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12/20 | Telling Time with Atmospheric Effects

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12/20 | Telling Time with Atmospheric Effects

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Marie Rogers's education takes a profound turn when she begins working for Ranjit Singh in New York, and much of this section is about political and philosopical discussions, but Smedley still manages to give us a sense of place and time: she's mesmerized by descriptions of the sunset hour in India, known as "cow dust" (or Godhuli bela), and when she walks in Central Park at dawn with her mentor, the trees are dripping with dew.

I found this passage a great reminder of the power of using local atmospheric effects to evoke time of day in ways that also reflect the mood of your characters and narrative.

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Below, to help inspire weird and wondrous wordplay, is a list of just a few of the rhetorical devices deployed by Joyce in the end of the Eumaeus chapter of Ulysses.  Try out a few of these, or something else. Regular writers use this stuff, too, just not usually as densely and wildly as Joyce! Have fun

antanaclasis

The repetition of a word within a phrase or sentence in which the second occurrence utilizes a different and sometimes contrary meaning from the first
we must all hang together or most assuredly we shall all hang separately

antiphrasis

The usually ironic or humorous use of words in senses opposite to the generally accepted meanings
this giant of 3 feet 4 inches

chiasmus

An inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases

working hard, or hardly working?

hypallage

An interchange of two elements in a phrase or sentence from a more logical to a less logical relationship
you are lost to joy for joy is lost to you

hyperbaton

A transposition or inversion of idiomatic word order
judge me by my size, do you?

syllepsis

The use of a word in the same grammatical relation to two adjacent words in the context with one literal and the other metaphorical in sense

she blew my nose and then she blew my mind

zeugma

The use of a word to modify or govern two or more words usually in such a manner that it applies to each in a different sense or makes sense with only one

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In the end of Part 6 of Daughter of Earth, Agnes Smedley seeks knowledge and information to support her radical poitical view, but is bored, unimpressed and unconvinced by turns by many of the teachers and spokespeople of the Socialist and anti-war movements whom she encounters. Eventually, she tries her hand speaking at a rally and herself performs miserably.

Examine an example of incompetance. It is part of a longer arc that may end is mastery and excellence, or just a pathetic failure?

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Flipping yesterday's prompt of personification on its head, today see if you can find a place to use the rhetorical device of objectification for a specific intent, as Agnes Smedley does in Daughter of Earth, on p. 154, when Marie gets a bit of payback by dehumanizing a crass asshole who treats her as chattel. She turns him into a thing: "One bay-windowed vulture, with a long cigar tipped heavenward, sat down heavily by my desk one day, shoved his bowler back from his perspiring dollar-like face and, without removing his hands from his pockets, made a 'proposition.' "

Try putting a problematic character into their proper place by describing in terms of their component parts or comparing them to powerless, possibly laughable or demeaning objects?

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It’s easy not even to notice personification — anthropomorphism is so often our default setting that many instances of it have become hackneyed or banal: winds whispering in the trees, windows overlooking gardens.

In today’s passage from Daughter of Earth (pp. 143-149), there are several striking instances of personification that heighten the reader’s attention to important moments. Marie goes out into the desert to ponder a big decision, whether to go east to help her brothers or west to follow her infatuation with Knut and Karin. “The hours walked and I walked with them.” And later, when Marie has opted to go west and then, again her hard-fought principles, capitulated to the urge to marry Knut, Smedley shows Marie’s disassociation from herself and her own choice by personifying her voice as she seals her vow: “‘Yes, I guess so.’—Was that my voice marrying me like this!”

Take a look at your own work and see if you can root out or freshen up any clichéed instances. Then think about how weird and wonderful personification can be at its best — such as the animated fixtures and objects of Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast that dovetail so intriguingly with the questions about what constitutes humanity raised by the beast’s dual nature.

Are there interesting personifications you could inject or amplify in your work in order to emphasize your underlying ideas or imagery?

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It's easy not even to notice personification - anthropomorphism is so often our default setting that many instances of it have become hackneyed or banal: winds whispering in the trees, windows overlooking gardens.

