Joyce, being a e s t h e t i c

I went to college to study English and some other things but about a quarter of the way through I decided to change it because of reasons. Since then I don’t think I’ve developed much as a reader or a critic — if anything I’ve regressed, and done so markedly — but I still remember some of the good things I thought back then.

This article is going to be about the good things I thought about

Sentences

Not every descriptive sentence needs a metaphor or a simile, and this is the basic mistake and surest sign of an amateur writer. These things are definitely important — a great enough metaphor can be deathless, in fact; “The river of time,” the “Mind’s eye,” etc. — but they’re not important enough to fill every sentence. If you try that, it sounds cheesy: “The arrows fell on the field like so many ravens, clawing and pecking. Lo’gathm, shrugging them off as a cliff shrugs off the waves, heaved into the enemy lines. He tore through them — danced — taking them apart piece by piece the way a child idly destroys a toy.”

Granted the fantasy setting doesn’t exactly help with the cheese factor but the point stands. Even literary fiction — good literary fiction — falls into this trap. Confederacy of Dunces is, I allege, one of the comfiest books ever written, but the descriptive prose tends to read like something a precocious 18 year old would write:

This had been a very productive morning, he thought. He had not accomplished so much in weeks. Looking at the dozens of Big Chief tablets that made a rug of Indian headdresses around the bed, Ignatius thought smugly that on their yellowed pages and wide-ruled lines were the seeds of a magnificent study in comparative history. Very disordered, of course. But one day he would assume the task of editing these fragments of his mentality into a jigsaw puzzle of a very grand design; the completed puzzle would show literate men the disaster course that history had been taking for the past four centuries. In the five years that he had dedicated to this work, he had produced an average of only six paragraphs monthly. He could not even remember what he had written in some of the tablets, and realized that several were filled principally with doodling. However, Ignatius thought calmly, Rome was not built in a day.

It’s not a bad paragraph by any means. The tone is pretty much perfect; it reads with the same airiness and detachment that are some of Ignatius’ most defining features. The ending line is funny. We get some good, understated exposition from details like “In the five years that he had dedicated to this work…” and others. The metaphors employed — “a rug of Indian headdresses,” “seeds of a magnificent study,” “a jigsaw puzzle of a very grand design” — don’t detract from anything, (though they aren’t particularly inventive.)

But for all of its praiseworthy qualities, the sentences in the paragraph don’t quite fit together well, or cohere. We get articulate descriptions of things, but the sentences themselves tend to just start — stop — start — stop.

And this is precisely what I think is vital to good writing: good rhythm. By rhythm I mean what one would expect; I believe each and every sentence has a particular way it should stop and start, roll along, or otherwise progress. This is itself determined by things like the sentences that proceeded it, the sentences which it will itself proceed, and the syllables and the phonetics of the words that make it up.

When it comes to concerns like these, Joyce isn’t just the master — he is the undying god. If you’d like, you can imagine one of those 6-winged angelic final bosses from Final Fantasy with his tweedy, skeeved out little face on the top of it. In his left hand he holds a tablet labelled ‘prosody.’ In his right he holds a sword, aflame, whose embers spell out ‘etymology.’ On his brow is a crown of darkness labelled ‘horr-ific fucking love letters.’

Observe:

The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys. All were shouting and the prefects urged them on with strong cries. The evening air was pale and chilly and after every charge and thud of the footballers the greasy leather orb flew like a heavy bird through the grey light. He kept on the fringe of his line, out of sight of his prefect, out of the reach of the rude feet, feigning to run now and then. He felt his body small and weak amid the throng of the players and his eyes were weak and watery. Rody Kickham was not like that: he would be captain of the third line all the fellows said.

Why is this worth quoting?

Start with the first sentence. Put your hand under your chin like they taught you in grammar school and say it. If you’ve committed the same academic sins as I have then you will notice it right away: the entire first sentence is entirely made out of iambs: The wide playgrounds were swarming with boys.

More things: the second sentence is a very small but effective example of what’s called polysyndeton — which is a fancy rhetorical term for using a bunch of conjunctions (usually, ‘and’) in a row for one or another artistic effect. If you don’t interpose commas between any of the ‘and’ phrases it tends to make things read faster, generally, and is a good way to move a description along, which is how Joyce uses it here. Then there’s the repetition of “out of … out of …” in the third sentence, the same syllables in ‘reach’ and ‘feet,’ the alliteration between ‘rude’ and ‘reach’ and ‘feet’ and ‘feigning.’

Almost every paragraph in the book is this densely sinewed. The length of one sentence and the sounds that make it up affect the length and the sounds of the ones that come before and after it.

I will end on this last note: on sounds. The astute reader will have noticed that I said ‘reach’ and ‘feet’ have the same syllables — the same sound — even though they’re spelled differently. And if I might impart one discrete little fact it would be this: that spelling does not always map to sound. “[B]lue, shoe, flew, through, you, two.” ‘Again’ doesn’t rhyme with ‘gain’ (in American English.) The language is just kind of shit at communicating how to pronounce its words.

So figure it out for yourself: sound things out. When writing prose or poetry, don’t worry about the way the words look: say them out loud or listen to them in your head. If you do this enough eventually it becomes natural, and you can all the more easily write sentences that will sound beautiful when heard in the heads of your readers. You will be able to write — if you’ll forgive my breaking of my own injunction from the beginning of this article — something akin to sheet music for people; pages filled with pleasant little symbols that will tell them how and what to play in their own heads, and it will be ravishing.

The best writing, to quote another master of this sort of thing, is written by the mouth and for the ear.