A passage of prose experienced on the page doesn’t exist as obviously in time as a snatch of music or a theatrical scene. That doesn’t mean time doesn’t matter when we’re reading. A number of the most striking verbal effects depend on the temporal dimension. Pace constitutes an important and sometimes neglected element of storytelling (we’re probably more aware of it in TV writing than in narrative fiction, due to the historical impact of tight temporal constraints in network television); the speed at which we read something is not supposed to affect the reading experience in any deep way, but I suspect that reading War and Peace feels significantly different when it is completed in ten hours versus in a hundred, and TV and film are in that sense more democratic than novels, insofar as they impose a uniform pace of consumption across the entire audience. The massive scale of a Clarissa or an In Search of Lost Time makes even a fast reader experience the book as a world to be entered rather than a story to be consumed, and a sense of dilation, of almost unutterably prolonged immersion, is crucial to the effects that each of those novels produces.
On a smaller scale, the stylistic impact of verbal repetition also depends on the fact that words exist in time. Henry Watson Fowler, in his 1926 dictionary of usage, urged the reader to avoid what he called “elegant variation” and deplored the “fatal influence” of “the advice given to young writers never to use the same word twice in a sentence.” Elegant variation can of course be turned to very good ends—the effulgence of a baroque sensibility, the instrument of a comedy of self-aggrandizement and self-deflation. It should never be ruled out automatically, and it’s this sort of dictum (“Omit needless words”) that similarly gives Strunk and White a bad name in certain circles. That said, concision is a useful guideline for inexperienced writers; indeed, the willful repetition of a single word can produce desirable effects well beyond the point at which most writers would lose their nerve and reach for the synonym. Here is a favorite passage from one of my very favorite writers, Peter Temple:
Against the righthand wall were the clamp racks: at the bottom, the monster sash clamps; above them, the lesser sizes; in the next rack, the bar clamps, the infantry of joinery, dozens of them in every size; then the frame clamps, the spring clamps, the G-clamps, the ancient wooden screw clamps that Charlie loved best, and flexible wooden go-bars arranged by length. Finally, an assortment of weird clamps, many of them invented by Charlie to solve particular clamping problems.1
The rubric “clamp racks” introduces an amazing array of clamps, the verbal momentum building up to the final catch-all category of “weird clamps” and their application to “clamping problems,” with the unexpected transformation of the noun into the adjectival form “clamping” providing a conclusion that feels strangely provisional, off-kilter, unsettled. Temple’s novels are published as crime fiction, which is probably the genre most hospitable to a stringent and beautiful ideal of prose in the tradition of Beckett (I think of practitioners like Derek Raymond and Ken Bruen). In his most recent books, Temple has perfected an idiom that is on the one hand estranging or defamiliarizing and on the other still appealingly and effectively load-bearing in the narrative sense. Crime fiction tends to feature stronger plots than literary fiction, and it also often carries a sociological freight as a result of its desire to portray broken societies and explore the problem of human evil.2 But Temple’s use of, say, the hyphen greatly exceeds the matter-of-fact needs of sentence-writing in popular fiction, as this sentence from his 2005 novel The Broken Shore shows: “The vinegary couple from the newsagency were in their shop doorway, mouths curving southwards. Triple-bypassed Bruce of the video shop was beside saturated-fat dealer Meryl, the fish and chip shop owner.”3 Satire lurks in the descriptive language as well as in the physical juxtaposition of victim and pusher of saturated fats, and the distinctive effect here is one of compression; the easy conventions of English word order are snubbed, as is the common injunction to avoid using conjugations of the verb “to be” in favor of active verbs.
While there’s something humorous about Temple’s clamp passage, comedy isn’t the primary verbal effect of the repetition. In other hands, though, that sort of repetition can be extremely funny in a way that calls to mind the routines of The Goon Show or Monty Python’s famous “Spam” sketch but that’s probably as old as Aristophanes. (Or even older—it seems to me that verbal repetition works on the basis of something fundamental about language and cognition rather than being a literary innovation anchored in one writer’s imagination at some specific location in time and space.) Influenced by the tradition of verbal sketch comedy (the Blackadder scripts also come to mind), British novelists like Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman have made themselves masters of repetition as a comic effect. This kind of joke works not just by lavish repetition but also by subverting the proper forms of similes and metaphors so that they fold back in on themselves. The pace of Gaiman’s novel Anansi Boys, for instance, is quite gentle, definitely not uproarious, so that the periodic outright comedy catches the reader slightly off guard:
It was sort of like Macbeth, thought Fat Charlie, an hour later; in fact, if the witches in Macbeth had been four little old ladies, and if instead of stirring cauldrons and intoning dread incantations they had just welcomed Macbeth in and fed him on turkey, and rice and peas, spread out on white china plates on a red-and-white patterned plastic table cloth, not to mention sweet potato pudding and spicy cabbage, and encouraged him to take second helpings, and thirds, and then, when Macbeth had declaimed that nay, he was stuffed nigh unto bursting and on his oath could truly eat no more, the witches had pressed upon him their own special island rice pudding and a large slice of Mrs Bustamonte’s famous pineapple upside-down cake, it would have been exactly like Macbeth.4
This passage derives its energy from the comic contrast between the Shakespearean high-cultural reference (the bits of Jacobean pastiche) and the everyday familiarity of the four little ladies cooking up a Caribbean meal; the name Macbeth is used five times in a single sentence, structuring and elevating the cadence even as the naming of rice pudding and pineapple upside-down cake serves to deflate. The next example foregrounds two separate acts of verbal repetition. Spider, impersonating his brother Fat Charlie, creates an illusion of that identity simply by asserting it:
“I’m Fat Charlie Nancy,” said Spider.