In today's passage from Daughter of Earth (pp. 143-149), there are several striking instances of personification that heighten the reader's attention to important moments. Marie goes out into the desert to ponder a big decision, whether to go east to help her brothers or west to follow her infatuation with Knut and Karin. "The hours walked and I walked with them." And later, when Marie has opted to go west and then, again her hard-fought principles, capitulated to the urge to marry Knut, Smedley shows Marie's disassociation from herself and her own choice by personifying her voice as she seals her vow: "'Yes, I guess so.'-Was that my voice marrying me like this!"

Take a look at your own work and see if you can root out or freshen up any clichéed instances. Then think about how weird and wonderful personification can be at its best - such as the animated fixtures and objects of Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast that dovetail so intriguingly with the questions about what constitutes humanity raised by the beast's dual nature.

Are there interesting personifications you could inject or amplify in your work in order to emphasize your underlying ideas or imagery?

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(with thanks to Rebecca Makkai and the Ithaca or catechism chapter of Ulysses)

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Why do we ask questions in narrative?

A lot of reasons — and not always simply to get to the answers.

Are questions are about curiosity?

Not necessarily. Does that 911 lady who says "What's the nature of your emergency?" sit around wondering what sort of shit show just befell you and everyone else on her queue? Unlikely. She might dread every call, or maybe she's a creepy voyeur, or just trying to do some good in the world, or earn a living. Who knows?

But curiosity, that's a good thing — right?

Sure. Except for that poor cat in the adage... Not to mention the prurient curiosity that bleeds over into nosiness, snooping, gossip. And what's up with how I usually can't wait to find out how books end, so I always read the last chapter ahead? Is that actually some sort of literary crime?

What are some other reasons we ask questions?

Among the best of all questions, in my opinion, are those that arise from the Socratic method, where teachers' inquiries lead learners to arrive at ideas through reason, not rote. Rhetorical questions do something similar, except that a yucky manipulation is taking place: There is an implied, predetermined correct answer to a rhetorical question, and yet the answerer (or reader) is also asked to pretend the answer is their own authentic response. With catechisms, the idea is to drill information, inculcating specific beliefs in a group of respondents, fixing and norming the group's received idea of the Truth. I really don't approve of that sort of brainwashing, but hey, it gave rise to James Joyce's truly hilarious send up of the Catholic Catechism in the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses, so that's worth something, right? There are surely more kinds of questions than anyone could enumerate, some banal, some profound, running the gamut from non-questions like "How are you?" or "What's up?" (to which no one actually wants an answer), to police interrogations (was that confession coerced?), to scripts read out by officials of every stripe to elicit binding oaths and affirmations, to toddlers' wonderments about the natural world (and every damn else thing besides), to, well —how could one omit it? — "To be, or not to be." (Did you ever notice the omission of an actual question mark in that line?)

Why are questions so powerful in storytelling?

(Did that question just imply something you weren't asked whether you agreed with, viz., that questions are powerful in storytelling? Yep, sorry. Guilty. Manipulative.) Questions are powerful (and here's where I forge ahead with my notion, despite having just admitted I was being manipulative) because by engaging readers directly, they bring about greater reader agency and connection to the story. They also have a different energy than declarative statements and thus draw a different kind of attention, and sometimes just the variation in pacing and intonation can be bracing. Ideally, but not always (see above complaints about rhetorical question and catechism), questions impart an open-endedness to the ideas they circle around. They can foment change, which is critical in storytelling, of course, but also in society. Could questions be a way to leap from the minute to the majectic, the personal to the political? When a character questions their reality, might a reader then question their own?

Do you — yes, I'm talking to you, now, directly, as a writer — ask enough questions of various different sorts in your work?

I don’t know, do you? Go take a look. Try searching your document for the question mark, and see how often it occurs!

By the way, would you mind if I asked you why are you writing what you're you're writing?

This is a good one because the answer, hopefully, will evolve over time, so you can ask it again and again.

Any questions?

