grace than Christine Schutt, especially in her first novel, Florida, and in her second collection of short stories, A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer.

Let’s first look inside only a four-word phrase of hers.

In her story “The Blood Jet,” Schutt ends a sentence about “life after a certain age” by describing it capsularly as “acutely felt, clearly flat”—two pairs of words in which an adverb precedes an adjective. The adjectives (felt and flat) are both monosyllabic, they are both four letters in length, and they both share the same consonantal casing: they begin with a tentative-sounding, deflating f and end with the abrupt t. In between the two ends of each adjective, Schutt retains the l, though it slides one space backward in the second adjective; and for the interior vowel, she moves downward from a short e to a short a. The predecessive adverbs acutely and clearly share the k-sounding c, and both words are constituted of virtually the same letters, except that clearly doesn’t retain the t of acutely. The four-word phrase has a resigned and final sound to it; there is more than a little agony in how, with just two little adjustments, felt has been diminished and transmogrified into flat, in how the richness of receptivity summed up in felt has been leveled into the thudding spiritlessness offlat. All of this emotion has been delivered by the most ordinary of words—nothing dredged up from a thesaurus. But what is perhaps most striking about the four-word phrase is the family resemblances between the two pairs of words. There is nothing in the letter-by-letter makeup of the phrase “clearly flat” that wasn’t already physically present in “acutely felt”; the second of the two phrases contains the alphabetic DNA of the first phrase. There isn’t, of course, an exact, anagrammatic correspondence between the two pairs of words; the u of the first pair, after all, hasn’t been carried over into the second pair. (Schutt isn’t stooping to recreational word games here.) But the page-hugging, rather than page-turning, reader—the very reader whom a writer such as Schutt enthralls—cannot help noticing that the second phrase is a selective rearrangement, a selective redisposition, of the first one—a declension, really, as if, within the verbal environment of the story, there were no other direction for the letters in the first pair of words to go. There is nothing random about what has happened here. Schutt’s phrase has achieved the condition that Susan Sontag, in her essay about the prose of poets, called “lexical inevitability.”

Before we turn our eyes and ears to the entirety of a two-clause structure by Christine Schutt, maybe we can agree that almost every word in a sentence can be categorized as either a content word or a functional word. The content words comprise the nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and most verbs: they are carriers of information and suppliers of sensory evidence. The functional words are the prepositions, the conjunctions, the articles, the to of an infinitive, and such—the kinds of words necessary to hold the content words in place on the page, to absorb them into the syntax. The functional words in fact tend to recede into the sentence structure; their visibility and audibility are limited. It’s the content words that impress themselves upon the eye and the ear, so the writer’s attention to sound and shape has to be lavished on the exposed words. They stand out in relief. (Pronouns, of course, do not quite fit tidily into this binary system; pronouns tend to be prominent when they are functioning as subjects or objects and tend to be shrinking when they are in a possessive capacity. And some common verbs—especially those formed from the infinitives to be and to have—tend toward the unnoticeability of operational words.)

In Christine Schutt’s two-clause formation “her lips stuck when she licked them to talk,” the second half of a sentence from the short story “Young,” the conspicuous content words arelips, stuck, licked, and talk. These four words are not all that varied consonantically. The reappearing consonants are l and k. Three of the four words have an l: two have the l at the very start of the word (lips and licked), and in the final word (talk), the l has slid into the interior. Three of the four words have a k in common—we go from a terminal k (stuck) to a kthat has worked its way backward into the very core (licked) and then again to a terminal k(talk). In the first three words, the l and the k keep their distance from each other: in the first two words, they don’t appear together; inside the third word, licked, they are now within kiss-blowing range of each other over the low-rising i and c that stand between them. In the final word, talk, the l and the k are side-by-side at last—coupled just before the period brings the curtain down. A romance between two letters has been enacted in the sentence: there has been an amorous progression toward union.

This kind of flirtation between two letters and their eventual matrimony brighten Christine Schutt’s work not only in the individual sentence but in the paragraph as well. In the four-sentence opening paragraph of the story “The Summer after Barbara Claffey,” in Schutt’s first short-story collection, Nightwork, the characters k and w spend the first three sentences dancing around each other and sometimes tentatively touching, but their intimacy never gets more serious than the conventional embrace they entertain in the familiar participlewalking:

I once saw a man hook a walking stick around a woman’s neck. This was at night, from my mother’s window. The man dropped the crooked end behind the woman’s neck and yanked just hard enough to get the woman walking to the car.

Letters, of course, are also known as characters, and it’s a courtship of characters that is giving an excitement to these sentences. The w seems warily feminine; the k seems brashly masculine. In the fourth and final sentence of the paragraph, the two characters mate and marry in the unexpected but beautifully apposite participle winking, a union resulting in what is in many ways the most stylistically noteworthy word in the paragraph. Then the wand the k disappear completely and completedly from what is left of the sentence as it plays itself out in a fade-out sequence of prepositional phrases:

I saw this and saw rain winking in the yard in the light around our house.

Writing is rich to the extent that the drama of the subject matter is supplemented or deepened by the drama of the letters within the words as they inch their way closer to each other or push significantly off.

Gordon Lish—the enormously influential editor, writer, and teacher whom I mentioned earlier—instructed his students in a poetics of the sentence that emphasized what he called consecution: a recursive procedure by which one word pursues itself into its successor by discharging something from deep within itself into what follows. The discharge can take many forms and often produces startling outcomes, such as when Christine Schutt, in “The Summer after Barbara Claffey,” is seeking the inevitable adjective to insert into the final slot in the sentence “Here is the house at night, lit up tall and ______.” What she winds up doing is literally dragging forward the previous adjective, tall, and using it as the base on which further letters can be erected. The result is the astounding, perfect tallowy—the sort of adjective she never could have arrived at if she had turned a synonymicon upside down in search of words that capture the quality of light.

Gordon Lish’s poetics forever changed the way I look at sentences, and so many of the sentences that thrill me are sentences in which consecution and recursion have determined the sound and the shape of the community of words. Take the aphoristic sentence that closes Diane Williams’s story “Scratching the Head,” in her second collection, Some Sexual Success Stories Plus Other Stories in Which God Might Choose to Appear: “An accident isn’t necessarily ever over.” There is so much to remark upon in this six-word, fifteen-syllable declaration. A sibilance hisses throughout accident, isn’t, and necessarily; and in those three words there are further acoustical continuities—the ih sound moving forward from accidentand into isn’t, the en sound moving forward from accident and into isn’t and into necessarily.In the five-syllable adverb necessarily, the vowel-and-consonant pair ar of the third syllable receives the primary stress, and the ne of the first syllable receives the secondary stress; and the e and the r of those two syllables get filliped forward into ever, and then the dying fall of that adverb is echoed dyingly by over. Ever has morphed into over, of course, with nothing more than the substitution of an o for an e. These tumbly final words tumble out into a long vowel, the only long vowel of the sentence: the woe-laden, bemoaning long o. The final syllable of the sentence is unstressed, and this unaccentedness deprives the sentence of a hard, clear-cut termination, much as the import of the sentence insists that an accident lacks definitive finality.

A sentence that I have spent an almost pathological amount of time gaping at since the turn of the century, a sentence that always leaves me agog, is the opening sentence in Sam Lipsyte’s story “I’m Slavering,” in Venus Drive: “Everybody wanted everything to be gleaming again, or maybe they just wanted their evening back.” The paraphrasal content of the statement informs us that high hopes for a return to a previous wealth of life or feeling are inevitably going to have to be scaled back and revised immediately and unconsolingly downward. If you tweak the verb tense from the past to the present, the sentence is even more self-containedly epigrammatic in its encompassing of our shared predicament of disappointments. It’s a richly summational sentence, not the sort of sentence you might expect to find at the very outset of a story—but there are writers whose mission is sometimes to deliver us from conclusion to conclusion instead of necessarily bogging us down in the facts, the data, the sorry particulars leading to each conclusion.

