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DESCRIPTION
359
The final sentence sums up the scene and states the impression
directly, as to the modifiers "neatly," "clean," "gay," but on
the whole the images create the sense of middle-class fulfill-
ment. Any ugliness is excluded. If the lawn were disfigured
by crabgrass, if weeds leered among the flowers, the facts are
discreetly omitted.
Very different are the
details—and
the
impression—in
this
account of the homes of miners in the north of England:
I
found great variation in the houses
I
visited. Some were as decent
as one could possibly expect in the circumstances, some were so
appalling that
I
have no hope of describing them adequately. To
begin with, the smell, the dominant and essential thing, is inde-
scribable. But the squalor and the confusion! A tub full of filthy
water here, a basin full of unwashed crocks there, more crocks
piled in any odd corner, torn newspaper littered everywhere, and
in the middle always the same dreadful table covered with sticky
oilcloth and crowded with cooking pots and irons and half-darned
stockings and pieces of stale bread and bits of cheese wrapped
round with greasy newspaper! And the congestion in a tiny room
where getting from one side to the other is a complicated voyage
between pieces of furniture, with a line of damp washing getting
you in the face every time you move and the children as thick
underfoot as
toadstools! George Orwell
Sometimes a writer concentrates on one or two images
which symbolize the impression. In the following passage Al-
fred Kazin projects into two key symbols his childhood de-
spair at being forced to attend a special school because of his
stuttering:
It
troubled me that
I
could speak in the fullness of my own voice
only when
I
was alone on the streets, walking about. There was
something unnatural about it; unbearably isolated.
I
was not like
the others! At midday, every freshly shocking Monday noon, they
sent me away to a speech clinic in a school in East New York,
where
I
sat in a circle of lispers and cleft palates and foreign accents
holding a mirror before my lips and rolling difficult sounds over
and over. To be sent there in the full light of the opening week,
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360
DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION
when everyone else was at school or going about his business,
made me feel as if
I
had been expelled from the great normal body
of humanity.
I
would gobble down my lunch on my way to the
speech clinic and rush back to the school in time to make up for
the classes
I
had lost. One day, one unforgettable dread day,
I
stopped to catch my breath on a corner of Sutter Avenue, near the
wholesale fruit markets, where an old drugstore rose up over a great
flight of steps. In the window were dusty urns of colored water
floating off iron chains; cardboard placards advertising hairnets, EX-
LAX; a great illustrated medical chart headed THE HUMAN FACTORY,
which showed the exact course a mouthful of food follows as it
falls from chamber to chamber of the body.
I
hadn't meant to stop
there at all, only to catch my breath; but
I
so hated the speech
clinic that
I
thought
I
would delay my arrival for a few minutes by
eating my lunch on the steps. When
I
took the sandwich out of my
bag, two bitterly hard pieces of hard salami slipped out of my hand
and fell through a grate onto a hill of dust below the steps.
I
re-
member how sickeningly vivid an odd thread of hair looked on the
salami, as if my lunch were turning stiff with death. The factory
whistles called their short, sharp blasts stark through the middle of
noon, beating at me where
I
sat outside the city's magnetic circle.
I
had never known,
I
knew instantly
I
would never in my heart
again submit to, such wild passive despair as
I
felt at that moment,
sitting on the steps before THE HUMAN FACTORY, where little robots
gathered and shoveled the food from chamber to chamber of the
body. They had put me out into the streets,
I
thought to myself; with
their mirrors and their everlasting pulling at me to imitate their ef-
fortless bright speech and their stupefaction that a boy could stam-
mer and stumble on every other English word he carried in his
head, they put me out into the streets, had left me high and dry on
the steps of that drugstore staring at the remains of my lunch turning
black and grimy in the dust.
In Kazin's description selection is extremely important.
The passage focuses onto the images of THE HUMAN FAC-
TORY and the two pieces of salami. Kazin tells us what his
feelings were (he is quite explicit). But he communicates the
despair of an alienated child in the salami with its "odd thread
of hair turning black and grimy in the dust," and the in-
human little robots endlessly shoveling food into a body that
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DESCRIPTION
361
has become a machine. In a world symbolized by such images
there is little room for humane values, for love and compas-
sion and tender understanding.
Kazin's paragraph shows the importance of the "crystalliz-
ing image," the detail that precipitates the scene in the reader's
mind. The writer must make readers see (or hear or taste or
touch). He or she cannot achieve this merely by relentlessly
listing every detail that falls within the perceptual field. Even
in catalogue descriptions like that by John Peale Bishop, we
are shown only a portion of what exists to be seen. The writer
must select relatively few details but render these so vividly
that a reader sees them in his mind's eye. These will then
crystalize the perception, making it solid and true. It is rather
like developing a photograph. The writer begins the process,
carefully choosing details and expressing them in compelling
images; readers, developing these images in the fluid of their
own experience, complete the picture for themselves.
