Legal Writing

X-Ray Reading Helps Interpret Author's Intentions

By Roy Peter Clark

Last week I made the case that the best writers were also the best readers, that they could peer down beneath a text to see the strategies of meaning. 

I shared with you the opening passage from the novel "Let the Great World Spin" by Colum McCann, and invited your insight and commentary. I will offer my own close reading at the bottom of this column. But first, here again is the passage followed by some of the most interesting interpretations we received:  

"Those who saw him hushed. On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey. It was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful. Some thought at first that it must have been a trick of the light, something to do with the weather, an accident of shadowfall. Others figured it might be the perfect city joke -- stand around and point upward, until people gathered, tilted their heads, nodded, affirmed, until all were staring upward at nothing at all, like waiting for the end of a Lenny Bruce gag. But the longer they watched, the surer they were. He stood at the very edge of the building, shaped dark against the gray of the morning. A window washer maybe. Or a construction worker. Or a jumper.

"Up there, at the height of a hundred and ten stories, utterly still, a dark toy against the cloudy sky."

Each of us brings our autobiography to an encounter with a text, which is why I am grateful to all of you who submitted your readings of this passage. Some interpretations were confident, coming from experienced, professional readers; others were more tentative and experimental, but just as persuasive.

Here are few I've selected to share:

Professor Leticia Almeida-Acosta expressed amazement at the words, "it was a silence that heard itself, awful and beautiful." She notes their ability to move the reader to feel the strange mood of a startling New York day in 1974.

Tammy Noteboom focused her X-Ray vision on that litany of street names: "On Church Street. Liberty. Cortlandt. West Street. Fulton. Vesey." She writes, "I am captured with these one word sentences about where people are standing when they are looking up. 'Hushed' and 'silence' also capture me because they seem so opposite of my memories of New York City, which are of a bustling city with nothing hushed or silent about it." I agree, Tammy, that there is a tension throughout the passage, a clash of opposites.

Marwa Elnaggar peers deep into the passage, right down to the nuts and bolts: "The idea of silence and hushed awe is supported by the way he names the streets. Each street on its own, and with a full stop/period at the end. The name of the street itself is the sentence. The frequent full-stops add silence to the beginning of the passage. On Church Street (stop, breath = silence). Liberty (stop, breathe = silence). Cortlandt (stop, breath = silence)."

Adrian MacLeod offers a rich, detailed and textured analysis of each part of the passage, the kind of close reading we usually reserve for poetry. Commenting upon "those who saw him hushed," he writes: "The words are an almost perfect reflection of the idea. The sounds in the sentence are all soft, many of them unvoiced. There are five single-syllable words in a symmetrical pattern. This also creates a stillness that reflects the idea. Economical, rhythmic. The words are vague, undemanding on the reader so they can focus on the mood."

Chris Hubbuch notes that "rhythm goes a long way. The short opening sentence stops you right away with that word hushed. Then the place-setting list of streets, each separated by a full stop. At that point, the reader has stopped, hushed, looked around to see what it is.

Jan Tarasovic admired much of the passage, except the Lenny Bruce simile, especially "the way that last sentence leads us up again, in sections, ending with that beautiful simple toy metaphor.

Philip Kay takes this literary passage and explores it for its successful news element.What makes a good lead? "Like any good lead, this one doesn't just grab you by the throat.It identifies the key players, situates you in time and space, maps the ground the writer will cover, and sets a tone."

1. In the arithmetic of writing, I count 15 sentences in that first paragraph. A number of those are intentional fragments or "verbless sentences." Six of those fragments are street names. That means the paragraph contains a lot of periods or what the Brits call "full stops." Each one of those is a stop sign. The effect is to move the reader slowly through the situation, wondering -- like the characters in the book -- "what the heck is going on in the sky?" But I also notice an odd symmetry in that paragraph.

The longest sentence -- about 40 words -- is strung out in the middle. First, short sentences stack up on the front end. Then the sentences get a little longer. Then they get even longer. Then they get shorter. And, finally, three verbless sentences conclude it. Here's a crazy idea: Imagine those short sentences at the beginning stacking up as high as a Twin Tower. The same with the ones at the end. With those two parallel towers, that long sentence in the middle looks like a tight rope stretched from one tower to the other.

2. We often hear how writers vary the lengths of their sentences, but far less about the value of varying the length of paragraphs. More than one critic has noticed how a very short paragraph -- sometimes a single word -- after a long one has a dazzling effect, like driving out of a long dark tunnel into bright sunlight. Short paragraphs help create white space on the page, the visual ventilation of the narrative. If the paragraphs are too long, the text will seem tedious. If too many are too short, it will seem disjointed -- letters floating in white space, like noodles in an alphabet soup.

3. Good writers are always looking for parallel constructions, equal grammatical units to express equal thoughts. What interests me in this text is this feeling -- I have no name for it -- of "not quite parallel." By that I mean "not exactly parallel" constructions, but pretty close -- and more interesting because of the slight variations.

Look again at that list of street names. At first they might seem parallel, but look at the variations. "On Church Street" (a preposition, name and the word street). Then, "Liberty, Cortlandt ... Fulton, Vesey." Each of those four is a single word, a name. But embedded in that last list is "West Street," the only example with just a name and the word "Street" (It interests me that the names "Church" and "West" have only one syllable, so the author may have added words to make them a bit weightier. You can find another "not quite parallel" passage at the end: "a dark toy against the cloudy sky." A dark toy is almost parallel to the cloudy sky, except the articles "a" and "the" are different. And a single syllable word "dark" is balanced with a two-syllable adjective "cloudy."

4. From the time of Homer, poets and storytellers have celebrated names, and in this passage there are seven proper names: six street names and the name of the edgy New York stand-up comic "Lenny Bruce." I am not a fan nor student of Bruce, so I spent the last half-hour reading about him, and watching on YouTube some brief videos of interviews and performances. I've come to the conclusion that the writer's evocation of Bruce in his first paragraph works on many levels.

Bruce was a New Yorker who died of a drug overdose in 1966, so he would have been both famous and infamous at the time the novel is set, 1974. Bruce also worked the stage, both sober and hammered, like a jazz musician, so that there was a shapeless, improvisational riffing to the work -- a formlessness with not much of a beginning and, at times, no appreciable end. Hence the simile comparing the expectant crowd to a Lenny Bruce audience. Metaphorically, Bruce was a daredevil, a comedic tightrope walker, whose public obscenities often got him in trouble with the law.

Whenever I carry on in this manner of X-Ray reading, I am often accused of over-interpreting the work, and I readily admit to it. I never claim, without interviewing the artist, that a writer intended a particular effect by using a particular tool. While the writer's intention is important, so is the reader's world view. As scholar Louise Rosenblatt has argued, the author may create the text, but it is the reader who turns it into a poem, a play, a novel or a news story. 

These are all important insights that demonstrate what happens when an author pays attention to the small things and the big things, everything from the number of syllables in a sentence to the echoes of archetype in a theme.

Full post as published by Writing Tools on February 10, 2010 (boomark / email).