Lipsyte’s sentence is composed of words that, in ordinary hands, are among the most humdrum and pedestrian in our language: in the first half of the sentence alone, the words filling the subject slots in the independent clause and in the infinitive clause are the bland, heavily used indefinite pronouns everybody and everything. And the entire sentence is in fact completely lacking in specificity and so-called literary or elevated language: there is no load of detail, no verbal knickknackery whatsoever—there are no big-ticket words. The only standout word, the participle gleaming, most likely was called up into the sentence out of bits and pieces of the words preceding it—the ruling vowel of the entire utterance (the long e) and the -ing of everything. Yet this opening flourish of the story not only has both sweep and circumference in its stated meaning, but it has a swing and a lilt to it as well. The first half of the sentence is buoyant, upfloating. The entire sentence has the chiming, soaring, C-chord long e’s in everybody and be and gleaming and maybe and evening; it has the alliterative ballast of the b’s in everybody and be and maybe and back, and of the g’s in gleaming andagain; and the only really closed word in the mix is the final word, the adverb back, which is shut off with harsh consonants at either end, especially the cruelly abrupt, terminal k, which finishes off the sentence and pushes it rudely down to earth. The last vowel in the sentence is the minor-key short a in back—the only appearance in the sentence of the disappointed, dejected ahhh of crap and alas.

Some of the most obvious ways to ensure that the words in a sentence together create a community of sound and shape are too rarely discussed explicitly outside of, say, high-school creative-writing classes. Yet many great writers constantly avail themselves of these little tactics to give their phrasing both dash and finish. The result is often a sentence that looks and sounds fulfilled, permanent. These phrasal maneuvers are concertedly evident in the examples I cited earlier, but they are worth considering individually, because even though we are all well acquainted with every one of them, we too easily forget just how much they can do for us.

For starters, make sure that the stressed syllables in a sentence outnumber the unstressed syllables. The fewer unstressed syllables there are, the more sonic impact the sentence will have, as in Don DeLillo’s sentence “He did not direct a remark that was hard and sharp.” You can take this stratagem to breathtaking extremes, as Christine Schutt does in her sentence “None of what kept time once works.” Schutt’s sentence should remind us as well that we need not shy away from composing an occasional sentence entirely of monosyllabic words, as Barry Hannah also does in “I roam in the past for my best mind” and “He’s been long on my list of shits in the world,” and as Ben Marcus does in “They were hot there, and cold there, and some had been born there, and most had died.”

Those sentences illustrate another point: unless you have good reason not to do so, end your sentence with the wham and bang of a stressed syllable, as in Dawn Raffel’s sentence “She lived to marry late” and in John Ashbery’s “There was I: a stinking adult.” Such sentences stop on a dime instead of wavering forward for a wishy-washy further syllable or two.

At the opposite extreme, give force to your sentences by stationing the subject at the very beginning instead of delaying the subject until an introductory phrase or a dependent clause has first had its dribbling say. This precept of course violates almost every English-composition teacher’s insistence that students vary the openings of their sentences, but you will find the best writers disobeying it as well. Readers have often attempted to account for the extraordinary cumulative power in the work of Joseph Mitchell, who wrote literary journalism for the New Yorker in a deceptively plain and simple style that often achieved incantatory cadences. You can make your way through pages and pages of Mitchell’s work and almost never find him starting a sentence without laying down his subject at the outset. Many fiction writers also skip the preambles, as Dawn Raffel does in her sentence “She was born in December in Baraboo or thereabouts—small, still, blue, a girl, and, by some trick of oxygen, alive.”

That Dawn Raffel sentence, with its recurring b’s and l’s, illustrates another form of play available to any writer. Avail yourself of alliteration—as long as it remains ungimmicky, unobtrusive, even subliminal. Such repetition can be soothing and stabilizing, especially in a sentence whose content and emotional gusts are anything but. You can let a single consonant dominate all or most of a sentence—the way Don DeLillo does with h’s in “He was here in the howl of the world,” and as Christine Schutt does with k sounds in “He knew the kind of Kleenex crud a crying girl left behind.” And the reiterated consonants do not have to appear at the beginnings of words: they can also show up at the very ends, as the t’s do in Barry Hannah’s sentence “Ah, well, what you cannot correct you can at least insult,” or they can be confined to the interiors of words, as the l’s are in Elizabeth Hardwick’s sentence “Another day she arrived as wild and florid and thickly brilliant as a bird.”

Take advantage of assonance as well. Keeping a single vowel in circulation through most of the conspicuous words will give a sentence another kind of sonic consummation, as Don DeLillo achieves with the five short a’s in “He mastered the steepest matters in half an afternoon,” and as Sam Lipsyte does with three short u’s in “You could touch for a couple of bucks.” (A lesser writer would of course have been satisfied with “For merely two dollars, you could cop a feel.”) Or reserve the assonance for the words in a sentence deserving the greatest stress, as Ben Marcus does in “The ones that never got born were poured into the river.” You can even divide a sentence into two or more acoustical zones and let a single vowel prevail in each zone. Here is a three-zone sentence by Don DeLillo: “There were evening streaks in the white of the eye, a sense of blood sun.”

You can make the most of both assonance and alliteration in a single sentence or multi-sentence sequence. In the following two-sentence run, Sam Lipsyte assonates with the longoo sound and alliterates with p’s and k sounds: “Dinner that night was some lewd stew I’d watched Parish concoct, undercooked carrots and pulled pork in ooze.  I believe he threw some kiwi in there, too.”  Some writers take merged assonance and alliteration beyond slant rhymes or half rhymes (such as lewd, stew, and ooze in Lipsyte’s first sentence) and even as far as a careful, unsingsongy kind of internal perfect rhyming, in which the rhyming words end with an identical vowel-and-consonant structure, as Fiona Maazel does in this sentence, which is acoustically unified further by the repeated k sounds: “I could tell she had been crying from the swell of her pores and the spackle crusted at the levees of each eye.” And here are three samplings from the saddeningly neglected writer Elizabeth Smart, all from her short-fiction collection, The Assumption of the Rogues & Rascals: “This cliff, I thought, this office block, would certainly suit a suicide”; “The long fall is appalling”; and the aphoristically molded, five-word formulation “God likes a good frolic.” In the last of these three sentences, there are all sorts of family resemblances among the words: the identical consonantic shells of God and good (as well as of like and the second syllable in frolic) and the shared vowel ofGod and frolic. And the way the words have been arrayed gives the sentence its aphoristic permanence. The article a, at the center of the statement, separates two phrases very similar in shape, with the words in the second phrase, good frolic, appearing as enlargements of, and elaborations on, the words in the first pair: God likes.