“Why is he saying that?” asked Rosie’s mother. “Who is he?”
“I’m Fat Charlie Nancy, your future son-in-law, and you really like me,” said Spider, with utter conviction.
Rosie’s mother swayed and blinked and stared at him.
“You may be Fat Charlie,” she said uncertainly, “but I don’t like you.”
“Well,” said Spider, “you should. I am remarkably likeable. Few people have ever been as likeable as I am. There is, frankly, no end to my likeability. People gather together in public assemblies to discuss how much they like me. I have several awards, and a medal from a small country in South America which pays tribute both to how much I am liked and my general all-around wonderfulness. I don’t have it on me, of course. I keep my medals in my sock drawer.” (162)
Magic works in this book by way of language, not as a function of arcane systems of learning, so that Spider’s playful but purposeful elaboration of the notion that his mother-in-law-to-be really likes him is the way he makes it so: “likeable,” “likeable,” “likeability,” and then the transition back through the verbal forms (“how much they like me,” “how much I am liked”) into the more expansive assertion of “my general all-round wonderfulness” and the deflationary self-deprecation of the explanation that the medals are stashed in his sock drawer. The last example I will give from Gaiman’s novel is a bit simpler than the other two, and for that reason reveals even more clearly the way the humor works: “The world was his lobster, his bib was round his neck, and he had a pot of melted butter and an array of grotesque but effective lobster-eating implements and devices at the ready” (175). It’s the repetition of the word “lobster,” stuck into the phrase “an array of grotesque but effective lobster-eating implements,” that I find charming, though I can also see how a reader might find it annoying or overly whimsical.
Repetition can be comic, but it can also be surreal. Luc Sante offers an interesting analysis of the dummy placeholder word and the ways it can invoke the uncanny in his discussion of the best-known characters of Spirou, the French-language comic magazine he grew up reading, “Les Schtroumpfs, known in the English-speaking world as the Smurfs, small blue elfin creatures who lived in a toadstool village”:
In their English-language animated appearances they could be cloyingly cute, but in French they were spared this fate by their language, marked by an incessant use of the (invented) word schtroumpf, employed as noun, verb, adverb, adjective, and interjection. Every reader, no matter how young, understood this usage without a gloss, because it parodied the French conversational trope of substituting catch-alls such as truc, chose, and machin for words that cannot immediately be called to mind, in any grammatical position. What schtroumpf highlighted was the ability of such dummy words to suggest words prohibited from writing or speech, regardless of the fact that the actual words schtroumpf was substituting for were always clear from context. Truc or chose became neutral from exposure, but schtroumpf subliminally spoke to the unconscious; its surface strangeness could make it mean things that the child’s mind does not yet know but can imagine with tantalizing vagueness.5
I don’t think English speakers have a comparably strong habit of catch-all substitution, though it might be that an obscenity like mother-fucker does some of the same work in certain speakers’ idiolects. (One of the strangest and most characteristic features of Chester Himes’s crime fiction derives from his use of the euphemism “mother-raper” in place of the then-unprintable “mother-fucker,” and his contemporaries fell back on terms like “mother-jumper” and “mother-fouler” for the same reason.)6 Inherently uncanny is the fact that the human mind has such a strong grasp on meaning that even a sentence missing all of its proper nouns can be readily understood, the estranging joke made by Sterne by way of the ellipses of Tristram Shandy: “The chamber maid had left no ******* *** under the bed:—cannot you contrive, master, quoth Susannah, lifting up the sash with one hand, as she spoke, and helping me up into the window seat with the other,—Cannot you manage, my dear, for a single time to **** *** ** *** ******?”7 A debate roiled during the period in which that novel was written as to whether pregnant women might rely more properly and prudently on female midwives or male physicians; Mrs. Shandy prefers the local midwife to Dr. Slop, a preference Uncle Toby accounts for very bluntly: “My sister, I dare say, added he, does not care to let a man come so near her ****” (Tristram Shandy, II.vi.89). The asterisks are four, the word is “arse,” and Tristram repeats his uncle’s words and ruminates upon them:
Make this dash,——’tis an Aposiopesis.—Take the dash away, and write Backside,—’tis Bawdy.—Scratch Backside out, and put Cover’d-way in,—’tis a Metaphor;—and, I dare say, as fortification ran so much in my uncle Toby‘s head, that if he had been left to have added one word to the sentence,—that word was it.