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The word landscape implies not just a place but the seer of that place, perhaps a visitor, a resident, or an artist who has portrayed the world with a certain eye, style, tone, mood, or message. And so landscapes inevitably imply as much about people as place. A dark forest might turn menacing when perceived by a fearful wanderer ill at ease in the wild, but seem tranquil to a resident Druid. The verdant fields of an antebellum southern plantation would appear very different as seen by an enslaved person than by their enslaver.

When Agnes Smedley's Marie arrives in the harsh Arizona desert on her journey to find a life she deems worth living, she sees the sinister daytime terrain of rock, dust and ravines populated by rattlesnakes and gila monsters, but the nights are different, gorgeous and freeing: "the deep sky flaunted untold myriads of stars, hard and brilliant...and countless giant cacti stood like grim sentinels against the the sky, their spiked arms flung up and outward." (p. 135)

So, when you tackle setting in your work, don't forget the great outdoors, whether its a city-, sea- or landscape, and make your descriptions do meaningful work that reveals your characters' perspectives and attitudes about the spaces they inhabit.

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Do you ever include nonhuman animals in your narrative? Do you do it enough? And are they there as motifs, pets, familiars, domestic animals, meat, vermin? As anthropocentric as we tend to be as a species, a connection to other living being is a great way to humanize a character.

On p 126 of Daughter of Earth, as Marie recuperates in a Carlsbad rooming house after her episode of near starvation, a nightingale visits her: "a strain of liquid music poured out of the darkness." It's a crucial turning point, very close to halfway through the book, and it reminded me of the Danish seabird that swooped across the book's first paragraph. Clearly birds are important images for Agnes Smedley, but intriguingly, they don't always have the same meaning. The initial seabird symbolizes the possibility of an escape from the earth and its struggles — an escape she rejects. The Carlsbad nightingale suggests that beauty and persists in the world, even at the darkest moments. The novel's final bird image is of a raptor, representing to Marie a man who wants to carry her off as carrion or chattel.

And then we read the end of the Eumaeus section of Ulysses, where Bloom, just off successive extended riffs on music and overused figures of speech, pauses to observe a cart horse let fall "three smoking globes of turds." It certainly puts the pontification and the blather in perspective, that literal load of crap.

In my own writing, I've been working on a scene that includes a disagreement about walking the dog. Today's Smedley and Joyce prompted me to go back and let the animal kingdom into the story, in this case by breathing a bit more deeply into the dog herself, developing her character and relationship to the human characters, rather than relying on a mere idea of a pet, no livelier or filled with narrative potential than a stuffed puppy sitting on a shelf.

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In today's pages from Ulysses, Leopold Bloom is briefly described as hungry, but it doesn't compare to the starvation that Marie suffers in Daughter of Earth after months of inadequate food and a solid week of nothing at all.

Consider your character's access and attitude to their next meal. Are they ravenous, queasy, or peckish? Struggling with body dysmorphia, fat shaming, or a tapeworm? Sated, malnourished, anorexic?

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Troubles for Charles Parnell...and Ireland...

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12/2/24 | DEBUNK A DEEPLY HELD PRINCIPLE

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12/2/24 | DEBUNK A DEEPLY HELD PRINCIPLE

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In this morning's readings, idols have feet of clay and ideals emerge as less than virtuous. Agnes Smedley's character Marie sacrifices her love for her two younger brothers on the altar of her own hard-won feminism. In order to achieve self-determination, she has trained herself not to be soft, not to be a to be a typical woman, not to care, not to love. As the final line of today's passage reveals, her principles drove her down a path, at this particular moment, that she would come to regret. In the Ulysses passage, the talk is of Parnell, the Irish Nationalist leader and Member of Parliament who fell out of favor and power after his adulterous relationship with Kitty O'Shea became public. Many Irish Catholics renounced him, and the alliance his party had forged collapsed, paving the way for the ensuing period of Troubles.

These stories have made me think about the principles, politics and very human hypocrisies underlying the story of my current book project and sharpened my sense of why I'm writing it.

Are there contradictions that define your characters -- whether they be heroes or antiheroes?

Are there writing or editorial principles that govern your work that might be worth overturning?

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the fall of charles parnell in rotogravure style