July 11, 2015 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments
It’s always been a part of our nature to notice patterns and assign them meaning. Take the constellations, for example. People looked up at the night’s sky and saw shapes and figures in the random order of the stars, and with one stroke, they connected the dots to reflect their own understanding of the world. It was one of humanity’s first attempts at art.
We had created symbols, an object meant to represent something else. It’s been a western tradition ever since. Just look at the book of Genesis and the story of man’s fall from grace. When Eve commits the world’s first sin–disobeying the word of God–it is not just through action but by taking something physical. Gods orders could have been simpler: “Don’t ignore me.” Or: “Don’t go over there.” But it is the eating of the apple that gets her and Adam in trouble. The apple is a manifestation of that sin. And thanks to the Bible’s enormous influence, apples tend to represent sin throughout the western world. But every text, every work of art, has its own internal logic, symbols bound to them, things that stand in for something else.
One of the best places to turn for this is The Great Gatsby. Throughout the novel, at different lulls in the story, Nick Carraway observes Gatsby standing out on the dock, gazing across the bay at the green light that radiates from Tom and Daisy Buchanan’s home. The green light is a symbol among symbols. First, notice the choice of color. Green is the color of money for one but, also, jealousy–as in he is “green with envy.” That’s no accident on Fitzgerald’s part either. The light itself represents Gatsby’s great longing for the life he could have had with Daisy, a life Tom has and he wants. Part of what prevents that from happening is that Gatsby isn’t old money: He’s a bootlegger. That’s not the kind of man, according to society’s standards, can marry a woman like Daisy. And all of that is communicated with a simple green light.
Symbols are great because they prevent us from ever veering into the melodramatic, from being too “on the nose.” They say what characters cannot say or express. Some are more highlighted than others, of course.
In “Hills Like White Elephants,” Hemingway sets the story in a train station to show the differing paths the couples may take, whether they choose to keep the baby or abort it, as well as whether the couple will stay together or fall apart. However, it’s far more subtle than Fitzgerald’s use of symbolism in The Great Gatsby. It’s almost a throw away line. But it’s there, under the surface.
T. S. Eliot, in his essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” presents the idea of the objective correlative.
“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.”
This, I believe, broadens our definition of symbolism, and though not quite exactly the same, is helpful in understanding the possibilities of literature. Eliot’s point is that all the elements of story can represent the emotion of the narrative. An object can stand in for jealousy or longing, love or loss, choice or consequence, but so too can it be applied to setting, scenes, structure, plot, dialogue, so on and so forth. We tend to think of symbols as only one part of the narrative, that they exist as symbols themselves, but everything in a story is symbolic. It stands in for something else. Even words themselves are symbols. What does anger look like? Depends on who you ask. What does madness look like? Each case is individual. Even something as simple as a table has different shapes and sizes.
This is what we call signifiers and signifieds. The signifer is what represents the object; the signified is the object itself. As Kenneth Burke once wrote, “Man is the symbol-wielding animal.” It’s a part of our nature. We were born to do it. So keep an eye out for how the elements of a story reflect the heart of it–its theme. It may enhance your understanding of the text, or when done thoughtlessly, it may give you a reason to close it.
July 10, 2015 / Vito Gulla / 1 Comment
My first semester as a grad student, everyone thought I was a douche, and to be fair, they still do but one with whom they don’t mind having a drink and sharing their lives. Back then, however, I was the odd man out. For one, I was the youngest of my cohort. Furthermore, I was probably the most prentenious of the bunch by far. But the thing that bothered my peers the most was that I seemingly had read everything. That’s no mere boast, mind you. My knowledge of the classics was so extensive that when my instructors quizzed us on the openings of great stories and novels, I easily had the high score that day. Kaylie Jones even made a joke of it, when I confessed that I hadn’t read a story by de Maupassant: She said, “Wait, there’s something you haven’t read.” After class, my peers asked me where I had gone for undergrad–did I go to some special prep school? To their surprise, their was nothing fancy about my upbringing or my education. My parents weren’t wealthy. I worked throughout college at UPS. I had graduated from a public high school with little distinction and a public university with even less. So how did I, at twenty-two, read more of the canon than writers who were my age in triplicate?
The short answer is simple: the internet.
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When I was in high school, I hated reading. It’s a miracle that I passed at all, since I did everything I could to avoid completing an assigned text. I can honestly say that I finished a handful of books over the course of my secondary education. What was the point? TV was twice as fast and a hell of a lot less boring. Besides, what use would it serve me? I was going to be a nuclear physicist.
The only thing I could choke down was poetry. It was short, which was nice, but the other thing about it was its play with language. I’ve always had a ear for music, for the beauty of sounds, naturally-attuned for euphony. I just liked the way some words sounded next to others. I liked it so much I began to write poetry myself. My friends would remark how any time they saw me I had a pen and paper in hand, furiously scribbling. And that love of poetry followed me to college, and so did my love of movies and philosophy. My love of physics, however, did not.