There are still further opportunities for you to put some play into your phrasing. Press one part of speech into service as another, as Don DeLillo does in “She was always maybeing” (an adverb has been recruited for duty as a verb) and as Barry Hannah does in “Westy is colding off like the planet” (an adjective has been enlisted for verbified purpose as well). A variation is to take an intransitive verb (the sort of verb that can’t abide a direct object) and put it in motion as a transitive verb (whose very nature it is to enclasp a direct object). That is what Fiona Maazel is up to with the verb collide, which abandoned all transitive use ages ago, in her sentence “Often, at the close of a recovery meeting, as we make a circle and join hands, I’ll note the odds of these people finding each other in this group; our sundry pasts and principles; the entropy that collides addicts like so many molecules.” Or take some standard, overworked idiomatic phrasing—such as “It turned my stomach”—and transfigure it, as Barry Hannah does in “I saw the hospital in Hawaii. It turned my heart.” Or rescue an ordinary, overtasked verb from its usual drab business and find a fresh, bright, and startling context for it, as Don DeLillo manages with speaks in “You will hit traffic that speaks in quarter inches” and as Barry Hannah does with the almost always lackluster verb occurred in “… a single white wild blossom occurred under the forever stunted fig tree.…” You can also choose to prefer the unexpectable noun, as Diane Williams does with history in “We can come in out from our history to lie down” and as Sam Lipsyte does with squeaks in “Home, we drank a little wine, put on some of that sticky saxophone music we used to keep around to drown out the bitter squeaks in our hearts.” Or you can choose a variant of a common word, a variant that exists officially in unabridged dictionaries but has fallen out of usage—if, that is, you have reason enough for doing so. In Fiona Maazel’s sentence “This was not how I had meant to act, all tough and abradant,” not only does the unfamiliar adjective abradant, with its harsh d and t, sound more abrasive than the milder, everyday abrasive, but its terminal t has been bookended with the initial t of tough, lending symmetry to the adjectives coupled at the sentence’s end. And you can take the frumpiest, the ugliest of the so-called vocabulary words—the Latinate monstrosities that students are compelled to memorize in SAT- and GRE-preparation classes—and urge them into a casual setting, where they finally shine anew. Fiona Maazel pulls this off in her sentence “The floor tiles appeared cubed and motile.” The choice of the unusual sentence-ending adjective, which in other contexts might risk coming across as thesaurusy and pretentious, most likely resulted from the writer’s unwavering alertness to the alphabetics of the noun in the subject slot of her sentence. The upshot of this morphological correspondence between tiles and motile is that the subject’s embrace of its second adjectival complement is much stronger than that which would be achieved by the two words’ merely syntactic functions alone. Finally, you can fool around even with prepositions. Prepositions often attach themselves adverbially to verbs and thus form what are known as phrasal verbs, such as check out and open up and see through, but you are not legally bound to use the orthodox preposition with a verb. Don DeLillo breaks from established usage in the sentences “She was always thinking into tomorrow” and “She moved about the town’s sloping streets unnoticed… playing through these thoughts….”

Granted, there can be a downside to the kinds of isolative attentions to the sentence I have been advocating. Such a fixation on the individual sentence might threaten the enclosive forces of the larger structure in which the sentences reside. Psychiatrists use the term weak central coherence to pinpoint the difficulty of certain autistic persons to get the big picture, to see the forest instead of the trees. A piece of writing consisting ultimately of an aggregation of loner sentences might well strike a reader as stupefyingly discontinuous, too dense to enchant. But the practices I have been trying to discuss can also result in richly elliptical prose whose individual statements converge excitingly in the participating reader’s mind. These practices account in part for the bold poetry in some of today’s most artistically provocative fiction.

Gary Lutz is the author of Stories in the Worst Way, I Looked Alive, and Partial List of People to Bleach.

Thomas Bernhard, the ranting, death-obsessed Austrian novelist and playwright who died in 1989, was the ultimate Nestbeschmutzer, soiling his country with screeds against the landscape, the people, and their history. Not content with the limitations of his own mortality, Bernhard darkened his will with the dictum that his works could not be published or performed in Austria after his death, as if to suggest that his homeland was not even worthy to bathe in his hatred. Although Bernhard’s executors have sashayed around his stipulation, his wrath has since matured into something far more universally toxic. In the end, Bernhard’s concerns are not a single country and its political crimes but rather the sheer affront of life itself, what the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran referred to as “The Trouble with Being Born.”

Hermann Broch and Robert Musil, fellow countrymen of Bernhard’s, reported on this trouble also, but in prose that was far more stately, tempered, and quite less given to spleen. Bernhard was altogether unconcerned with immunizing a reader against his surgical attacks on humanity, and if he made a blood sport of novel writing, he did it with a zeal and a gallows humor that is unrivaled in contemporary literature. His formally radical novels, which sometimes blasted into shape as a single, unbroken paragraph, were manic reports on such fixations as the futility of existence; the dark appeal, and inevitable logic, of suicide; the monstrosity of human beings; and the abject pain of merely being alive. Bernhard’s language strained the limits of rhetorical negativity: if his prose were any more anguished, it would simply transmit as moaning and wailing. Building interest in the grief experienced by people who look at the world and find it unbearable was a dark art of Bernhard’s, and his characters do not resist the long walk to death’s door but run to it and claw at the surface, begging for entry. After all, says Strauch, the agonized painter in Bernhard’s first novel, Frost, “there is an obligation towards the depth of one’s own inner abyss,” even if meeting that obligation destroys you.

A debut work of nearly unbearable bleakness, by a writer who would go on to produce some of the most severely nihilistic literature of the twentieth century, Frost, which was first published in German in 1963, is not so much a novel as a persuasive case against happiness, written in the relentless prose style that would become Bernhard’s signature. An Austrian medical student accepts a perverse task from a teacher: go to Weng, where “the roadsides favor promiscuity” and “children fall into sudden fits of weakness,” and clinically observe Strauch, the teacher’s estranged brother. “Watch the way my brother holds his stick, I want a precise description of it,” says the teacher. This is a perverse thing to want, particularly from someone who has not seen his brother in years, and it creeps toward suggesting that such cold, loveless interest from a family member has something to do with Strauch’s miserable loneliness. It will turn out that other forces are bearing down on Strauch as well, and that misery happens to be one of his guilty pleasures. This is a man who excels at futility and unhappiness, and the performance of his grief will overpower every other spectacle in the novel.

The narrator arrives in Weng and is soon promised that he’ll “get to meet a whole series of monsters,” which proves to be true:

I really was frightened by this landscape, in particular this one spot, which is populated by small, fully grown people whom one can certainly call cretins. No taller than five foot on average, begotten in drunkenness, they pass in and out through cracks in the walls and corridors. They seem typical of this valley.

Readers of Bernhard will recognize this distortion as his default, fantastical take on the real world; the people who populate it are crushed into grotesque shapes, colliding with a brutal landscape that seems carved out of a cruel fairy tale. The language is gothic and clinical at once, affecting the airs of anthropological rationality. When Bernhard imagines beyond reality, it is to color the world worse, and he can be very convincing about it: “Cities that are long since dead, mountains too, long dead, livestock, poultry, even water and the creatures that used to live in the water. Reflections of our death-masks. A death-mask ball.” About his dank, mountainous environment, Strauch warns the narrator, “It’s not possible to be so healthy that being here won’t cripple you inside and out.”

Crippled inside and out certainly is a good working diagnosis of Strauch, although geography, mutilating or not, seems hardly to blame, however convenient a scapegoat. He is menaced by headaches, certain that frost is eroding his mind—a destroyed man whose hyper-articulate death throes seem to spout, without cease, not from the landscape but from his amygdala, the nut-shaped cluster of worry in the brain that might as well be called the anxiety fountain. Indeed, the treachery of landscapes in Bernhard’s work cannot compete with the poison and peril emanating from within his characters.

The narrator registers at the local inn where Strauch is living and passes himself off as a student of law rather than medicine. As subterfuge goes, the deception proves mostly irrelevant to the novel, but Bernhard clearly requires some established literary devices to keep the book from reading like a hatchet job on life itself. Yet the only character who could possibly care about the narrator’s secret identity is Strauch, and he’s too busy combing his own hair shirt to detect the lie. Strauch would much rather “make the world die in me, and myself die in the world, and everything cease as though it had never been.” That’s a pretty ambitious goal, and by the end of the book a kind of success has been achieved, as if the book has fallen on its own sword. The world depicted by Strauch becomes fairly cold to the touch, and the narrator, not to mention the reader, is sucked headlong and flailing into his death-ship perspective.

Bernhard is an architect of consciousness more than a narrative storyteller. His project is not to reference the known world, stuffing it with fully rounded characters who commence to discover their conflicts with one another, but to erect complex states of mind—usually self-loathing, obsessive ones—and then set about destroying them. Bernhard’s characters are thorough accomplices in their own destruction, and they are bestowed with a language that is dementedly repetitive and besotted with the appurtenances of logical thinking. The devious rationality of Bernhard’s language strives for a severe authority, and it tends to make his characters seem believable, no matter how unhinged their claims. Phrases don’t get repeated so much as needled until they yield graver meanings, with incremental changes introduced as though a deranged scientist were adding and removing substances in the performance of an experiment. “‘You wake up, and you feel molested,’” Strauch says:

In fact: the hideous thing. You open your chest of drawers: a further molestation. Washing and dressing are molestations. Having to get dressed! Having to eat breakfast! When you go out on the street, you are subject to the gravest possible molestations. You are unable to shield yourself. You lay about yourself, but it’s no use. The blows you dole out are returned a hundredfold. What are streets, anyway? Wendings of molestation, up and down. Squares? Bundled together molestations.

