“O, ROCKS!” THAT’S WHAT she says, “O, rocks.” To what? “The transmigration of souls.” Well, isn’t that your reaction? Except that’s not what she’s responding to. The real question, and real annoyance, is about a word. And maybe about her husband. She’s Molly Bloom, the female leading figure (one can hardly call her a heroine) of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Molly is earthy, musical, chiefly uneducated, intuitive, and unfaithful. Very right-brain, except for the infidelity, which is probably lobe-independent. She is the source of the world’s most famous fictional monologue (we’ll exempt Hamlet here as dramatic), but that’s not our subject here. Her husband, Leopold, is the more cerebral of the two by far. He’s intellectually curious, philosophically inclined, ineffectual, a great reader. Her literary tastes run more to steamy romances with titles like Sweets of Sin, and when she encounters a new word, she turns to her hubby. The word in this case is “metempsychosis,” a true jawbreaker meaning, yes, the transmigration of souls, the closest to which she can get, or so he later reports, is met-him-pike-hoses. Not all that bad, really. Bloom defines it, and she offers the interjection with which I started this paragraph, followed by a request: “Tell us in plain words.”
And there, friends and neighbors, is about 90 percent of what we need to know about the Bloom marriage.
Since I’ve already abused Shakespeare, we might as well trot him out again. To his question, “What’s in a name?” we might equally ask, what’s in a word? Novels are full of words, of course, but they tend to be on offer in bulk. Novelists get paid, sometimes literally, by the word. And sometimes it feels like it. Think I’m kidding? Read some Thackeray and get back to me. Actually, you can still find open by-the-word payment for short fiction, often from the literary magazines, but the rate of payment is so low that it doesn’t threaten anyone’s amateur status. Besides, we’re not really interested in words by the bin here. More in words by ones and twos.
Sometimes the same word in different contexts. A bit earlier in our novel, Joyce tells us that Bloom “ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.” Contrast that with the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story “May Day,” published at almost exactly the same time (appearing in Tales of the Jazz Age, also in 1922), where the flappers and fraternity men “ate their buckwheat cakes with relish.” Ewww. What, they were out of maple syrup? Here we go, then: one word, two, to my mind, very different revelations about the writer. “Relish” is one of those wonderful English words with two very different meanings: you can relish an opportunity but you shouldn’t put relish on it. Right? Joyce clearly knows this doubled meaning and exploits it in his sentence, the very first one in which Bloom appears in the novel, right at the beginning of the “Calypso” episode. He’s thinking about that secondary meaning involving diced pickles and mustard. Chiefly, he’s thinking that he wants the other one clearly predominant, but if a little of the messy relish hangs around, that could be fun, too. Fitzgerald? Not. How can I say that with such certainty? Word placement, for one thing. Joyce situates it right after the thing it’s modifying, “ate.” Not “organs,” not “fowls.” After the verb. To verb something—do, watch, listen, eat—with relish is to do it with enthusiasm and energy. Bring a noun into the picture, though, and we might just be talking condiment. In “May Day,” the operative phrase is “cakes with relish.” That’s what the eye perceives and the tongue rejects. At least, mine does. Yes, Fitzgerald may mean, in the first instance, that they, too, “ate” with gusto, but the secondary meaning arrives neck and neck in a photo finish with the primary, and the gusto flies right out the window. Conclusion? Someone here is more precise with language than someone else. It need not work to Joyce’s credit; you may see him as excessively concerned with detail or anal or something, Fitzgerald as more relaxed, more open to possibility. Or you may simply put it down to work rates, to Joyce’s painstaking composition by accretion, adding as he goes, or to Fitzgerald’s frantic pace in those early days, cranking out short story after short story. That’s not what I see, but it’s anyone’s call.
All that from a word. Not word choice even. Just sentence position.
So then, maybe words do matter. In works of literature, no less. Who knew?