If there was one thing I didn’t like, it was studying, and in order to succeed in my science courses, I was expected to memorize all manners of formulas. But where was the critical thinking, the application of ideas, the innovation? Physics and calculus didn’t offer any of that, so I guess that’s why I failed both. But it didn’t phase me all that much. It was a chance for me to discover what I really wanted. I didn’t want to have a career where I plugged numbers into a calculator and charted a graph: I wanted something meaningful. I wanted a job that didn’t feel like work, that came naturally, because if I did have to study, I’d never graduate.
I thought about the things I was good at, the things I did well, the ones people had said I did better than most. In tenth grade, I remembered, my English teacher said I should major in creative writing. At the time, I thought he was full of shit. But then I realized, he wasn’t the only one. In fact, as early as fifth grade, people were saying I had a way with words. It was theme that kept reoccuring, and I kept ignoring. But if I was going to be a writer, how would I learn to get better?
The answer was obvious: I had to read.
At first, I picked up books others had recommended, like Fight Club, or ones by poets I had enjoyed, like Sylvia Plath. It was during this time that I realized that reading wasn’t such a chore; in fact, it was a lot like watching a movie. It had all the things I liked about Star Wars or Back to the Future, the only difference was that I had to imagine it. I also learned that writing sentences was pretty damn similar to writing poetry. It didn’t take long for me to exhaust the few books my friends had loaned me. Worse still, I had no where to start. How would I know where to start on my own?
My talk with the librarian proved fruitless. Most of my classes were general education courses, and none of the teachers seemed particularly helpful. Then the idea occurred to me. I was pretty good on the computer. I had used it to enhance my knowledge of music and film. I had torrented hundreds of classic albums and films–from a list I complied by spending hours every night on Wikipedia. (My instructors over the years are probably having a mild heart attack at this moment.) The site had been invaluable to me. They had articles on the history of film, notes on significant achievements in the artform, even little footnotes that led me further down the rabbithole. Why couldn’t–or bet yet, shouldn’t–I use this tool to help with my new goal?
So I did. I sorted through page after page, clicking on links and footnotes, following the thread as far as it would go. I checked out books from the library, and when I couldn’t get them for free, I gave up buying lunch to buy a book instead. I didn’t read books based on their description, only reputation alone. Many were very good books, like Notes from Underground or Blood Meridian; others were not so good, like The Bluest Eye or Home to Harlem. Regardless, every novel presented some new skill for me to learn or avoid. The good books showed me how to write with care, how to search for that one perfect word (le mot juste), to give as much attention to my prose as my characters, to set a scene. The bad books showed me what dreck looked like on the page and spurred me to try, because, I reasoned, if shit like that can get published, why can’t I?
Every few weeks, I would go through my supply and search the web for a new fix. I used the Time list, the Modern Library list. I read anything I got my hands on, and when I switched from physics to English, I had even more books to enjoy. My best semester introduced me to Crime and Punishment, Song of Solomon, Midnight’s Children, and The Death of Artemio Cruz from just one class. I got to the point where I was reading three or four books a week at least. Sometimes even, I’d put down one novel to pick another immediately.
I had become an addict.
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I’ve been teaching college for three years now, and in that time, I’ve managed to have quite a few students who have made me proud. More rare, however, have been those who chose to write, who have that yearning, that boundless ambition to press pen to page. They often come to me for advice, and I think, they’re often disappointed with what I have to say. They say, I have an idea for a story. It’s about this guy who…. They give me every piece of it, scene by scene, and ask me what I think. Typically, I like it. Then I give them the bad news: Where are the pages? Usually, they shrug and say they keep throwing them out. I’m quick to remind them that they’ve produced fine writing in the past, and they will contnue to do so. All they have to do is write it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s good or bad, because it’s a draft. There’s plenty of time to fix it. The words aren’t static, fixed there forever: They can be changed. Then they say, What about Hemingway–how can I ever compare to him?
Try, I say, just try.
The writing you never do is writing that you can never assess, that you can never know the true worth of. My former students who want to write take it for granted that their heroes struggled themselves. Hemingway rewrote the last page of A Farewell to Arms thirty-four times before he was happy with it. And I doubt that Hemingway learned his craft in a vacuum. He studied the masters; he emulated them–as did everyone else.