The point to remember is this: select only the details essen-
tial to the impression you want to convey; describe them pre-
cisely and concretely; then readers will perceive them.
Metaphor and Simile in Subjective Description
In addition to selecting and arranging details, the writer of
description may also introduce comparisons, often in the
form of metaphors or similes. In Bishop's paragraph about
the Decatur Street Market, for instance, the proprietor is "fat
as Silenus" (an ancient god of wine), the leeks "sea-green"
with roots "like witches' hair," and the squashes "long and
curled like the trumpets of Jericho."
Metaphor is even more central in the following passage
about the Great Wall of China. The Wall assumes a mon-
strous power as it marches over and dominates the lands:
There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent and terrible, stood the
Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature her-
self, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth
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362
DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION
of the valley. Menacingly, the grim watch towers, stark and four
square, at due intervals stood at their posts. Ruthlessly, for it was
built at the cost of a million lives and each one of those great grey
stones has been stained with the bloody tears of the captive and
the outcast, it forged its dark way through a sea of rugged moun-
tains. Fearlessly, it went on its endless journey, league upon league
to the furthermost regions of Asia, in utter solitude, mysterious like
the great empire it guarded. There in the mist, enormous, majestic,
silent, and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China.
W. Somerset Maugham
Exaggerating Details
An impression may be embodied in distorted and exaggerated
details. Mark Twain, an adept at the art of hyperbole, or ex-
aggeration, tells of a trip he took in an overland stage in the
1860s. The passengers have spent the night at a way station,
and Twain describes the facilities for cleaning up before
breakfast the next morning:
By the door, inside, was fastened a small old-fashioned looking-
glass frame, with-two little fragments of the original mirror lodged
down in one corner of it. This arrangement afforded a pleasant
double-barreled portrait of you when you looked into it, with one
half of your head set up a couple of inches above the other half.
From the glass frame hung the half of a comb by a
string—but
if
I
had to describe that patriarch or die,
I
believe
I
would order some
sample coffins. It had come down from Esau and Samson, and had
been accumulating hair ever
since—along
with certain impurities.
We are not supposed to take this literally, of course. Twain
is exercising the satirist's right of legitimate exaggeration, le-
gitimate because it leads us to see a truth about this frontier
hostel.
Process Description
A process is a directed activity in which something undergoes
progressive change. The process may be natural, like the
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DESCRIPTION
363
growth of a tree; or it may be humanly directed, like an au-
tomobile taking shape on an assembly line. But always some-
thing is
happening—work
is being done, a product being
formed, an end of some kind being achieved.
To describe a process you must analyze its stages. The anal-
ysis will determine how you organize the description. In a
simple case, such as baking a cake, the process has obvious,
prescribed steps; the writer needs only to observe and record
them accurately. On the other hand, complicated and abstract
processes—for
instance, how a law comes into being as an act
of
Congress—require
more study and thought.
Here is a simple example of a process, a natural
one—a
small frog being eaten by a giant water bug:
He didn't jump;
I
crept closer. At last
I
knelt on the island's win-
terkilled grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog in the creek just
four feet away. He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes. And
just as
I
looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The
spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and
drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked
tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football.
I
watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and rumple,
and fall. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay
in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water: it was a mon-
strous and terrifying thing.
I
gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval
shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow
glided away. The frog skin bag began to sink. Annie Dillard
At the beginning of the description the frog is whole and alive,
sitting in the creek; by the end it has been reduced to a bag
of skin. This change is the process Dillard describes. It is con-
tinuous rather than divided into clearly defined steps. Yet it
is analyzed. Verbs, the key words in the analysis, create sharp
images of alteration: "crumpled," "collapse," "shrinking,"
"deflating," "ruck," "rumple," "fall." The similes and meta-
phors translate an unusual visual experience into more famil-
iar ones: "like a deflating football," "formless as a pricked
balloon."
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364
DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION
The next example of process description involves an assem-
bly line at a cosmetics plant:
Cream-jar covers joggle along a moving belt. Six iron arms descend
to set paper sealers on
sextuplicate
rows of cream pots. Each clat-
tering cover is held for a moment in a steel disk as a filled cream
jar is raised by a metal wrist and screwed on from underneath.
At the mascara merry-go-round a tiny tube is placed in each steel
cup—clink.
The cups
circle—ca-chong,
ca-chong,
ca-chong—till
they pass under two metal udders. There the cups jerk
up—ping—
and the tubes are filled with mascara that flows from the vats up-
stairs in manufacturing. The cups continue their circle till they pass
under a
capper—plump.
The filled, capped tubes circle some more
till they reach two vacuum nozzles,
then—fwap—sucked
up,
around and down onto a
moving
belt.