On one level, this concept is pretty straightforward. Here’s something you’ll probably never read in a novel unless you work as an acquisitions editor at a publishing house: the novel’s set in some past century; for simplicity’s sake, we’ll say the nineteenth. Okay, then, words: crinoline, gentility, propriety, soot, stain, buggy. If your novel suddenly drops in the observation that some character is “hard-wired” to behave a certain way, the illusion, what the late John Gardner called “the vivid and continuous dream” that is fiction, is broken. There are words that are appropriate to our own time that have no place in earlier times, unless they are in quotation marks or used either in irony or to deliberately violate the fourth wall and break the illusion. Gardner himself provides an example. His Grendel takes as its anti-hero the monster of Beowulf; sure, he eats people and breaks bulls’ spines with a single blow, and his fur is often messy with blood and entrails, but he’s a fun guy. He’s also, of course, a medieval guy who has no access to the twentieth century. Except . . . when he does. In one chapter, Gardner peppers his narration with terms from film and physics: “Cut A,” “Time-Space cross-section,” and so on. In a conventional historical novel set in the murkier part of the Middle Ages, the monster doesn’t get to know such things. Gardner, however, never wrote a conventional anything. His novel is a meditation on heroes and villains and the individual’s role in society. He could care about historical “authenticity,” but that’s not the vivid and continuous dream he seeks to maintain. His monster, as a result of his visit with the dragon (the last evil being Beowulf confronts in the original epic), has become unstuck in time. He knows things he couldn’t really know. If he were real. Which, of course . . .
Every writer has signature words and ways of stringing them together. Sometimes a single word is enough to identify a writer. Take the word “abnegation.” Please. As you know, I have read rather a lot of books, and I have never found the word “abnegation” in any of them except by one writer. And he uses it a lot. That would be William Faulkner, who finds uses for it, usually with “self-” appended, in more works than one would think possible. It’s not in every novel, but it turns up rather frequently. Show me that word in a sentence and I’m guessing Mississippi Bill every time. Now, since that word often turns up somewhere in a sentence with 130 friends, whose order is a bit of a jumble, the guesswork is largely taken out, but you get my point. I could be wrong; I’ve heard rumors of a use by Melville. “Self-abnegation” means self-denial or even self-sacrifice and shows up in military commendations, particularly the sort given posthumously. Faulkner, of course, has a lot of former military persons in his work, what with General Compson and Major de Spain and Colonel Sartoris and so on, and the notion of service and sacrifice runs strong throughout his work, but he also tends toward a very formal and slightly archaic diction, so that characters with sixth-grade educations sound like Daniel Webster with a drawl.
There are lots of words that indicate Faulkner, noble sounding words in odd combinations or lowly places, as in this passage from Absalom, Absalom! (1936).
. . . and opposite Quentin, Miss Coldfield in the eternal black which she had worn for forty-three years now, whether for sister, father, or nothusband none knew, sitting so bolt upright in the straight and hard chair that was so tall for her that her legs hung straight and rigid as if she had iron shinbones and ankles, clear of the floor with that air of impotent and static rage like children’s feet, talking in that grim haggard amazed voice until at last listening would renege and hearing-sense self-confound and the long-dead object of her impotent yet indomitable frustration would appear, as though by outraged recapitulation evoked, quiet and inattentive and harmless, out of the biding and dreamy and victorious dust.
Be comforted: that sentence did have a main clause and wasn’t simply a fragment of massive proportion. But we’ll stick to the interesting part. Who is a “nothusband”? Have you ever thought of children’s feet as possessing “impotent” or “static” rage? Really? Not even once? Hemingway (don’t worry, he’s coming) counseled writers to write with nouns and verbs. Sage advice, mostly. Unless you’re Faulkner, who writes with adjectives and says the most amazing things. Think about the “biding,” “dreamy,” “victorious” dust. How is dust ever victorious or biding, to say nothing of dreamy? The answer is, it never was. Until he made it so. Or “outraged recapitulation.” Just magnificent. And I, for one, would give up large chunks of my career to have written “that grim haggard amazed voice,” although I know I would have lacked the courage to have dropped the commas even had the words occurred to me. The thing is, Faulkner requires a special kind of labor from readers, and I’m not talking here about untangling those gargantuan sentences, although that’s labor-intensive as well. What, for instance, does that voice sound like, all grim and haggard and amazed? In what way is dust victorious or recapitulation outraged? His out-of-the-blue adjectives and obscure, slightly archaic nouns make us sit up in astonishment, but they also remind us of an obligation. We feel the rightness, the aptness of his descriptors, but then we have to go to work.
