Sensory Detail
Because vivid writing appeals to the reader’s five senses, writers call upon vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell both to set a scene and to bring a story to its conclusion.
Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping (1980), the story of an orphan teenager named Ruthie, is packed with the things Ruthie sees, hears, touches, tastes, and smells, especially as the story draws to a close, when Ruthie and her Aunt Sylvie depart the town of Fingerbone, Idaho, by walking across the railroad bridge. “Nobody’s ever done that,” Sylvie says. “Crossed the bridge. Not that anybody knows of.” And Ruthie relates:
It was a dark and clouded night, but the tracks led to the lake like a broad path. Sylvie walked in front of me. We stepped on every other tie, although that made our stride uncomfortably long, because stepping on every tie made it uncomfortably short. But it was easy enough. I followed after Sylvie with slow, long, dancer’s steps, and above us the stars, dim as dust in their Babylonian multitudes, pulled through the dark along the whorls of an enormous vortex—for that is what it is, I have seen it in pictures—were invisible, and the moon was long down. I could barely see Sylvie. I could barely see where I put my feet. Perhaps it was only the certainty that she was in front of me, and that I need only put my foot directiy before me, that made me think I saw anything at all.
“What if a train comes?” I asked.
And she answered, “There’s no train until morning.”
I could feel the bridge rising, and then suddenly a watery wind blew up my legs and billowed my coat, and more than that, there was a sliding and shimmering sound of the water, quiet sounds but wide—if you dive under water and stay down until your breath gives out, when you come up in the air again, you hear space and distance. It was like that. A wave turned a stick or a stone on some black beach how many miles away, and I heard it at my ear. To be suddenly above the water was a giddy thing, an elation, and made me uncertain of my steps …. It was so dark there might have been no Sylvie ahead of me, and the bridge might have created itself under my foot as I walked, and vanished again behind me.
But I could hear the bridge. It was wooden, and it creaked. It leaned in the slow rhythm that moves things in water. The current pulled it south, and under my feet I could feel it drift south ever so slightly, and then right itself again. The rhythm seemed to be its own. It had nothing to do, as far as I could tell, with the steady rush of water toward the river. The slow creaking made me think of a park by the water where my mother used to take Lucille and me. It had a swing built of wood, as high as a scaffold and loose in all its joints, and when my mother pushed me the scaffold leaned after me, and creaked. That was where she sat me on her shoulders so that I could paddle my hands in the chestnut leaves, so cool, and that was the day we bought hamburgers at a white cart for supper and sat on a green bench by the seawall feeding all the bread to the seagulls and watching the ponderous ferries sail between sky and water so precisely the same electric blue that there was no horizon. The horns of the ferries made huge, delicate sounds, like cows lowing. They should have made a milky breath in the air. I thought they did, but that was just the sound lingering.
Ruthie strains to see in the dark night and imagines the sight of her own dancer’s steps. She hears the creaking of the bridge and the turning of a pebble on a distant beach. She feels the touch of the wind billowing her coat and the swaying of the bridge. Then she remembers feeling and hearing a wooden swing leaning and creaking, touching cool leaves with her hands, seeing ferryboats sailing in bright electric blue light and hearing their horns, and she remembers thinking that their sound had the odor of milk.
Ruthie remembers confusing a sound with an odor. In another instance of synesthesia (stimulation of one of the five senses evoking perception in another sense), she speaks of the sound of water as if she were seeing its “sliding and shimmering.” Her senses are so acute that they mingle together, yet she seems unable to name what she might feel most deeply.
Ruthie says that she feels giddy and elated, uncertain and afraid. But does Ruthie the orphan feel desperate, anxious, lonely, or angry? Robinson never says, and she has no need to. A writer doesn’t have to come right out and tell the reader whether the speaker is happy or sad, if she carefully describes what’s going on with the speaker’s senses. The outer world—the swaying bridge, the creaking swing, the mooing ferryboat—becomes an integral part of the emotion the writer is setting out to evoke, rather than merely providing a fixed backdrop against which the action takes place.