All along the belt women in blue smocks, sitting on high stools,
pick up each mascara tube as it goes past. They insert brushes, tamp
on labels, encase the tubes in plastic and then cardboard for the
drugstore displays.
At the Brush-On Peel-Off Mask line, a filler picks an empty bottle
off the belt with her right hand, presses a pedal with her foot, fills
the bottle with a
bloop
of blue goop, changes hands, and puts the
filled bottle back on the line with her left hand, as she picks up
another empty bottle with her right hand. The bottles go past at
thirty-three a minute. Barbara Carson
Garson's description provides a
fine
example of how analysis
determines paragraphing. Three products are
involved—
cream, mascara, and the "Brush-On Peel-Off
Mask"—and
each is treated in a separate paragraph. For the mascara two
are used, marking the two-stage process of the tubes' being
first
filled and then packaged.
The sentences are also determined by the analysis. Thus the
three sentences of the first paragraph distinguish (1) the
covers on the conveyor belt, (2) the iron arms placing sealers
on the pots, and (3) the fixing of the lids onto the jars. Notice,
too, the long sentence in the fourth paragraph; it uses parallel
verbs to analyze the filler's movements.
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DESCRIPTION
365
Process description may be either objective or subjective.
Both the foregoing examples are relatively objective, though
each suggests responses. Even though Dillard's subject is hor-
rifying and she actually expresses her reaction ("it was a mon-
strous and terrifying thing"), her images are objective. Dillard
concentrates on rendering the visual experience in and of itself
(which in a case like this perhaps best communicates the
horror).
Despite its objective surface, Garson's description also im-
plies a reaction. Her
diction—especially
the words imitating
sounds—suggests
the inhuman quality of the assembly line.
Her fourth paragraph cleverly hints her feelings about work
on the line. The long elaborate first sentence describing the
worker's mechanized movements is followed by a brief
matter-of-fact announcement that "the bottles go past at
thirty-three a minute." The implication makes sensitive read-
ers wince.
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CHAPTER
31
Narration
A narrative is a meaningful sequence of events told in words.
It is sequential in that the events are ordered, not merely ran-
dom. Sequence always involves an arrangement in time (and
usually other arrangements as well). A straightforward move-
ment from the
first
event to the last constitutes the simplest
chronology. However, chronology is sometimes complicated
by presenting the events in another order: for example, a story
may open with the
final
episode and then flash back to all
that preceded it.
A narrative has meaning in that it conveys an evaluation of
some kind. The writer reacts to the story he or she tells, and
states or implies that reaction. This is the "meaning," some-
times called the "theme," of a story. Meaning must always be
rendered. The writer has to do more than tell us the truth he
sees in the story; he must manifest that truth in the characters
and the action.
Characters and action are the essential elements of any
story. Also important, but not as essential, is the setting, the
place where the action occurs. Characters are usually
people—
sometimes actual people, as in history books or newspaper
stories, sometimes imaginary ones, as in novels. Occasionally
characters are animals (as in an Aesop fable), and sometimes
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NARRATION
367
a dominant feature of the environment functions almost like
a character (the sea, an old house).
The action is what the characters say and do and anything
that happens to them, even if it arises from a nonhuman
source—a
storm, for instance, or a fire. Action is often pre-
sented in the form of a plot. Action is, so to speak, the raw
material; plot, the finished product, the fitting together of the
bits and pieces of action into a coherent pattern. Usually,
though not invariably, plot takes the form of a cause-and-
effect chain: event A produces event B; B leads to C; C to D;
and so on until the final episode, X. In a well-constructed plot
of this kind we can work back from X to A and see the con-
nections that made the end of the story likely and perhaps
inevitable.
Stories can be very long and complicated, with many char-
acters, elaborate plots, and subtle interpenetration of charac-
ter, action, and setting. In writing that is primarily expository,
however, narratives are shorter and simpler. Most often they
are factual rather than imaginary, as when an historian de-
scribes an event. And often in exposition an illustration may
involve a simple narrative. Being able to tell a story, then,
while not the primary concern of the expository writer, is a
skill which he or she will now and again be called upon to
use.
Organizing a Narrative
As with so much in composition, the first step in narration is
to analyze the story in your own mind. In the actual telling,
the analysis provides the organization. The simplest kind of
narrative is the episode, a single event unified by time and
place. But even an episode must be organized. The writer
must break it down into parts and present these in a mean-
ingful order.
In the following case the episode is the brief landing of a
passenger ship at the Mediterranean island of Malta. After
describing the setting in the first paragraph, the writer divides
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368
DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION
his story into two parts: the problems of getting ashore (par-
agraphs 2 and 3), and the difficulties of returning to the ship
(4).
We called at Malta, a curious town where there is nothing but
churches, and the only sound of life is the ringing of church bells.
The whole place reminded me of the strange towns one often sees
in the nightmares of delirium.