Without a story to drive it, Frost builds not through unfolding events but by telemarking around Strauch’s bitter cosmology while the narrator follows him through the woods, fattening himself on the rage of his new mentor. A chart of Strauch’s worldview would produce a splotchy Rorschach of points and counterpoints, contradictions, reversals, and the occasional backflip, none of which could really hold up to a logician’s scrutiny, which is obviously the point. Strauch, a failed artist who only painted in total darkness, is opposed to nearly everything, and lest you think he’s a humanist at the core, with a fondness for the arts (that classic virtue of the misanthrope), he claims that “artists are the sons and daughters of loathsomeness, of paradisiac shamelessness, the original sons and daughters of lewdness; artists, painters, writers and musicians are the compulsive masturbators on the planet.” Yet there are even worse evildoers, in his estimation: “I’ve never hated anything as much as I hated teachers.” A notable assessment, given that he was for a long time employed as one.  Of his students, he says: “I never told them the name of one single flower or tree. Nor gave them one country of origin . . . Because I am opposed to the enlightenment of children where plants are concerned, in fact, where nature is concerned.” Indeed, he believes that schools should be abolished and that young people should be required to visit slaughterhouses instead, which can teach them far more, and far more quickly: “The only wisdom is abattoir wisdom!” He swears he does not exaggerate, and that “imagination is an illness.” On his own powers of observation: “I discovered that my surroundings didn’t want to be explained by me.” Which doesn’t keep him from trying.

Strauch is too deranged to make sense, or, more worryingly, he’s too perceptive and intelligent to straitjacket his explosive declarations with coherence and consistency. Never mind the beautiful paradox of Beckett’s motto: I can’t go on, I’ll go on. Bernhard’s version of the phrase removes Beckett’s compulsion to live: I can’t go on, I’ll kill myself. I am a coward for not having already killed myself. But since all pursuits are futile, suicide is futile. Better never to have been born.

One of the unbalancing pleasures of Frost is how frequently we can change our mind about Strauch as he himself obsessively changes his own mind, shifting our diagnosis from Angry Genius to Brain-Addled Sad Sack to Poet of Uncomfortable Truths. Not knowing the limits of his hatred and fear makes Strauch fascinating, and Bernhard, even this early in his career, knew how to use characters as shock treatments for the reader, dialing up the intensity before boredom can set in. The most chilling idea that recurs in Frost involves suicide, which is offered up by Strauch as the one authentic solution to the problem of being alive. But it is spoken of as such an inevitability—the question is only really when it will happen for each person—that it’s considered “the decision of the father (first and foremost) and of the mother (as well) to sponsor the suicide of their offspring, the child, the sudden premonition of ‘having created a new suicide.’” Suicide is a project initiated by all parents, and giving birth is likened to plotting a death. It feels violent, and violating, to have suicide threatened in one’s presence, even from a character in a novel, and to ignore it is like walking away from a drowning person. If there’s something voyeuristic to this role we’re forced into, it also imposes an unwanted responsibility, which is quite different from the routine empathy one might feel toward a more typical fictional character. This difference of literary effect begins to describe how assaultive Bernhard’s work can be. Strauch foreshadows the kind of character Bernhard would go on to create in novels like Woodcutters, The Loser, Correction, and Extinction—a ranting malcontent on a filibuster, staging grand disquisitions on the awful discomfort of being human, frequently endorsing suicide as not only appropriate but desirable. He so loathes the fact that he was born that he wants to erase himself.

Alive with rage and shouting in our faces, a character of this sort eats up so much of the stage that story and plot are crowded out to the perimeter, obediently clamoring for attention now and again, but appearing dim and perfunctory at best. The compelling happenings of Frost are mostly interior, and the physical world and its objects are rotely attended to. The narrator, innocent of the world at the outset, is so poisoned by Strauch’s perspective that he turns into a kind of destroyed madman himself—as if he has witnessed an atrocity that he will never recover from—and we see that certain ideas can be so corrosive as to ruin the mind that hosts them. The novel closes with the narrator’s “report” back to his teacher, a letter that regurgitates some of Strauch’s tirade with a degree of desperation, struggling to find a language with which to diagnose Strauch, settling finally on the awkward phrasing of “an amoral interstitial thinking without any declared purpose,” a disorder that has probably not yet made it into the DSM. Banging his head against “the unrevealing mysticism of one who is on the run from clarity,” the narrator in the end declares Strauch to be “much more miserably alone than one will be able to imagine even after reading my report.” This is a beautiful bit of modesty that defeats any sense that Strauch has been exaggerating his condition, deepening the already terrible black hole that surrounds him. It seems that Strauch isn’t the only one who paints in total darkness. His creator is rather fond of doing so as well.

Bernhard’s ambivalence toward the dramatic shape of a plotted story is already in evidence in Frost, yet he hadn’t quite determined how to supplant it, which leads to a static, sometimes overexcited investigation of Strauch and his manias: a novel that can function more as a perverse disclosure of a disease than as a suspenseful revelation of character. The subplots and secondary characters in Frost—intrigue at the inn and the neighboring village, which Strauch and the narrator sometimes gossip about—serve as peripheral animations to throw Strauch’s tirades into greater relief, but they also work to allow the reader some much-needed rest from the scorched-earth intensity of Strauch’s anger. The knacker, hauling around animal carcasses, is sleeping with the innkeeper, whose husband is in jail for murder; as characters they are somewhat less than human, driven entirely by their lower faculties and made to seem unduly crass and petty. A farmhouse burns, incinerating the animals within, which prompts a cheerful description of their burnt flesh. A woodcutter is killed. But these characters, and their intrigues, are more like hand puppets bobbing atop cardboard scenery, a bit of over-rigged, cartoonish entertainment in between bracing doses of death talk. Bernhard doesn’t seem particularly convinced by the dramatic potential of this material either, and so it is only lightly and erratically sketched, while Strauch is held in abeyance before he bombards us again with his rant against life. One senses the young Bernhard trying his hand at conventional narrative (an interest he would later abandon), dutifully serving up novelistic material to spackle together the far more potent torment issuing from Strauch, but it’s curious in a novel when adultery and animal fires, as well as general mayhem in the Austrian forest, can serve as light comic relief.

Bernhard finds little use in his novels for cheerful thoughts, happy people, or positive outcomes. Says the narrator of The Loser: “It’s always correct to say this or that person is an unhappy person . . .whereas it’s never correct to say that this or that person is a happy one.” Facile reasoning aside, his characters might be regarded as arguments, constructed to stifle any possibility of hope or joy, the opposite of what anyone—anyone, that is, with an interest in self-preservation—should want from a book. They petition, with a barrister’s authority, a bleak space, interrogating the purpose of life and regularly finding it hollow and terrible. “Who had the idea of letting people walk around on the planet,” asks the narrator,” or something called a planet, only to put them in a grave, their grave, afterwards?”

Who indeed? Yet the technique precisely describes the kind of jeopardy in which Bernhard routinely places hi characters, choosing to notice them just when their suffering is at its most intense. This procedure allows readers the unusual experience of witnessing people who operate under virtually no illusions, in the most extreme emotional circumstances, at war with fears that none of us can rightly deny. These are characters without the routine protective carapace of denial and evasion, and their raw assault on mortal problems can make them seem both heroic and doomed. As psychological specimens, they are among the most dour, depressed, angry, and alarmingly death-obsessed characters in the history of literature; and anecdotal assessment, of course, but if a device existed to measure the nihilism of a fictional character, it is hard to imagine that Bernhard’s creations would not peg the needle of the machine.