Ben Franklin famously taught himself to read and write. For him, those two things went hand-in-hand. The man himself, more or less, invented the American style. But he didn’t do so in a day. It took years of practice. His method was simple: He found a piece of writing he thought was particularly impressive (for him this was The Spectator), tried to memorize it as best he could, and then wrote out those sentences and paragraphs. After he finished, he would look at his work and then the original and compare. Sometimes, he discovered he had improved the style; other times, he discovered he hadn’t. But that learning process was enormously important in his growth as a writer. He learned what good writers did and then did them himself. His case is not unique as I’ve said already. Hunter S. Thompson copied pages of The Great Gatsby just to know what it felt like to type out Fitzgerald’s prose.
As children, we do this instinctually. We mimic the sounds and phrases of our parents and those around us. We learn the language by copying the way others use it. The same goes for writing. A lot of it comes through osmosis. By seeing the same things over and over again, we adopt those choices as our own. But there’s more a young writer can do, and it requires something we so rarely give: careful and considerate thought.
If we passively read, there’s only so much we can learn; however, if we look at a sentence and ask why, we begin to strive towards something greater. Every word, every mark of punctuation, every paragraph break, the order of the sentences, their length, their construction–all of these things are a choice, whether we recognize it or not.
Emerson demonstrates it best: “First we eat, then we beget; first we read, then we write.”
This sentence alone is a testament to his genius. Look at the sentence above. We’ll skip the diction choices and focus solely on punctuation. Emerson could have written it like this: “First we eat, then we beget. First we read, then we write.” Or he could have done this: “First we eat. Then we beget. First we read. Then we write.”
Notice anything?
The two latter examples don’t have the same, and I hate to use the word because it’s so ill-defined, flow. They just don’t sound right. Why?
Emerson’s sentence is perfection because the construction draws a parallel. It serves as an analogy: Eating is to reading as begetting (procreating, making babies) is to writing. Had he choosen one of the alternatives, that connection would have been lessened or even lost. The order of the words are the same in both clauses, separated by a semi-colon. Can that be copied or imitated? Of course, it can. Emerson doesn’t own the copyright to that structure. It’s free to use as you like–and so is the rest of the canon.
Everything is a technique. It’s just a matter of trying it out for yourself, or as T. S. Eliot once wrote, “Immature poets borrow; mature poets steal.”
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People tend to forget the age we live in and the resources available to us. As far as access to knowledge goes, this is the best time to be alive. There’s a whole world of information on the internet just begging us to look at it. Project Gutenberg hosts just about every novel in existence that is out of copyright. Wikipedia is a pretty damn good encyclopedia. Sparknotes and Shmoop are there to help us understand those difficult texts. And the best part is that they’re all available for free. If you wanted to read through the works of Homer in the past, like say in 1300s, you had better be rich or have access to a serious library, since books had to be produced by hand. Or If you wanted to read every one of Shakespeare’s plays, in say 1900, you better get your butt to the bookstore and have some cash on hand, because even though his work had been out of copyright and could be printed for free by anyone, the only way you could get it was in hard copy. Furthermore, good luck getting anyone to explain it to you back in the day. Unless you knew some slick literature professor, you were on your own. Now, you don’t even have to leave the bathroom for all that and more.
It’s amazing that we have all these devices in arm’s reach at any given moment, and we don’t even bother to log off Facebook or Instagram for a minute to see what else is out there. It’s no wonder people call us entitled. We don’t seem to realize the power we hold in the palms of our hands.
I did, but I’m the exception, not the rule–not that I’m anything special. And don’t think I’m discounting the legion of educators I’ve had in my life. Without them, I am nothing. But I didn’t expect to be spoon-fed the rest of my life either. I knew there would be a time when I would have to step out on my own, and I committed myself to it. The question, then, is obvious: Will you?
April 19, 2015 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments
I’ve been thinking about the first lines of novels and stories for a while now. Even though my professors in undergraduate literature classes stressed how everything you needed to know was right there in that first page or paragraph or sentence, it’s something, largely, I ignored. It wasn’t that I didn’t value them: I just didn’t give them any thought. That is until I started trading stories with Jeff Minton, an up and coming fiction writer and fellow professor.
The first thing I noticed about his stories was that I was immediately and irrevocably hooked from the first sentence. (Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way, since Jeff received honorable mention from Glimmer Train during one of their contests.) I wondered to myself what it was that Jeff was doing, what magic did he put in his words, and why, when I looked back at my own fiction, did all my openings seem dry and boring by comparison?
It’s a question that came up just this last week at a writer’s workshop. We were sitting around the table, discussing one of the pieces, when I mentioned the first line of this novel in progress. It was the typical “the sky was this color today,” and no one else seemed to question it. Even before I had read anything Jeff had written, I knew enough not to start by describing the weather. I asked the most obvious question: Why? Why start with that? What was it doing for the narrative? What did it contribute? Besides, isn’t it clichéd?
