Perhaps they had a doctor to me on Saturday morning, the next day, yes, I remember they did, I was counting my pulse rate, knew what it was normally, then, do not know, now, no. . . . June was out for Saturday, perhaps all day, certainly for lunch, for lunch Tony came in and said he was cooking fish fingers, he said they tasted okay if they were fried, a curious thing to remember, all memories are curious, for that matter, the mind as a think of an image . . .
Then there is the space around text (or, in this passage, interrupting it to make bubbles of wordlessness). A pool of white surrounding a raft of words rests the eye and creates the time-space for a reader to draw connections or ponder. Marguerite Duras uses white space in an especially designed way in The Lover, which I’ll talk about later; Dinty Moore has a fine essay on the uses and misuses of white space called “Positively Negative”; Nigel Krauth and Simon Barton also have much to say on the kinetic and semantic properties of space.
Super-short paragraphs and line breaks can aerate prose, throwing light into density, giving the reader space to think. They also create dynamism, letting the eye swing to the left more often, each swing shifting the thought. Here’s the opening of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, about a woman who might be the last person on earth:
In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
Somebody is living in the Louvre, certain of the messages would say. Or in the National Gallery.
Naturally they could only say that when I was in Paris or in London. Somebody is living in the Metropolitan Museum, being what they would say when I was still in New York.
Nobody came, of course. Eventually I stopped leaving the messages.
To tell the truth, perhaps I left only three or four messages altogether.
I have no idea how long ago it was when I was doing that. If I were forced to guess, I believe I would guess ten years.
Possibly it was several years longer ago than that, however.
And of course I was quite out of my mind for a certain period too, back then.
These mini-paragraphs, some a single line, are being typed by Markson’s narrator as she struggles to assemble what she knows of the world, to draw a thread between it and herself with language. She’s having a solo dialogue, a desperate thinking-through. But with no way to check the “truth” of anything she thinks, she helplessly begins to weave a new net of “knowledge” from ever flimsier fiber. She’s a lone, last Penelope, weaving and unraveling meaning as she types—a process we feel at the start of each line, each fragile warp or weft.
In her novella Days, Dorthe Nors also imagines a female narrator writing a personal account of solitude; she keeps a cryptic diary of daily lists as spare as bone. Yet they gradually reveal her inner and outer worlds, through both what they give and what they leave out, an unnerving emptiness around each line. Here’s the first day:
1. So much for that winter,
2. I thought, looking at the last crocuses of spring;
3. they lay down on the ground
4. and I was in doubt.
5. Chewed out an entire school because a single sentence bugged me
6. and drank my hot chocolate, sweet/bitter.
7. Worked,
8. considered traveling somewhere I never imagined I’d find myself
9. yet stayed where I was
10. and banged on my neighbor’s wall,
11. was in doubt, but sure,
12. was insecure,
13. stood still by the window,
14. let my gaze move from running shoes to wool socks
15. and lay down on the bed.
Compare those spare, lonely passages with the quicksand of Sebald or Knausgaard, where there’s no breath of white space for days. Akin to this literal textual density—what we see on the page, how much relief we get—is the degree of resolution in what is actually being said: the density of detail or association. On one end of the spectrum could be Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel; here is its opening:
Sam woke around 3:30 p.m. and saw no emails from Sheila. He made a smoothie. He lay on his bed and stared at his computer screen. He showered and put on clothes and opened the Microsoft Word file of his poetry. He looked at his email. About an hour later it was dark outside. Sam ate cereal with soymilk.
Not only are the sentences short, simple, and mostly subject-verb, but the vision is low-resolution. With no grit or detail beyond a brand name, this writing (deliberately) has the texture of a cartoon or emoji. It’s as flat as the screen Sam stares at.
Now consider another passage from Baker’s Mezzanine. Here the narrator describes a tie, as everyday a subject as Lin’s:
it was made of a silk that verged on crepe, and its pattern was composed of very small oval shapes, each containing a fascinating blob motif that seemed inspired by the hungry, pulsating amoebas that absorb excess stomach acid in Rolaids’ great dripping-faucet commercial, and when you looked closely you noticed that the perimeter of each oval was made of surprisingly garishly colored rectangles, like suburban tract houses; an order so small in scale, however, that those instances of brightness only contributed a secret depth and luminosity to the overall somber, old-masters coloration of the design.
This single sentence winds far longer and more intricately than Lin’s seven short ones, offering elaborate phrases and clauses that give it different depths (this is in fact the second part of a longer, colon-split sentence). Several of Baker’s words have four or five syllables, while no word of Lin’s has more than three. Baker makes more texture with his detail and range of vision, from a microscopic look at amoebas to an overhead view of the suburbs; from lowbrow Rolaids to Old Master painting. These two references themselves carry different cargoes of imagery and tone, and that Baker pairs them gives his sentence even more texture, like moving from a hard plastic surface to velvet. Both Lin’s and Baker’s passages treat minor content. Yet their different kinds of words, syntax, and associations—style and sensibility, you can say—create strikingly different textures. Further, Lin’s passage narrates, making the storyworld advance in time, while Baker’s describes: a portrait. And this takes me to the subject of movement in time.
* I won’t address the use of explicit visual devices such as varied typography, or photographs and other graphic images embedded in the text, even though all of these can add to or trouble how we absorb or make sense of the language. See works cited by Simon Barton, Glyn White, and Nigel Krauth. Some thoughts on the uses of space and gaps will appear, but mostly I’m interested in patterning on the contentual level of text, not the graphic.
A few years ago my mother had a phase in which every three or four months something would short in her heart or brain, and she’d slump to the floor. Whatever did this left no trace; we guessed some kind of seizure. By the time I’d find her in the emergency room with her skinny arms taped and wired, she’d be back to herself, toss her head, and say, Oh, never mind. I’m fine. The last time this happened, as she again lay wired in a hospital bed, we played an alphabet game to kill the dull time as tests were run (names of flowers from a to z; names of birds; names of cities or cocktails). She began to fall silent for longer spells between words, forgetting which letter we’d reached or fumbling the topic, and her hand in mine grew still. I thought she was exhausted,