the oxford essensial guide to writing phần 9 potx

DESCRIPTION 357 "vagrant odours," "greasy wind," "rain like grease," "cobblestones scummed with grease." You can see that details work differently in impressionistic description than in objective. Connotations are more impor- tant, and diction is charged with emotion. The writer wants to arouse in readers a response like his own. But he must do more than merely tell us how he feels. He must re-create the scene in a significantly altered manner, including this detail and omitting that, exaggerating one image and underplaying another, and calling up compelling similes and metaphors. In short, the perception must be refracted through the writer's consciousness. It may emerge idealized, like a land- scape by a romantic painter. It may be distorted and made ugly, like a reflection in a funhouse mirror. Idealization and distortion are perfectly legitimate. The writer of subjective description signs no contract to deliver literal truth. "Here," he or she says, "is how / see it." Yet the description may reveal a deeper truth than mere objective accuracy, and, like an artist's caricature, make plain a subtle reality. To convey subjective truth, then, a writer must embody responses in the details of the scene. Often, in fact, he or she relies exclusively upon such embodiment, making little or no statement of feeling and, instead, forcing the perception to speak for itself. A simple case is catalogue description, in which the writer lists detail after detail, each contributing to a dominant impression. The following paragraph is a good example (it describes an outdoor market on Decatur Street in New Orleans): The booths are Sicilian, hung with red peppers, draped with garlic, piled with fruit, trayed with vegetables, fresh and dried herbs. A huge man, fat as Silenus, daintily binds bunches for soup, while his wife quarters cabbages, ties smaller bundles of thyme, parsley, green onions, small hot peppers and sweet pimentos to season gum- bos. Another Italian with white moustache, smiling fiercely from a tanned face, offers jars of green file powder, unground all-spice, pickled onions in vinegar. Carts and trucks flank the sidewalk; one walks through crates of curled parsley, scallions piled with ice, 358 DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION wagonloads of spinach with tender mauve stalks, moist baskets of crisp kale; sacks of white onions in oyster-white fishnet, pink onions in sacks of old rose; piles of eggplant with purple reflections, white garlic and long sea-green leeks with shredded roots, grey-white like witches' hair. Boxes of artichokes fit their leaves into a complicated pattern. Trucks from Happy Jack, Boothville, and Buras have un- loaded their oranges; a long red truck is selling cabbages, green peppers, squashes long and curled like the trumpets of Jericho. There is more than Jordaens profusion, an abundance more glitter- ing in color than Pourbus. A blue truck stands in sunlight, Negroes clambering over its sides, seven men in faded jeans, washing-blue overalls; the last is a mulatto in a sweater of pure sapphire. A mangy cat steps across a roadway of crushed oranges and powdered oyster-shells. John Peale Bishop Not only the individual details, but their very profusion con- vey vitality and abundance far more effectively than would any plain statement. It is not possible to overestimate the im- portance of specificity to good description. Look back at how carefully Bishop names colors. While details in catalogue descriptions are generally chosen according to an underlying feeling or evaluation, the selection is less rigorous than in some other kinds of subjective descrip- tion. Thus Bishop includes the "mangy cat" and the "crushed oranges," even though these jar slightly with the attractive- ness of the scene. More often the writer "edits" the percep- tion, using fewer details and only those conducive to the im- pression. The novelist Thomas Wolfe, for example, draws this picture of an idealized, if modest, home: On the outskirts of a little town upon a rise of land that swept back from the railway there was a tidy little cottage of white boards, trimmed vividly with green blinds. To one side of the house there was a garden neatly patterned with plots of growing vegetables, and an arbor for the grapes which ripened late in August. Before the house there were three mighty oaks which sheltered it in their clean and massive shade in summer, and to the other side there was a border of gay flowers. The whole place had an air of tidiness, thrift, and modest comfort. 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, 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 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 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 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." 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. 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. 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 [...]... into two broad categories: the stops and the other marks Stops take their name from the fact that they correspond (though only loosely) to pauses and intonations in speech, vocal signals which help listeners follow what we say Stops include the period, the question mark, the exclamation point, the colon, the semicolon, the comma, and the dash We look at these first Then we look at the other marks These... meaning: the tumbled passenger "like a marionette unhinged," "the mocking missionary," the shrieking indignation of the greedy boatman thrown into the sea NARRATION 3 69 Their nightmare quality, which is the dominant note of the setting, unifies these details But their causal connections are relatively unimportant For example, the sailors do not toss their boatman into the water because of what other... pleasant cynicism upon the capacity of young ladies to endure the absence of lovers gone to war): They contrive, in some manner, to live, and look tolerably well, notwithstanding their despair and the continued absence of their lover; and some have even been known to recover so far as to be inclined to take another lover, if the absence of the first has lasted too long Even when the coordinated clauses... 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, be announced That is, the writer may explicitly tell us what meaning he or she sees in the story Sometimes such a statement of theme occurs at the end of a story (the. .. Nonetheless the presence is there Even if not explicitly seen as an "I," the writer exists as a voice, heard in the tone of the story His words and sentence patterns imply a wide range of tones: irony, amusement, anger, horror, shock, disgust, delight, objective detachment Tone is essential to the meaning of a story The tone of Hemingway's paragraph, for example, seems objective, detached, reportorial... shot the six cabinet ministers at half-past six in the morning against the wall of a hospital There were pools of water in the courtyard There were wet dead leaves on the paving of the courtyard It rained hard All the shutters of the hospital were nailed shut One of the ministers was sick with typhoid Two soldiers carried him down stairs and out into the rain They tried to hold him up against the wall... water The other five stood very quietly against the wall Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no good trying to make him stand up When they fired the first volley he was sitting down in the water with his head on his knees Hemingway's story exemplifies realistic meaning For while one can read philosophical significance into the horrifying episode, there is no evidence that Hemingway intends us to. .. at the Mediterranean island of Malta After describing the setting in the first paragraph, the writer divides 368 DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION his story into two parts: the problems of getting ashore (paragraphs 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. .. 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... 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 presented 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 . 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. 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. 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