One of the other attendees was quick to challenge me, pointing to William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which begins, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Now while I pride myself on being the dumbest guy in the room, I’m not too dumb to see the difference. It didn’t take long for my adversary to see the folly either. Obviously, describing the bland orange of the sky versus some crazy ass shit is a big difference.
You know, I just got a copy of the latest Boulevard, and as soon as I laid my hands on it, I flipped through the pages and read the first lines of all the pieces of short fiction. Here’s one of them: “It was actually a joint multidisciplinary seminar undertaken by English, Philosophy, Women’s Issues and Paraplegic Studies” (Barbarese 80). Now I get there’s that winking sense of irony by the end of that first sentence, but really, who the fuck cares? What about that line makes me want to read further? Maybe I’m not the intended audience. Maybe this is aimed at academics who get a chuckle out of their own absurdity.
Here’s another: “He shared the room with no one in the New River Barracks” (Dow 133). While I get a little bit of a sense of the character’s isolation and loneliness, any interest I have is immediately gone when I read the following line: “In the room a car battery was hooked up with wires to an automobile tape player…. His shift would begin in an hour” (Dow 133).
Now call me an asshole, but neither of these stories’s openings really do anything for me. And the funny thing is that neither of these writers are amateurs. One has publications (poetry) in The Atlantic and The New Yorker, and the other was in The Best American Poetry. So maybe readers will stick around based on name and reputation alone.
I guess everyone is guilty of it, even the greats. DeLillo starts his masterful novel Cosmopolis with “Sleep failed him more often now, not once or twice a week but four times, five” (1). (And don’t get me started on the first chapter of The Body Artist.) Now again, there’s something of interest, a hint of a problem, but it’s not the central question of the novel, not the great quest that Packer sets out on, holds no kernel of what we as the reader will eventually find. In truth, it’s a lot of boring exposition–about some multi-billionaire who spends his time reading poetry and listening to classical music in his private elevator. (I guess because that’s what DeLillo does or wants to do.) If you ask me, the novel would have been a hell of a lot better without. In fact, I know the point of attack, the moment that I said to myself, “Now I’m interested”: “He didn’t know what he wanted. Then he knew. He wanted to get a haircut” (5).
Of course, by now, you must be wondering, what’s the secret? And I’ll tell you: Great openings have to introduce a problem.
Meville is probably one of the best examples, though you have to be familiar with the Bible to get it: “Call me, Ishmael.” Why is this one so good? Because we know something about the character in three words. With that one allusion, the narrator tells us that he has adopted this name, that it’s not who he is but who he has become. He, like the biblical character, has spent or will spend those 40 years (or is it days–and why is everything in the Bible 40? Because it’s an old way of saying a lot) in the desert adrift. He is a bastard child. He is the outcast child, punished only for the circumstances of his birth. I’d say that’s one hell of a problem.
Here’s another classic, this time from Fitzgerald: “In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.'” In two sentences, we’re told that our narrator wants to be a nice guy, but then, throughout the entire book, all he does is judge people. He just never does it to their faces. Again, wanting to be a nice guy but having to think about it, that’s a problem.
Here’s one more: “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.” This one is probably the most mundane, but it’s great for what it implies, what’s underneath the surface. Our narrator and protagonist, Jake Barnes, gives us a portrait of a man he more or less despises. Why? Because Cohn thinks he’s hot shit, but Barnes sees right through him–and knows he could kick his ass. (A side note about the novel: That first page is even more brilliant since Barnes goes on to tell us that Cohn was “treated like a Jew at Princeton,” pretty much telling us that even though he thinks Cohn is a prick, he’s a prick because he’s a prick and not because he’s a jew–discrimination Barnes finds both sorrowful and pitiful.) One last time, in case you missed, there’s a problem: Two people who don’t see eye-to-eye.
So really, what’s the point of all this? First lines don’t exist in some vacuum of cleverness. They aren’t some bullshit hook. (Have you ever blah blah blahed?) They shouldn’t be trying to build some lame ass fantasy or sci-fi setting. (Just look at Startship Troopers for an example: “I always get the shakes before a drop.”) First lines lay out the rest of the story in such a way that if the rest of the paragraphs were accidentally deleted, you could still imagine the rest of the story. They have to infect everything that follows. They have to present that burning problem at the center of the work. Sure, they can bookend a work so there’s a nice little parallel between beginning and end, to show how much your character has grown by the story’s, but that’s more advanced shit that’s not always required. It’s not just the intrigue. It’s not the question of what happens next. It’s that moment when you say, “There’s something wrong here.” And it doesn’t have to be huge either. Not everything needs that flashbang open. Life isn’t a James Bond movie. Even, I doubt, real MI6 agents have that kind of life. Art is, as Hitchcock said, life with the boring parts cut out. Cut out the boring parts and start with a problem. Of course, now there’s the only problem left to solve: How the fuck do you do it?