Hemingway takes a rather different approach, not how much can I pack in here, but how little can I say? For him, the real drama of life lies in what goes unsaid, the meaning behind our conversations. Everyone knows his simple sentences—a handful of words, subject-verb-object-and-get-out, hardly any adjectives, fewer adverbs, nouns and verbs. I want to talk about his adjectives. They’re just as amazing as Faulkner’s: “good,” “fine,” “all right,” “swell,” “nice.”
Wait a minute. What’s so special about “nice”? It’s not “haggard,” or even “victorious.”
That, my dear Watson, is what is so remarkable. “Nice” is the dog that didn’t bark in the night. Consider his debut novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926). First of all, there’s the verisimilitude: Hemingway is capturing the speech of a certain set of people at a specific moment in history. Those people, expatriates from America, chiefly, but also England, hanging out in Paris and Spain and trying to forge new lives amid the personal debris after the Great War, are, like the speaker in T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” shoring their fragments against the ruins of a crumbling civilization. More often than not, they speak in those same fragments, little snippets designed to reveal as little as possible. These characters are all damaged goods, riddled with injuries physical and psychological, stripped of illusion about the goodness of humanity or the nobility of the cause, too familiar with emotion and suffering. Jake Barnes’s severed male member is only the most spectacular—and representative—damage done by the war. Everyone has suffered and lost, whether friends, sanity, or pieces of bodies or psyches. Their speech, accordingly, is designed to suppress feeling, to reveal as little as possible about their inner lives. Robert Cohn, the friend Jake detests, sins against the tribe in various ways. He’s privileged (a Princeton graduate), successful among men still struggling to establish themselves, Jewish among Gentiles, left out of the experience of warfare, excessively earnest, insufficiently guarded. Perhaps worst of all, he says too much.
We went out into the street again and took a look at the cathedral. Cohn made some remark about it being a very good example of something or other, I forget what. It seemed like a nice cathedral, nice and dim, like Spanish churches.
Being too specific or knowing too much is unforgivable. The rules of the group are clear, if unstated: say little, and nothing of substance. “Nice” is good, even “nice and dim,” but go no further. Were people talking this way in the years just after the war? Yes, if they were of a certain age, if they had suffered through the war, and if they were disaffected, alienated, rootless, unhappy. It was a big club. The 1920s may have been, as Fitzgerald named them, the jazz age, but the Hemingway decade could have been called the deracinated age. Not quite the same pop, is it? Still, those were his people: uprooted, footloose, aimless, and quite as self-destructive as Fitzgerald’s. But there is more than mere historical accuracy here.
What does “nice” mean? It was “a nice cathedral.” What is a nice cathedral? What is one that isn’t nice? What does it mean when Lady Brett says of Mike, “He’s so damned nice and he’s so awful”? Bill says that Brett is “nice,” Jake that the count is. People they don’t like are occasionally “nice.” The rioja alta is “nice.” Probably the Fundador (a Spanish brandy) is “nice.” I don’t remember any of the bulls being “nice,” but I wouldn’t rule it out. But why?
Because it doesn’t mean anything. Or rather, because it can mean so many things and yet nothing in particular. Or because it is capable of meaning what it says and also its opposite, depending on context, delivery, and inflection. You can’t do that with “red,” you know. There’s simply no inflection you can give to “red” that will make it mean “green,” or even “not red.” “Nice,” on the other hand, can mean pleasant, diverting, pretty, agreeable, rewarding, or even, in a pinch, nice. It can also mean lousy, distasteful, unpleasant, disagreeable, obnoxious, or any of dozens of other not-nice qualities. Why can it do that? Because, unlike “red,” it has no firm meaning in the first place. If I tell you the balloon is red, you have a solid idea at least of the range of possible colors for the balloon. But if I say it’s nice, then what? Consider this famous, if generally misquoted, statement from that eminent literary critic, Oliver Hardy: “Well, here’s another nice mess you’ve gotten me into.” We tend to remember it as “fine mess,” but he evidently never actually said that. Do you think he means “nice”? Or is it more like terrible, awful, sticky, vexatious? If you’re Stan Laurel and your pudgy pal says this to you, do you believe you’ve been complimented? I didn’t think so. And anyone who has ever been set up with a blind date knows what “nice” means in that context: your guy (or gal) for the evening is not winning any beauty prizes.