Any given novel can be thought of as having its own pace or set of paces; some writers pace very consistently both within and across novels (this is obviously true for a great deal of genre fiction—let’s say the thrillers of Lee Child or the science fiction novels of Iain M. Banks—but it could also be said of Anne Tyler or Paulo Coelho), while others write books of more variable pacing (Kate Christensen’s Trouble, Ed Park’s Personal Days) or seem to vary their pacing deliberately from one book to the next (Motherless Brooklyn versus The Fortress of Solitude). Neil Gaiman’s novels are striking for their very marked differences in terms of structure and pacing, from the fantastic baggy monster of American Gods—which seems to contain several different novels within its multitudes—to the fable-like economy of Stardust or the Kiplingesque cumulative tale-compilation of The Graveyard Book. The prose of novels often differs from the prose of short stories partly because of some real though hard-to-pin-down aspects of pacing, momentum and directionality, none of which are things that literary-critical terminology is especially well equipped to deal with. The following passage seems to me a good example not just of alluring prose but of prose that, while it is beautifully “crafted” in a way I associate with the literary short story, can also be said to display the rhythms of full-length novel pacing. It is from A. L. Kennedy’s Paradise:
You are now approaching forty and have already spent far too long washing underwear in a theatre, stacking shelves, cleaning rental power tools—which are, I would mention, often returned in revolting states. You have slotted together grids of doubtful purpose, you have folded free knitting and/or sewing patterns into women’s magazines, you have sorted potatoes (for three grotesque hours), you have telephoned telephone owners to tell them about their telephones and you have spent one extremely long weekend in a hotel conference suite, asking people what they found most pleasing about bags of crisps. Every prior experience proves it—there is no point to you.
At least at the end of the crisps job, I got to take some home. But selling cardboard was a godsend: flexible and satisfying in a way that involved no pressure at any stage, because—after all—what sane person could possibly care about who might be buying how many of which kind of box. The job actually managed to be more trivial than me, which seemed to produce this Zen glow across my better days and enabled me to lie my head off in a consistent, promotional manner with hardly a trace of nauseous side effects.
At the moment, though, there’s nothing doing: not in cardboard. Nobody wants me any more and yet, for the usual reasons, I continue to want cash. So, on a sodden Tuesday lunchtime, I’m forced to admit I’ve been driven to make the drinker’s most conventional mistake. I’ve started working in a bar.8
The second-person address “you” is self-consciously literary (the best-known example of second-person narration is probably Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, and it always gives a slight “stunt writing” feel), but the narrator reverts to the plainer “I” after that initial list-like compilation of job histories (this passage falls a good way into the novel as a whole). There are funny moments, including ones produced by that trick of repetition (“you have telephoned telephone owners to tell them about their telephones”), but the overall effect is relentlessly self-denigrating. The time of narration is also unusually slippery here: second-person continuous present-tense address in paragraph one, then a switch into the more straightforward first-person past tense in paragraph two before the disorienting leap of paragraph three, which omits the actual transition from past to present and plunges into the present tense of the current job on a Tuesday lunchtime when alcohol has already been consumed. The last paragraph is clearly going to work as a sort of hinge or joint: there is movement; the next stretch of narration will be attached to this bit and will strike out in a different direction. When I say that the next stretch will exist sideways to the previous one, I have in mind the contrast with a different form of narration in which the story feels less like a vector and more like a structure or model, with each piece functioning as a particular brick might serve in stabilizing an arch, set in the one inevitable place it can possibly belong. That is the feeling that many very good short stories give: it is not the only way a short story can be paced, but it is the kind of pacing that makes the stories of Nathan Englander or Yiyun Li attractive to me despite my general preference for longer fiction.
