FlashFiction.Net

I found this essay written during my MFA. I think it was written at a time when I began to think of each sentence as its own story. That thought process came while reading Ian McEwan’s Saturday. Maybe it’s interesting. Maybe not.

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Walking up three flights of stairs has revived him, his eyes are wide open in the dark; the exertion, his minimally raised blood pressure, is causing local excitement on his retina, so that ghostly swarms of purple and iridescent green are migrating across his view of a boundless steppe, then rolling in on themselves to become bolts of cloth, swathes of swagged velvet, drawing back like theatre curtains on new scenes, new thoughts (38).

The above sentence from Saturday has a “loose sentence structure,” the feeling that at any of a number of times it could’ve ended, such as rewritten here:

Walking up three flights of stairs has revived him. His eyes are wide open in the dark. He has minimally raised blood pressure. This exertion is causing local excitement on his retina. Ghostly swarms of purple and iridescent green are migrating across his view of a boundless steppe. They are rolling in on themselves to become bolts of cloth and swathes of swagged velvet. They are drawing back like theatre curtains on new scenes and thoughts.

Yet McEwan’s sentence goes on, the commas carrying it further so that the desired end is put off, much like the orgasm that is to follow, the repeated new adding that emphatic, climactic finale. Here, the structure reinforces that sense of something new unfolding, of an experience that cannot be stopped no matter how the character would will it to end. I once read that the desire of a text is for its end—and I wonder if sentences share a similar need. By putting off that desire, the writer creates a tension: the sentence struggling to complete and the writing willing it forward. Such structures—in fact, almost all of them analyzed here do so—build from the general—his eyes are open in the dark—and add the minutiae that allows the reader inside that original, generalized thought. An expansiveness occurs, one that allows the writer to take the reader from the distant, first observed action—walking up stairs—and into the consciousness behind that action.

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This commonplace cycle of falling asleep and waking, in darkness, under private cover, with another creature, a pale soft tender mammal, putting faces together in a ritual of affection, briefly settled in the eternal necessities of warmth, comfort, safety, crossing limbs to draw nearer—a simple daily consolation, almost too obvious, easy to forget by daylight (50).

Again, the sentence accumulates, begins with the universal and then gathers its particulars, each one distinct yet related, the general creature shifting to a mammal, the mammal to a face, the face to the feelings it engenders. But here, rather than continue on this path, the sentence returns to the general—the meaning of this act as a simple daily consolation. Thus we journey in, then back out, the sentence taking in both the particulars of this relationship—allowing it come alive through the specific details—while at the same time taking us outside of the relationship, to the millions of other couples engaged in a similar act that creates the “something” of life that shelters us from the nothing (represented in this story by Baxter and terrorism, that which would take away all the “somethings” we’ve accumulated). Framed by the more wide-ranging actions—the sleeping, waking, daily consolations—the action of the individual actually takes place inside the sentence itself.

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With a short running jump, he springs two, three feet into the air, and with racket fully extended, his thick, muscular back gracefully arched, his teeth bared, his head flung back and his left arm raised for balance, he catches the ball just before the peak of its trajectory and with a whip-like backhand smash that shoots the ball down to hit the front wall barely an inch above the tin—a beautiful, inspired, unreturnable shot (115).

The sentence mirrors the action it captures; it runs, then springs, flings itself at the reader, winds itself up, and hurtles forward—“a beautiful, inspired, unreturnable shot.” To capture that motion and pounding, hurtling sense, McEwan uses conjunctions, until that final set-off description. It’s an interesting technique, to describe something first—this action of hitting the ball—and then explain at the end what it is we’ve just finished observing. Such a structure both “shows” and “tells”—a quality that would drive many MFA workshop participants to distraction in figuring out how to critique it. Parallelism—racket extended, back arched, teeth bared, head flung, arm raised—gives the sentence its foundation. Around that centerpiece, McEwan builds the complex structure. He begins with a very clear action: Jay springs into the air. And he ends with continuation of the action: Jay catches the ball and shoots it down. Each item in that parallel series, though, has a slightly different form: thick muscular back gracefully arched isn’t precisely parallel either to his head flung back or to his left arm raised for balance. The past particple maintains the parallelism, but McEwan’s variance around that theme, much like Theo’s experimentation with the blues themes, adds additional layers of interest and meaning.

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Out in the real world there exist detailed plans, visionary projects for peaceable realms, all conflicts resolved, happiness for everyone, for ever—mirages for which people are prepared to die and kill (176).

This sentence repeats a singular concept—a search for Eden—through a series of re-envisioned reiterations of that original idea. The general idea sets the sentence in motion, but what sustains its momentum are all the various alternatives. It ends with the death of that dream—the “dying” and “killing” that makes Eden impossible. The sentence that began with “detailed plans” for “peaceable realms” ends with “mirages” ending in death. The sentence’s journey reflects humanity’s journey, from Eden to wasteland. And how can one not love that “for everyone, for ever,” the “forever” that (who knew?) has always been inside the “for everyone” brought outside, the way the Edenic search inside all our various dreams is brought out in this sentence. God, that’s just so good.

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Before Baxter speaks, Perowne tries to see the room through his eyes, as if that might help predict the degree of trouble ahead: the two bottles of champagne, the gin and the bowls of lemon and ice, the belittlingly high ceiling and its mouldings, the Bridget Riley prints flanking the Hodgkin, the muted lamps, the cherry wood floor beneath the Persian rugs, the careless piles of serious books, the decades of polish in the thakat table. (213).

McEwan’s asyndetonic parallel listing of objects creates a riddle: What meaning emerges out of their being juxtaposed? Every sentence, of course, will have its own unique answer. Here, these objects symbolize the human-made world, the things created to offset the nastiness in nature—Baxter’s genetic coding that transforms him into something inhuman and brutish. These things—for Henry and for us—stave off that crack in the world made by those planes crashing into the Towers. Each object exerts its own individual power: the champagne and its bubbly wealth, the gin&lemon its air of tradition, the ceiling a sense of God, the prints its art and culture, the lamps its light, and so on. While the sentence allows us to take each one individually, it also forces us to consider them as a whole, that entire sense of civilization and art and culture and love and shelter and goodness—all that Baxter threatens to take from him, all that 9/11 threatened to take from all of us.