That’s Hemingway’s “nice,” or one of them. And his “pretty” and “good,” too. They mean what you make them mean. His prose is the art of the unspoken. Readers sometimes mistake his simplicity of style for simplicity of thought. They do so at their peril. Robert Frost, another deceptively “simple” writer, said he wrote his poems “in parable, so the wrong people won’t hear them and so be saved.” That explanation will cover Hemingway’s case very, um, nicely.
Faulkner is a cascade of information and elaboration, Hemingway a trickle of insinuation and understatement. Ultimately, both Hemingway and Faulkner demand that readers conspire in creating meaning. We may not always think of those two writers as belonging to the same party, but on this point they are pretty unified. Is the narrator (or character) being truthful? Simple? Ironic? Sarcastic? How much? What does that mean? You can see the work involved with “nice” easily enough, where it may mean one of eleventy-three things or their opposite. The decisions are just as demanding about a “grim-haggard-amazed” voice or “victorious” dust. What do they sound like, look like?
This is where reading becomes an active element in creating meaning. Yes, the writer puts the words on the page, but that’s only half the story. We’re not passive receivers of information in this transaction. Rather, we take those words and make something comprehensible of them, teasing out meanings, building up associations, listening for echoes and innuendoes. We can’t do that without writers, naturally. But they also can’t do it without us. This isn’t quite the tree-falls-in-the-forest question. A novel without readers is still a novel. It has meaning, since it has had at least one reader, the person who wrote it. Its range of meanings, however, is quite limited. Add readers, add meanings. Anyone who has ever taught literature knows this. Book groups know it, too, whether the individual members have considered it or not. If a novel could only have the meaning that the author had imprinted on it, then all readers would passively accept that meaning, or as much of it as they could process. There would be no need for literature classes or discussion groups beyond simple remediation: for those of you who missed the meaning, here’s what you weren’t clever enough to grasp. That is sometimes the view of beginning literature students. They will come to class and ask, in so many words, “But what does it mean?” as if it can only mean one thing or as if my reading is the only authorized version of the text. And of course there would be no scholarly journals or monographs necessary in literary studies. Okay, so perhaps that’s not the worst outcome you’ve ever heard, but you get the idea.
Want to play a game? From a single page of a single novel we get the following phrases: “the daughter of that house had traversed a desert of sordid misery”; “she herself was nothing of a sybarite”; “she elevated daintiness to a religion; her interior shone with superfluous friction, with punctuality, with winter roses”; “she assimilated all delicacies and absorbed all traditions.” Okay, name that tune. What would you say about the writer of these phrases? From some century not our own? From some planet not our own? We can be pretty sure no one wrote those phrases after Hemingway, who murdered them. If I came across them cold, I would probably guess the nineteenth century and England. I would be wrong. Slightly. They are indeed from the same page (277 in my old Modern College Library edition) of Henry James’s The Bostonians. James, of course, was an American, technically. He lived much of his adult life, however, in Britain as an Englishman; there was a quarter of a century, from 1880 to 1905, during which he did not set foot in the United States. But American nevertheless. James is, to my mind, unique, as much in his way as Twain is in his. No one sounds quite like him, no one strings words together in quite his way. Perhaps no one, even those with the benefit of Freud and Jung, investigates the human psyche with quite the same subtlety, and no one does it with such interestingly convoluted sentences. But even before the sentence level, his word choice and phrasing, his diction, mark him out as a special case. You need someone who is a better James scholar than I (not a great challenge) to tell you what that special quality consists of, but I know it when I hear it. There’s a kind of magic to the play of words in an author, in part because his or her diction is not like anyone else’s. James’s magic is not Hemingway’s or Faulkner’s, nor theirs Laurence Sterne’s nor Edna O’Brien’s. It’s always their own.