Bernhard’s mortal impulses place him in the company of another contemporary German-language writer, W.G. Sebald. Both were perfect adherents to Kafka’s credo to pursue the negative, because “the positive thing is given to us from the start.” Each produced portraits of devastated characters, ruined by both circumstance and self-generated torment, but their techniques diverged in stark ways. Whereas Sebald built a tranquil moat around his characters’ pain, Bernhard wheeled out the catapult and flung his characters into the fire, paying close attention to the sounds of their screams. In Sebald the emotion is buried under the veneer of manner and etiquette, and its repression and concealment create an exquisite pressure. We tiptoe around his characters and their elaborate denial, which, by its very banality, suggests to us extraordinary levels of pain that cannot be etched in language. They are so obliterated as to be beyond direct communication. Instead, they can talk about the flora and fauna in wistful ways, they can reminisce dully, and we are left to infer the depth of their grief. Sebald promoted his credo of subtlety and indirection when he declared that atrocity could not be rendered directly in literature, a rule that would seem to stuff rags into the mouths of Bernhard’s characters, who are so far from standing on ceremony that they may as well be crawling on their bellies through the dirt.

What does bind Bernhard and Sebald, beyond their instinct toward the inner darkness, is an interest in narrative techniques that moderate, and offset, the pain and anguish of their characters. Each frequently presents narrators whose chief function is to listen in on characters in pain, harvesting their suffering. Sebald’s quiet narrators work like mollusks on the encoded confessions that come to them, and it’s often the patience and curiosity of the narrators, or their simple drive to listen, that slowly draws in readers, until our own powers of detection are heightened and we can see the delicately buried signs of anguish. It is as though authorial choreography is not enough; an ally must be sent abroad into the text to work directly with the characters.

Bernhard, too, would prove to be obsessed with narrators who spy, effacing themselves in order to feed on a vaster world of feeling. In Frost, what keeps all of the madness and vitriol captivating is how elaborately it is mediated through the narrator, who breaks from direct quotation into stylized paraphrases, allowing the raw, spoken material from Strauch the refinements and range of literary prose. Strauch’s consciousness is artfully parceled for us to sound both more deranged and more provocative than it would if we were to listen directly to his monologues. This is not your best friend’s narcissism: boring and self- centered, repetitive, ignorant of its audience. Yet whenever Strauch worries his wound for too long, the relentlessness of the wrath quickly becomes numbing and theatrical. It strangely loses its conviction.

Bernhard would develop a keen instinct for techniques that allowed him to complicate what is sometimes the very basic message of his books (i.e., it hurts to be alive, and we might consider killing ourselves). Frequently, he would pair his characters with mute sidekicks, like the narrator in Frost, who absorb and filter the rage into readable form. This is Bernhard’s version of literary suspense: dangling his characters over sharp rocks, wringing from them their tortured confessions, which are then corseted into elegant prose by able chaperones. Frost is but a tentative step toward the mediation and rage processing that Bernhard would continue to hone in his later work. In books such as Extinction and Yes, Bernhard’s ranting narrators move away from their private testimony and manage also to shoulder a storytelling burden, saving these novels from overdrilling their own resources. A more refined antidote Bernhard discovered to this problem was to increase the curatorial range of his narrators, giving them access to larger and more varied territories, deepening the tragic circumstances that would provide the context for the novel. Correction, for example, plants its narrator among the posthumous papers of an architect who has just killed himself, since the perfect structure he built for his sister—a cone in the middle of a forest—has allowed her to consummate her own lifelong desire: to kill herself. The narrator, again unnamed and emotionally muted, can access both recollections and writings of his subject, Roithamer, in addition to his own memories of the man, which allows for a more complicated, contrapuntal force to develop, with multiple channels of content flowing into his shaping hands. The narrative moment of the novel is itself static—a man sits in a garret sorting through papers—but the territories the narrator can access to build a story are expansive and rich, allowing for a layered unfolding of circumstance and consequence.

If Frost is an apprentice work, a blast of raw feeling without the formal elegance of his later novels, it already heralds Bernhard’s urge not just to look death in the fact but to climb directly in its mouth and produce a fearless report of the architectural dimensions of a place that few of us care to imagine for very long. In writing that is remarkable for how close it takes us to our own ending, Bernhard is, finally, uplifting and revelatory, because he does not turn away from the most central and awful part of reality. His characters are so ruthlessly determined not to be fooled that they ruin themselves before our eyes. This is mercilessly honest work that shows the moral consequences of being highly alert to life, and it is terrifying to read. As the narrator of Frost says of his own report, “I could read the whole thing back, but I would only give myself a fright.” ■

The Genre Artist

If a story takes place, as we are told stories do, then who or what does it take that place from, and why is an acquisition verb—take—necessary to describe the activity of stories? Maybe it’s an unfair, literalizing question. Not all figures of speech need to be prodded for accuracy (although shouldn’t a phrase relating to stories, which are made of language, have some passing precision?). Stories would keep taking place whether or not we worried about what it meant for them to do so, or worried about what stories actually did instead. But if we poked at this strange phrase, which suggests a theft of setting in order for narrative to occur, we might also deduce that if a place is taken for something to happen in it, then this taking must happen at a specific time (that’s what the word “happen” asks us to believe, anyway). The verb “take” presumes duration, implies a moment (unless we take a break from time or take the opportunity to no longer experience time, options that are difficult, at best, to secure, unless we die). It is this specific time that is meant to concern us when we encounter what is likely the most well known (i.e., terrifying) story opener of all: once upon a time.

Imbedded in this innocent phrase, which I would like to prod for the rest of this paragraph until it leaks an interesting jelly, is a severally redundant claim of occurrence, perhaps the first thing a reader, or listener, must be promised (reader: consumer of artificial time). For the sake of contrast, to look at a more rigorously dull example, the opener “I have an idea” does not offer the same hope, or seduction, or promise (particularly if I am the “I”). Even the verb is static and suggests nothing approximating a moment. Time is being excluded, and look at all the people already falling asleep. “Once upon a time” is far more promising (something happened, something happened!). We might need to believe that the clock is ticking before we begin to invest our sympathies, our attentions, our energy.

Fiction has, of course, since dropped this ingratiating, hospitable opener in favor of subtler seductions, gentler heraldings of story. But it is rare not to feel the clock before the first page is done, a verb moving the people and furniture around (whereas “having an idea” does not allow us to picture anything, other than, possibly, a man on a toilet). The physical verbs are waiting to assert themselves, to provide moments that we are meant to believe in, and verbs, traditionally, are what characters use to stir up the trouble we call fiction. Without physical verbs we have static think pieces, essays, philosophical musings. There is no stirring, because generally there is nobody there holding a spoon. This will be an interesting distinction to remember.

Maybe this is as it should be, since Proust said the duty of the literary artist was to tell the truth about time. Aside from blanching at the notion of duty, which is one of the required notions to blanch at, it seems clear to me that Proust’s edict, interpreted variously, has served as a bellwether for most thriving traditions of fiction (which held true, of course, before Proust articulated it). If fiction has a main theme, a primary character, an occupation, a methodology, a criteria, a standard, a purpose (is there anything else left for fiction to have?), it would be time itself. Fiction is the production of false time for readers to experience. Most fiction seeks to become time. Without time, fiction is nonfiction. Yes, that’s arguable—we have Borges, Roussel, Christine Brooke-Rose, and Robbe-Grillet, after all, among others, to tell us otherwise, and it is in part their legacy, their followers (witting or not), whose pages will be shaken here until we have something that counts for a portrait of this anti-story tradition.

One basic meaning of narrative, then: to create time where there was none. A fiction writer who tells stories is a maker of time. Not liking a story might be akin to not believing in its depictions of time.

It sounds facile to say that stories occur, but it is part of the larger, relentless persuasion that time both is and envelops the practice we call story. We cannot easily separate the two. Yet if time is the most taken-for-granted aspect of fiction writing, it would seem precisely like the good hard wall a young, ambitious writer would want to bang his head against, in order to walk and talk newly in the world of fiction (that’s still the desire, right?). To the writer searching for the obstacle to surpass, time would look plenty worthy a hurdle. If something must be overcome, ruined, subverted in order for fiction to stay matterful (yes, maybe the metaphor of progress in literary art is pretentious and tired at this point (there’s time again, aging what was once such a fine idea)), then time would be the thing to beat, the thing fiction seemingly cannot do without, and therefore, to grow or change, must.