As soon as the ship anchored, a regular battle began between
the boatmen for possession of the passengers. These unhappy crea-
tures were hustled hither and thither, and finally one, waving his
arms like a marionette unhinged, lost his balance and fell back into
a boat. It immediately bore him off with a cry of triumph, and the
defeated boatman revenged himself by carrying off his luggage in
a different direction. All this took place amid a
hail
of oaths in
Maltese, with many suggestive Arab words intermingled.
The young priests in the second class, freshly hatched out of the
seminary, turned vividly pink, and the good nuns covered their
faces with their veils and fled under the mocking gaze of an old
bearded missionary, who wasn't to be upset by such trifles.
I
did not go ashore, for getting back to the ship was too much of
a problem. Some passengers had to pay a veritable ransom before
they could return. Two French sailors, who had got mixed up with
churches when looking for a building of quite another character,
solved the matter very simply by throwing their grasping boatman
into the sea. A few strokes with the oars, and they were alongside,
and as a tug was just leaving they tied the little boat to it, to the
accompaniment of the indignant shrieks from the owner as he
floundered in the water. Henry de Monfreid
In each of the two main parts of the story de Monfreid begins
with a generalization and then supports it with a specific in-
stance. The effectiveness of his narrative lies both in the skill
with which he analyzes the episode and the precision with
which he renders characters and action. The glimpses he gives
us are brief, but vivid and filled with meaning: the tumbled
passenger "like a marionette unhinged," "the
mocking
missionary," the shrieking indignation of the greedy boatman
thrown into the sea.
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[...]... third part of a plot, the climax, resolves the conflict: here, the shooting Finally the plot ends with the denouement, the closing events of the narrative: Peter Romano's being carried off to jail In the simple and often partial stories you are likely to tell in expository writing, it is not always necessary (or even desirable) that you develop all these elements of a plot in detail You may need to spend... capitalist economy, each the victimizer of the other In practice, many stories operate, so to speak, at intermediate points of meaning The meaning of one narrative is realistic tending toward the symbolic; of another, symbolic tending toward the allegorical Whatever its mode, the meaning of a story, if it is to be truly communicated, has to be rendered in the characters and plot and setting It may, in addition,... happens In symbolic stories meaning is neither purely allegorical For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 37* DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION nor purely realistic It is both at once Such stories are realistic in that characters and events correspond to life as we know it, and we can generalize from them to real people At the same time the stories—like allegories—point to another level... exposition has a special meaning with reference to narration The exposition is that part of the plot which gives us the background information about the characters, telling us what we need to know in order to understand why they act as they do in what is about to unfold Exposition is usually, but not always, concentrated at or very near the beginning of a story Wilson's exposition occupies the first three... dollars left By June, he owed his landlord two months' rent, $52 The landlord, Antonio Copace, lived only a few blocks away on Lexington Avenue, in a house with a brownstone front and coarse white-lace curtains in the windows The Romanos lived above the fruit store, on the same floor with a cheap dentist's office, in a little flat to which they had access up a dirty oilcloth-covered staircase and through... Great Depression of the 1930s: Peter Romano comes from a little town in Sicily For years he kept a large and prosperous fruit store under the Second Avenue elevated at the corner of Twenty-ninth Street A few years ago, however, he got something the matter with his chest and wasn't able to work anymore He sold his business and put the money into Wall Street When the Wall Street crash came, Peter Romano... tell us necessary facts about his history Exposition gives way to conflict, the second part of a plot Conflict involves two or more forces working at cross purposes (Sometimes this takes place between a character and a physical obstacle such as a mountain or the sea; or it may be internalized, involving diverse psychological aspects of the same person.) In this story the conflict, obviously, occurs... their causal connections are relatively unimportant For example, the sailors do not toss their boatman into the water because of what other boatmen did earlier to the unfortunate passenger The two events relate not as cause and effect but more generally in showing the greediness of the Maltese In more complicated stories, however, events may well be linked in a plot of cause and effect A brief example... rich man, but he, too, no doubt, had been having his losses At any rate, he was insistent about the rent Peter Romano had a married daughter, and her husband offered to help him out He went to Mr Copace with $26—one month's rent But the old man refused it with fury and said that unless he got the whole sum right away, he would have the Romanos evicted On June 11, he came himself to the Romanos and... away, he would have the Romanos evicted On June 11, he came himself to the Romanos and demanded the money again He threatened to have the marshal in and put them out that very afternoon Peter Romano tried to argue with him, and Mrs Romano went out in a final desperate effort to get together $52 For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 37° DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION When she . Peter
Romano's being carried off to jail.
In the simple and often partial stories you are likely to tell
in expository writing, it is not always necessary. way to the
speech clinic and rush back to the school in time to make up for
the classes
I
had lost. One day, one unforgettable dread day,
I
stopped to