Sometimes the magic words are names. Here are two from a novel I’m pretty sure you have not read: Veneering and Podsnap. Sound like a slightly demented home and garden store, don’t they? Okay, class, name that writer. As I say, you’ve probably not read this novel (which is not in the top six of his that might be assigned for course study), but if you’ve read any of those six, you’ll get it. You’re right. Again. Nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, even comes close to the artful inventiveness of Dickensian naming practices. Names have an edge to them. We talked about them just a moment ago as emblems of character, but they have qualities of their own. Weight. Feel. Geometry. They’re sharp or boxy or roly-poly. They’re evocative. You don’t need a description to envision Mr. Pumblechook or Lady Dedlock; you only hope that when the descriptions come, they match the expectations the names have set up. The novel that gives us the Veneerings and Podsnap is Our Mutual Friend (1865), the last novel Dickens completed. I first read it as the seventh and final novel in a course on his later, “social” novels (we skipped A Tale of Two Cities as being too unlike the others), so after mucking around the fens and the ruined mansion with Pip and the jail in Little Dorritt and the miasma of the Court of Chancery in Bleak House, when I came upon “Podsnap,” I remember thinking, “of course he is.” It’s simply perfect. Dickens’s names, like his characters, are generally a shade grotesque—just a little deformed or a little outside the normal run of things. Dickens sounds like himself in other ways, naturally, but he most resembles himself in those hilarious, alarming, punning, suggestive names he slings around the necks of his characters.
All of which brings us to the Law of Narrative Diction: By their words shall ye know them. Word choice and placement and combination act to define a writer’s style, texture, tone, mood. Everyone has the same language; no two people use it the same way. Sometimes writers don’t even use it the same way from book to book.
Try this one on for size: “‘Wow! Looks swank!’ remarked my vulgar darling squinting at the stucco as she crept out into the audible drizzle and with a childish hand tweaked loose the frock-fold that had stuck in the peach-cleft—to quote Robert Browning.” We’ve got ourselves a two-fer—the main speaker, who is the narrator, and the person, the “vulgar darling,” who offers the aesthetic statement. What can we discern here? First of all, that the narrator is someone for whom “wow” and “swank” are vulgarisms lying outside his working vocabulary, although they are very much typical of the speech of the other person in this scene, who says them naturally. He, on the other hand, can speak of an “audible drizzle” and employ “peach-cleft” for a different sort of cleft, one that sweaty frocks might hang up in, as well as writing in an alliterative (squinting . . . stucco, frock-fold) and almost cloyingly poetic way. So we might deduce that she is young and relatively unschooled, as evidenced by that bit of 1950s slang, he older, rather more literate and even literary, if not inevitably in ways that are profitable or even particularly attractive. Would it surprise you to find that her name is Lolita? Yes, that fussy narrative diction and hauteur belong to our favorite child-molestor, Humbert Humbert. I’ve talked about his hideousness elsewhere. For now we want to notice the brilliance of this nonnative speaker, Vladimir Nabokov, in capturing both the diction of an overeducated immigrant to these shores (not hard, perhaps, since English was his third language) but also the argot of the American teenager circa 1955. His brilliance, for many of us, has to do with his ear for language, for the Americanisms most of us rarely notice. In Pnin (1957), for instance, the hapless immigrant professor of the title is confronted by all manner of native speakers—hustlers and sycophants, glory grabbers and social climbers—no two of which sound alike. And in Pale Fire (1962), which for many readers stands as his masterpiece, he plays off the immigrant voice of the possibly mad, possibly royal Charles Kimbote against the family and acquaintances of the poet John Shade, again with perfect pitch for the things Americans of various stations and generations do to the Mother Tongue. There are many pleasures along with a few frustrations in reading Nabokov. The frustrations have to do with how much smarter the writer is than the average bear, which includes professors of English. The pleasures lie chiefly in what he can do with language, with our language, as he makes it his own playground. The games, the puzzles, the puns, the tricks he can make English do—those are all wonderful. Most wonderful of all, however, is how he can make us sound, how he can capture so perfectly the speech of the new and strange people he found when he discovered America.
Speaking of sound: rocks. Not “fiddlesticks” or “humbug” or “phooey.” Rocks. More specifically, “O, rocks.” That just says volumes about the speaker. Later on, she’ll say a mouthful in her closing soliloquy, but for now, two words suffice. She also has a few things to say about Leopold, who knows words like “metempsychosis” but has a few kinks of his own. Here’s Molly’s own pronouncement on her husband: “well hes beyond everything I declare somebody ought to put him in the budget.” You can’t say fairer than that.