Time must die.

John Haskell is among an intriguing new group of writers chiseling away at the forms of fiction writing without appearing exhaustingly experimental (read: unreadable). Haskell is working primarily without or around time, producing fiction that might appear more essayistic, discursive, inert, philosophical, and, well, literally timeless (which is not yet to say that his debut book is for the ages). Yes, I said “inert,” because things do not have to move to be interesting. Think mountain. Think dead person. Think thought. I say “think,” because Haskell is a thinker, and although he writes often about film, you could not film what he writes.

I Am Not Jackson Pollock contains some storylike moments, but it is primarily a new kind of fiction, one that, curiously, hardly seems interested in fiction at all (which is not to suggest that it reads autobiographically—the opposite is true, which makes a great case for secret-keeping). Haskell might be indebted to Borges, but not in the way most so-called imaginative writers are. There’s no obsession with infinity and worlds within worlds, no conceptual masterminding at work to showcase a stoner’s tripped-out, house-of-Escher mentality, not much that would qualify as being made up. Haskell is more interested in using modest, unassuming forms of nonfiction, as did Borges or Sterne (albeit Haskell does not perpetrate extravagant untruths): the essay, the report, the biographical sketch, the character analysis (this last is Haskell’s favorite, from real people like Glenn Gould and Jackson Pollock, to film characters like Anthony Perkins’s innkeeper in Psycho, to Topsy, the first elephant executed by electricity). Haskell does not write characters so much as he writes about them, and it is this willful instinct toward exposition that is so curiously distinctive and unusual in the story-driven world of most new fiction.

A fair question here might be this: where is the fiction in this, if these “stories” of Haskell’s refuse story and then faithfully essay to supply information, respectable information, analysis, and reflection, just as nonfiction might? And one fair answer might be: John Haskell’s primary fiction, overriding his entire project, the place where his fiction is located, is precisely in his puzzling gesture of calling these pieces fiction in the first place. He is fictionalizing his genre. Or, in other words, his fiction is genre itself. Haskell is not an artist in a particular genre, he is an artist of genre.

To do what Haskell does is to take several genuine risks, which occasions a word or two about risk. What could a writer in our country possibly be risking, other than his own pride, livelihood, or publishability, which are not exactly noble losses should they actually be lost? (Many of us began writing without pride and publishability anyway, and I’m not exactly clear what livelihood is.) Yet risk is the most urgent exhortation of what we are supposed to take when we write fiction (which is somehow different from the kind of taking a story does when it takes place). Fiction is praised when it is called “risky,” but this sort of risk usually involves shattering, shameful disclosures. (I could fill the rest of this essay with examples of shattering, shameful disclosures, but maybe just one will do: while wrestling with my dog, experimenting on a new hold called “the Sumatra,” we ended up horizontal on the lawn, head to toe, and thereupon commenced a directed nuzzling, a purposeful mouth-to-balls activity, that in some quarters of academe is referred to as the sixty-nine, which then became a standard “variation” on the “Sumatra,” well into adulthood (especially into adulthood)). With secret-telling having become its own lucrative industry, it’s hard to fathom what a risk of subject-matter might be (though I’m certain better, scarier secrets are approaching in next season’s books, however ill-equipped my imagination is to conceive them).

Risks of form, on the other hand, might seem more provocative, more inherently interesting to those attuned to the established modes and means of fiction writing (Hey, you guys!), but the risk more often cited in these cases is the financial sort that a publisher takes in publishing such work. They risk not selling enough books. And they are sorry but they cannot take that risk (it is interesting that the writer is supposed to be risky while the publisher is not). Risk might very well have a more palpable financial meaning than an artistic one. So while it is no longer clear what literary risk is—perhaps the term has been molested to death, like those other harassed words: edgy, innovative, startling, stunning—it could be more appropriate to say that within the larger, hapless chance-taking of writing at all (when indifference is about the scariest, and likeliest, response most of us might face), writing fiction without story seems especially curious, willfully self-marginalizing, and therefore very much worth considering. (No, not all obscure literary gestures are “interesting,” but something akin to playing golf without one’s body, as John Haskell might be doing, is.)

The shopworn adage “show-don’t-tell” reinforces the ethos that fiction must have a story, and warns a writer away from discursive, essayistic moments and exposition, which apparently amount to a kind of quicksand for the writer (a statement that presupposes motion as a valuable aspect of fiction writing). Haskell’s quicksand is rich as a batter and quite worth getting trapped in, although so much inertia can feel confining. If we are to be cast in mud, and then smothered, we want our demise to be fascinating. Telling is supposedly insufficient, it cannot produce a quality demise, since it does not dramatize a moment, or in fact does not even supply a moment at all. Telling is stingy with time. Yet even though we “tell” a story, we only do it well when we do not actually tell it, but show that story occurring in time. Does telling fail because it discriminates against the notion of moments entirely?

Take this paragraph in Haskell’s story, “The Faces of Joan of Arc.”

Hedy Lamarr, through most of the movie, takes the side of those in authority, which is not the same as having authority. Obedience is a way of reconciling oneself to a lack of authority or a lack of choice. But it’s not the only way.

This is a funny (read: not-so-funny) way to start a section in a story, but this is Haskell in his psychological mode, and it’s a tone he turns to frequently, which can make parts of this book sound eerily similar to the DSM-IV-TR Case Studies: A Clinical Guide to Differential Diagnosis. His exposition is dutiful and persistent, but he oddly does not seem to be using it to generate sympathy, which is what a narrative writer might hope for after disclosing details of character. Minimalism in fiction, which at its best extracted psychology purely from surfaces, would be anathema to Haskell. One of his favorite things to do, his pet point throughout the book, is to probe the interior conflicts within a character, but the effect is rather more coldly intellectual than warmly empathic:

She creates a space between what she does and who she feels she is, so at least she can live with a little peace.He wanted to let whatever it was inside of him come out, and then change it, and by changing that he was hoping everything else would change.

Inside that bubble he could relax and let who he was come out.

She waited until what the camera wanted was fairly close to what she wanted, and although this wasn’t a perfect arrangement, she could pretend to stand it.

… the man wanted to bring out whatever it was inside the boy.

Haskell is expert at clarifying the moments when his characters feel estranged from themselves. The defiance of Haskell’s title is a form of self-denial echoed throughout most of these stories. He is so shrewd at depicting this sort of moment, that for him it is apparently sufficient to carry whole stories. Once he has achieved the revelation, he seems ready to end his story. If he has a deficiency, it’s his inability to convert his fascinations into whole pieces of writing that prove the artistic adequacy of his idea. If Haskell is desperate to show us how people hide from themselves and conspire against their own better interests, working as multiple identities in agonizing contexts—which is, after all, a familiar enough idea routinely explored, or dramatized, by many writers—then it’s upon him to make our experience of this idea immediate, visceral, and potently refreshed. Maybe it’s not upon him, but when the idea is centralized, as it is in Haskell’s work, and narrative is deliberately excluded, there is a risk when that idea does not seem novel.

To be fair, Haskell has no real comforting tradition to fall back on, to guide him in his efforts, so he must invent for himself what an ending, in this sort of writing, might look like. It’s an original path he has chosen, and it will be rewarding to watch this exceptional writer as he navigates this new territory for fiction.

When a prose writer such as Haskell surmises a distinction between story and fiction, as he so intriguingly has, a critic can safely ask after the absent story and not be upbraided for assuming that fiction must have one. A writer thus interested anyway in dividing the two projects risks an error of category, or at the least risks being read incorrectly (not that reading correctly sounds like a very compelling thing to be doing). But when, for example, David Markson, an expository novelist who fired the starting gun for fictions of information and proved that pure exposition can be alarmingly moving, who purposefully tells instead of shows, is dismissed in The New York Times for failing to provide a story in his novel Reader’s Block, no discussion follows about why, exactly, fiction must have one (at 150 words in the book review, how could any discussion follow?). Nor do we learn what a story might have looked like in such an exquisitely felt book that, to summarize, catalogs the various ways historical figures have hated whole races of people and/or died by their own hands. (Yes, you should read this book.)

