Monday 4/22/24
More work on "May Showers."
There is no one else who could have written it, but if someone did, they would have been so pleased that they had that they wouldn't have considered coming back to it again, and again, trying to make it better still. But that's what I've been doing.
There is this paragraph within the story that is one of the most remarkable things I've ever seen, including from a structural standpoint. It's three sentences long, but it's not really three sentences.
The first sentence begins subject-verb. What you see with all of the MFA-machined slop--and I'll break down an example soon from The Paris Review--is subject-verb, subject-verb, subject-verb, every sentence.
This sentence, like I said, starts with a subject-verb clause, but then it progresses through five additional clauses, with those clauses working almost like short passes do in hockey. The best passing teams are good at moving down the ice via such passes. Those passes have a way of condensing and thus lessening distance. It's a very connective approach. The same principle can apply to writing. After all, the best writing is connective in every way and lessens distance between work and reader.
Here, the clauses are shaded almost like they're in a different key than the root--as in opening in this case--clause, but they have the same tonal center. It's a six-clause sentence, but the clauses take us downhill. We don't feel, having read the sentence, that we've read a long sentence. If someone said, "It's X amount of words long," the reader would be like, "Really?" We don't have to go backwards to connect anything with, say, clause the fourth, in order to have clause five read as sensical and a rhythmic continuation, which is something you often have to do with, say, the multiple clauses of Henry James, who does not write downhill. You have to re-find the flow with James.
But then there's this additional component: that downward momentum continues on through the sentence and into what follows. We get the nominal period, but it's what I think of as a ghost period--it's there, like the way a rest is there in music; but the momentum of that which had been happening can carry on over through the interval of the rest--of the ghost period--and into the next sentence, taking its momentum further.
Now things really start to get all "Holy fuck, I could never do that." This second sentence both is a sentence and isn't. It starts--and you don't see this without it being a pre-made, accepted construction--with the word "Him." There's no comma after the Him, though. It's not like, "Him, I like," which is that accepted construction I was talking about.
This construction is dependent on the continued momentum of the earlier sentence. It really starts with the last sentence's sustained momentum. Its carry-over momentum. Technically, this second sentence isn't even going to be a sentence, but it is a sentence. It's 110 words long. It's not stream of consciousness. I don't do that. There isn't even really a violation of the strict rules of grammar. This is just new.
Further: this is a work about the rain and a voice in the rain, and that idea is brought out in this language itself, which has a rain-like quality, and the quality of a voice in the rain and being the rain.
There is so much power and force and momentum--and swing, too--in this sentence, that it's propelling us; having utilized the momentum of the previous sentence, that momentum builds through the 110 words of this sentence, such that when it comes to its end--with another ghost period--then the next sentence that concludes this remarkable paragraph begins with a subject-less clause and we are still sustained--and, in actuality, further boosted along--by that which has come before and remained within us and is actively still happening/unfolding. The actual subject--which is beyond the letters of the language, because I'm not talking grammar now and diagramming sentences--is this spirit, for this is a ghost story, but a ghost story unlike any ever written. And the ghost is even in the structure of the thing. It's that force, that momentum. Just as there's this voice in the rain in the story. Both there but not there.
There's a second clause, also without subject, that qualifies--or rather quantifies--an aspect of that first clause, before we get to the concluding clause of the sentence and the paragraph, which takes us out of both with a subject-verb structural reprise of the clause that opened the paragraph. So the paragraph is bookended, we might say, by a subject-verb construction, but this is as far afield as you can be from the rote subject-verb construction that dominates everyone else's writing and makes for the whole of it, such that there's anything there at all.
The three sentences of the paragraph are comprised of 191 words. By contrast, I'd say the median sentence in "The Bird" is six-words long, and there are five commas in the whole of that story. Everything I do is completely different from anything else I do. What you will see with every other writer is that everything they do is the exact same as anything else they do.
I'm looking at this paragraph and I'm thinking, "How on earth could any of these people compete with this?" It's laughable. No one could do it. And that's before we get into what is happening here at the level of the story, the power of these words, their impact emotionally, psychologically, and even physically.
When I say I read things I wrote and laugh, this is what I'm laughing about. I just sit here and read it back and laugh. It's like, come on, you have to be kidding me that someone is doing this. And I did it.