I have a lurking feeling that I have not yet persuasively made my case about how pacing works in short stories versus the novel, so I want to give two simpler examples that will perhaps clarify the point. I was very struck, some years ago, by the richness of style in evidence in the sentences of this extract from a diary Tobias Hill kept during his stint as a writer-in-residence at Eton. Here Hill has inadvertently allowed a pan of milk to boil over in the suite where he’s staying:
There is nothing seductive about the lactic mire of the electric oven. The Hodgson Guest Suite is indeed roomy, but it is cavernous and utilitarian, everything foursquare and scrubbed to the quick. “All the mod cons” is an estate agent’s way of putting it, too: all cons are present, but the mod is that of a bygone decade. Vinyl seats, flaked white goods, ironing board (though maybe all normal people have ironing boards; maybe it’s just crumpled writers who don’t). Marmoleum.9
“The lactic mire of the electric oven”: I like the phrase, it catches my eye, and yet I feel it’s the kind of stylistic flourish that detracts from the effectiveness of the prose as a whole. The diction is appealing, and yet there’s also something a little purposeless or show-offy, it doesn’t ring quite true: what is this passage for? It is unfair, perhaps, to complain of a diary entry’s seeming undermotivated; it is a perfectly reasonable practice of the genre to offer description for its own sake, and there is no expectation that a diary entry should have the momentum or propulsion of a short story or essay (nor yet the punch of a deliberately composed aphorism). But I can’t shake the feeling that the style is insufficiently called forth by the occasion; this may be related to the kinds of insecurity Hill attributes to himself earlier in the piece (he is the product of comprehensive education rather than public schooling, making Eton a potentially stressful environment), as if he exerts himself to produce these verbal flourishes partly out of a rush of social-educational anxiety, of thinking a little too much about how or what he’s supposed to be thinking.
In contrast to this passage which I have called undermotivated, I would instance a thematically similar extract from a short story by William Boyd, “The Things I Stole” (it is definitely presented as fiction, and I have no reason to believe it isn’t entirely “made up,” but the first-person narrator is rendered in a plausible and low-key fashion that gives the story the feel of a nonfictional personal essay):
I stole food at my boarding school. We were allowed a modest food parcel once a week (like POWs) from a local grocer: a few bananas, a box of dates, mini-packs of cornflakes—no buns or cakes, no chocolates, nothing that could be purchased from the school tuck shop where fizzy drinks, colas, biscuits and every tooth-rotting sweet the confectionery industry could serve up were on offer.
In my house there was a very rich Greek boy whose food parcel might have come from Fortnum & Mason, such was its size and magnificence. I and my coevals pillaged this boy’s food with no compunction (he was plump and cried easily). It was thanks to Stavros’s food parcel that I developed my enduring taste for Patum Peperium, Gentleman’s Relish, a dark, pesto-like spread made from anchovies. It is my Proustian madeleine—it summons up all my early pilfering. I can taste its earthy, farinaceous salinity now.10
This falls somewhere between Hill’s diary entry and Kennedy’s novel. It is “motivated” or purposeful in a way that Hill’s extract isn’t. But it doesn’t have the hinge-like quality of the passage from Kennedy’s novel either; there is movement of a kind (the last line I quote uses the tongue’s sense of taste to bring the past alive in the present), but the tact of the pacing feels to me more characteristic of short story than novel. We sense this to be a satisfactory little chunk of a construction that will probably, once we have read it in its entirety, give the feel of structural self-sufficiency; we don’t imagine that we are likely to be pointed in a wholly unexpected new direction.
One of the most unusual relationships to time in narration that I have ever encountered can be found in the fictions of Edward P. Jones, a writer for whom I feel an admiration mounting almost to idolatry. He has published only one novel, and that book shares many features with the short stories he has been composing over a much more extended period. His effects seem to work equally well in long and short forms, unlike, say, Yiyun Li, whose stories I find exquisite and memorable but whose novel The Vagrants lacked that sense of formal perfection and inevitability and didn’t offer anything that seemed sufficient compensation for their absence. When I reviewed his collection All Aunt Hagar’s Children for the Voice Literary Supplement in 2006, I could only say that Jones “writes as God might, were He to publish fiction”: he mobilizes a relatively unusual verb tense to embed the future in the past, and every single incident in his characters’ lives is simultaneously present to the stories’ omniscient narrator (who is also in this sense a kind of celestial census taker).11 The property called Patches’ Creek belongs to a woman who “fancied herself the richest Negro in Mississippi” but “would die not knowing there were five undertakers and one insurance company founder who were richer”; the battered but intact female protagonist of “Common Law” is “one and a half years from marrying Alvin Deloach,” “more than eight years from marrying Vaughn Anderson,” “just about thirty years from seeing her first grandchild come into the world,” and “more than forty and a half years from death.”12 With this orientation, Jones diverts the reader’s attention almost entirely away from the question of what will happen, a curious and moving technique unmatched elsewhere in contemporary fiction. It speaks to the sweeping aspirations of the realist novel that God’s notional omniscience should be the implicit model for talking about the narrative voice of Tom Jones or Middlemarch, but even omniscient narration in the novel is tied down to a specific temporal vantage point, and to a unidirectional flow of time from past to present; Jones transcends that limitation more fully than any other writer I can think of.