Markson should have presumably, under the fiction-must-have-a-story criteria, zeroed in on one of his hundreds of characters and gone deep, doing that good old-time psychological work, the person-making stuff, dramatizing how such an interesting fellow had gone on to hate Jews and/or kill himself. Markson should have used more words like “then.” He should have sequenced. He seems to have forgotten that literature is supposedly a time-based art.

Markson’s amnesia is one of the happy accidents of the last decade of fiction writing. By eschewing a fetishistic, conventional interest in character, or a dutiful allegiance to moment creation, to occurrence itself, Markson accomplishes what a story, slogging through time and obedient to momentum, arguably could not: a commanding, obsessive portrait of single behaviors throughout history, a catalog of atrocity that overwhelms through relentless example. In truth, it’s a novel that can be read as an essay, but unlike most essays, it’s lyrically shrewd, poetry in the form of history, and it’s brave enough to provide creepy, gaping holes where we normally might encounter context (the burden of the conventional essayist).

This might explain a new category of writing, the lyric essay, swelling special issues of literary magazines (such as The Seneca Review) and, in particular, a new, provocative anthology: The Next American Essay, edited (orchestrated, masterminded, realized) by John D’Agata, the form’s single-handed, shrewd champion. The lyric essayist seems to enjoy all of the liberties of the fiction writer, with none of a fiction writer’s burden of unreality, the nasty fact that none of this ever really happened that a fiction writer daily wakes to. One can never say of the lyric essayist’s work that “it’s just fiction,” a vacuous but prevalent dismissal akin to criticizing someone with his own name. The lyric essay is a rather ingenious label, since the essayist supposedly starts out with something real, whereas the fiction writer labors under a burden to prove, or create, that reality, and can expect mistrust and doubt from a reader at the outset. In fiction, lyricism can look like evasion, special pleading, pretension. In the essay, it is apparently artistic, a lovely sideshow to The Real that, if you let it, will enhance what you think you know. The implied secret here is that one of the smartest ways to write fiction today is to say that you’re not, and then do whatever you very well please. Fiction writers take note. Some of the best fiction is these days being written as nonfiction.

The Next American Essay proceeds chronologically from 1975 to 2003, from John McPhee (a re-animated Monopoly game) to Jenny Boully (all footnotes, no text), with D’Agata practicing his own artful transitions before each piece, waxing witty, smart, personal, mute, cleverly obtuse, passionate, lucid, myopic. D’Agata’s transitions alone, which show how alive an anthology can be, and would make any editor envious, provide a toolbox of categorically adulterous leapfrogs that could outfit a whole new generation of writers with the skills to launch an impressive and relevant movement of writing. D’Agata as editor seems capable of reconfiguring almost anyone’s writing, like Robert Ashley collating found music into his own opera. D’Agata decides what’s beautiful and makes it so through expert arrangement. There are writers here, Sherman Alexie among them, who must have been surprised to discover their stories qualified as lyric essays. D’Agata justifies the choice of Alexie by claiming that fiction is a protective term, providing shelter for difficult material, which is really essayistic in nature. All fiction writers should be so lucky.

The flagship practitioner of the lyric essay, who seems early on to have inspired D’Agata’s editorial imagination, is the Canadian poet Anne Carson. Under the banner of poetry, Carson has produced some of the most rigorously intelligent and beautiful writing of the last ten years: essays, stories, arguments, poems, most provocatively in her early collection, Plainwater. Her piece, “Short Talks,” which she describes as one-minute lectures, and which moves through the history of philosophy like a flip-book of civilization, offering stern commandments and graceful fall-aways, simultaneously qualifies as fiction, poetry, and essay, and is championed protectively by ambassadors from each genre.

The loose criteria for the lyric essay seems to invoke a kind of nonfiction not burdened by research or fact, yet responsible (if necessary) to sense and poetry, shrewdly allegiant to no expectations of genre other than the demands of its own subject. If that sounds strangely like fiction, several of the writers included here, Harry Mathews, Carole Maso, and Lydia Davis among them, first published their pieces in that genre, and will no doubt continue to. Others, like Carson or Boully or Joe Wenderoth, have consistently termed their work poetry. Thalia Field has published her singular writing under the label of fiction, although it seems better read as poetry. Here, of course, it is an essay, as are works of autobiography. David Antin shows up with more of his astonishingly boring diaries, continuing his decades-long ruse of consequence. Thankfully he cannot single-handedly ruin an anthology. David Shields provides a Lishian catalog of clichés that accrue curious meanings and expose how revealing banal language can actually be. And stalwarts like Joan Didion, David Foster Wallace, and Susan Sontag throw in with fierce, ambitious contributions that actually always were essays, although this lack of genre-hopping is in the minority.

Sadly absent from what is otherwise one of the most significant anthologies published in years are a few true voices of the essay who would have fit right in with these other inspired eccentrics, among them: Daniel Harris, Lawrence Weschler, Joy Williams, and Dallas Wiebe.

One instantly wonders how the chosen genre appellation liberates or constricts the writer, and whether or not John Haskell, absent from D’Agata’s all-star selection, would have fared better (whatever that might mean) under a different label, with someone like D’Agata warming-up for him. Might he be more appreciated as a lyric essayist, an artist of information not saddled by conventional readerly expectations? I ask because Haskell seems to suffer slightly when evaluated as a fiction writer, when one brings hopes of story to his book, which are hard not to bring. There’s the implied tedium of fiction not driven by story, particularly if a reader is expecting one (of course tedium, as Robbe-Grillet showed, can have its thrills). With storyless fiction, one suspects an intellectual lesson is at hand, instead of entertainment (this must either be fun or it must be good for me), with a reader’s pleasure not high on the author’s agenda. Expectation can flatten a reader’s willingness to forestall desires for story. It is similar to feeling forever trapped in a flashback, waiting for the current scene. A reader saves attention and energy if he senses that what he’s reading is not primary, the thing itself, and that the real story is ahead, and attention is the commodity the writer is striving to create, at all costs. Haskell’s book could very nearly be shelved uncontested in the film studies section of the bookstore, and here it might perform its rogue fictionalizations with more astonishment, reversing his style of ambush, so to speak, since it is much more a collection of film studies with bursts of unreality, than it is a burst of unreality with moments of film studies.

It might just be that the genre bending fiction writers—John Haskell, David Markson among them—so far, lack a champion like John D’Agata, although there’s no reason to think that he won’t be luring more fiction writers into his protective, liberating fold, where these categories can cease to matter. Once upon a time there will be readers who won’t care what imaginative writing is called and will read it for its passion, its force of intellect, and for its formal originality.

THE HARMING OF MEANING

I mean to discuss certain reveries of reading that occurred during the interment of childhood I served in my parents’ home, reveries often centering around Seuss and his extreme attack on sense. Let’s say that I was often read to, that books were made a gift to me, ones I could not understand or even read but that joined the detritus of objects meant to secure my character, my future capacity of knowing. The books were an investment in the person-shaping activities my parents had undertaken with respect to me. If enough books were piled into my room, perhaps I might emerge a person, someone ready to square off with the other challengers coming through the pipes of childhood. It was in my best interest to posture a knowledge of a book, even if that entailed exhibiting grave silence in response to the typical interrogative. Possibly I learned grave silence before I learned to speak—it is a useful way to deflect attention, project authority, become a reader. Thus I “read” Dickens and Melville before I could properly think, and a page from Great Expectations was solely a field to accommodate, sanction, my own dayhiding, rather than a source I was supposed to study for narrative images. Reading was a time for wayward falling, plunging inward (wherever) as far as possible until the book asserted its world again, disappointed me with its specificity. A “good” book was a book sufficiently absent to allow me to inhabit its space and dilate (grow, fall, miss, lose) in whatever manner seemed fluid, a book that wouldn’t harass me over-much with its own terms. Most of what I remember reading as a child is instead whatever happened to be thinking while holding the book over my fact, growing up behind the page, etc. Only later did I learn the obligation, the disaster, of following the words. Wasn’t booked language the first sanction to let the mind form elsewhere? What a book is “about” is simply where you go when you read, where and how you move about in pursuit of yourself while the book is in action. It’s not what the book is about at all, rather what and where the reader is about. Reading can be discussed as a physical posture, an attitude or position struck to enable certain kinds of thinking, to hell with the specific book, double to hell with “writers” and their visions. The book is just equipment for the daily hunt, a shield. If you hold up a book, the world will leave you alone.

There were therefore occasions of storytelling I slept through. I can admit that most of what was sent my way fell short. One learned to offer up the typical listening cues to the mother or father storyteller: smile during a break in the language, nod, toss and put an arm over the eyes. Mostly I slept as the language fell over me. There is no better way to sleep than when being read to, first because I do not like being watched when language is coming at me, I do not want to be seen waiting for language. Second because the sleeper loses his pace without an ordered effort, a syntax, to the pursuit—language gives shape to the sleep act, structures the body’s drop, because to dream is to solicit pure grammar and thus perhaps discover something worth thinking, etc. One was often carried off to bed at this point, even when not sleeping, or awoken during this heave-ho, when it would be impolite to indicate I was awake. Childhood can be viewed as a set of strategies to secure carriage—in my case I was piggybacked, cradled, slung in a fireman’s carry. I was tossed and held and passed along, but, most importantly, I was kept off the ground (“The sacred or tabooed personage must be carefully prevented from touching the ground; in electrical language he must be insulated, if he is not to be emptied of the precious substance or fluid with which he, as a vial, is filled to the brim”—James Frazer). One wanted to be in their arms, to be brought into other rooms, preferably dark ones upstairs with cold sheets and a wedge of bed for them to sit and touch my hair, kiss the face that represented me, then close in on my chest for the great blackout.

Yet this business ceased when Seuss entered the orbit of noises launched to my attention. A Seuss encounter harmed my private effort of world-building. When it occurred, I could not go elsewhere because there was no elsewhere, no such thing as location. There was only one word and it was the word I was hearing, nothing could be substituted, or substitute away and nothing changed, because the spine of the thing had grown. The Seuss architecture at once woke me and began its rabid scaffolding, asserting an inner syntax bone by bone that has given body to every subsequent language enacted before me, owned and marked all future texts with its deep skeleton. To my view, then, one does not read Dr. Seuss, one is built by him. He is a builder of persons. He cannot be slept though.

THE DEAFENING PROPERTIES OF EARLY ART

When I was five years old I suffered a period of deafness. Suffered might not be the right word, maybe engaged is better, because I regard the deaf period as one of the most fruitful in my regretful relationship with myself. Let’s say I entered occasions of deafness that started with my mother, the chief soundmaker of my early time. Her voice produced a tightness in my head (a brightness too—sun, stars, the rest of it) and, to be frank, I rather enjoyed it, although a side “effect” was a sharp drop in what I could hear. This is my own diagnosis, you understand—maybe I was not deaf, was simply focusing on her, but it did seem that the world’s acoustics had halted just short of my own body, which was acting as a baffle. The sound was falling at my feet and, as with most things, I saw its effect on others but could not feel it for myself. It is only now that I can consider that what she read to me, what she was reading to me that year, might have been the cause of my loss of hearing, that hearing the cadenced madness of Seuss was literally deafening, a force so exclusive it denied me other sounds, or echoed so resolutely that nothing new could approach, certainly a criteria for powerful literature, or powerful something, maybe just power. The completeness of her voice was enough to bind me in place, leaving no room for what else, the sound of our house breathing out our actions, the songs I made to remind myself I was alive. It is amazing to be denied even the noise of one’s own hands, the ruffle of doing nothing. I was deaf for only so long, but long enough to become a vigilant watcher of the mouth, realizing that I had to get at the mouth to get what I wanted, the mouth being all. The Deaf are known for reading lips, not eyes, and they read lips because the lips produce a first language, regardless of sound, since sound proves to be incidental to language, only a technology of it. If I had to choose, I’d give up so-called landscapes, sunsets, flowers, sky, bodies, anything notoriously beautiful or hideous, for all of the completeness of watching a mouth, just the sight of a mouth and what it does, given that the mouth renders other scenery ridiculous, swallows up the entire category of what can be seen. It is ultimately the only thing to see, and a mouth in the act of shaping out the Seuss lexicon is the premier vision. Stated another way, Seuss is brilliant because the mouth makes beautiful shapes to recite his work. That’s as far as my literary criticism goes, my primary aesthetic criteria. In honor of Dr. Seuss, I will admit that I do not look people in the eye, that I don’t regard the eye as the center of the “storm,” but rather the mouth, or the word hole, that carves language out of the wind. The eyes cheat and hide; despite the lore, eyes have never “said” anything to me, they seem built chiefly of water, easily poured from the head and discarded. The only thing eyes are good for is to look at the mouth. Dr. Seuss is an artist of the mouth because a recitation of his work requires a first gymnastic of the face, a series of basic face codes as primal as, well, as primal to me because it was my mother’s face that undertook the gestures, or that was overtaken by them, a semaphore of the head that said everything and gave me not only a mother, but a world. My other senses, at the time, were irrelevant.

THE LITERATURE OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

My feeling is that the impossible must be made viable, and only through language, that language is not subject to laws of physics and therefore must not be restricted to conservative notions of “sense” or even “nonsense,” but must pursue what appears impossible in order to discover the basic things: what to do, what for, how and just what.

We do not have language only to duplicate the mistakes our bodies make, or to try to represent the body in action. The body is heavy enough to represent itself; enough with the body, let it rot. Language so readily affirms the impossible that to deny this potential is to harm the future of what can be known or felt, which makes life impossible. Thus for life to be possible, language must pursue what it is not. Seuss is a hero to me because he made manifest the rampant power of naming, proving that you can name a thing into being as well as name something right out of the world. Objects have no anchors, let’s go after them all and send them into the ether, clear the world of what we already know. If I Ran the Zoo is not just a cute bestiary of impossible flesh, but proof that words are harder than things, that guttural announcements such as “the Bustard, who only eats custard with sauce made of mustard” are far more sublime and revealing than any book of crappy facts. “Oh snow and rain are not enough! Oh, we must make some brand new stuff!” Hell yes! Has it ever been said any better? But Seuss makes new “stuff” because the language is built to amplify the catalog of things as long as we have artists able to laugh off the burden of boredom passed on by those “practitioners” who officially ruin the language each time they use it.

In this regard, Seuss is a doctor because he enacts a medicine of language that heals the scar left by reason, complacency, sense, predictability, a scar so complete it just looks like the world, and we often don’t know any better, don’t know we’re living on a wound. He is a doctor of structure, able to liberate the head from its habit of easy, empty associations, allowing a delirious collision of objects to stand in for boredom and the disappointments of the eyes. The fool medicates the serious people, exposes the dullness of their gravity. “For almost two days you’ve run wild and insisted/On chatting with persons who’ve never existed.” But it’s the fool who chatters at nothing who then allows for the nothingness to dilate, creating new rooms to be filled. Seuss plays the fool and enables the helium-knowledge of silliness, for to be silly is not only to lack sense but to be blessed, to levitate, transcend, stand above the earth (and not to touch it). The medicine is triggered without contact. He does not need to touch us. We are healed into the future by his manipulations of the great brain of language, which must be massaged in order to grow, and shocked, and jarred, and kicked and injected. It is thus not untoward to consider that Seuss is a chemical. The vocabulary will always change for that inscrutable, necessary thing that creatures pursue. Why not simplify? In place of whatever is more basic than food, air, touch, water, without which we would not even have life enough to die, insert a word that stands for all of it: Seuss. It should forever stand for everything important. Water can only do so much.