Fireworks Inside and Out

We still had time left in class--time to go a bit deeper into a question I've been wondering about for a few years, and have made a central consideration this semester: why is description often thin or even skipped? Why can it amount to stage direction and not much more?

The answers ranged from fear of sentimentality to laziness to preoccupation with other aspects of getting the story down. There was a sense that description is both daunting and negligible--that it can be a track laid in later when the main line is in place. If needed.

True, there is no necessary order of operations when making a piece of writing.  True, a bare bones story can exist without it.

What if one wants to describe, though, but is shy of taking on the authority to name how a thing is? Or can't find a way to talk about, say, a flower that feels fresh or interesting? 

It was about 7:30 by then; to my left, the picture windows across the outside wall of the room had blackened. I only saw the darkness peripherally. It was time for it to be dark; what of it?

I opened a book we are using this semester in both my classes, Mark Doty's The Art of Description. (It is the latest volume in Graywolf Press's The Art Of series on writing.) What a beautifully written, extraordinarily clear and smart book this is. It would have saved me a lot of years of trying to figure out how writing works if I'd had read it when I was younger, though I'm not sure I'd have grasped it as completely as I do now. Desert Island writing books, limited to two only: Mystery and Manners by Flannery O' Connor and The Art of Description by Mark Doty. Done.

The book is subtitled World Into Word; to myself, I call it that; it names the enterprise and opens the toolbox.  Three words, balanced and tuneful.

In the first essay Mark writes about seeing a fireworks display. I begin this quote partway into the story:
"A few children had to be comforted, a few shocked pets hurried away, but everyone else loved it, craning their heads back and taking in the gold and green and fuchsia sparks exploding over us in the form of starbursts or fantastic down-raining flowers."

How's that? Nice. Fireworksy. But wait:

"Here I sigh. That last sentence just doesn't come anywhere close to evoking the actual visual or auditory experience. Not to mention the smell of burnt powder and drifting smoke picking up a little salt and seaweed tang, mingled with the annoying cigarette of the man next to me.Or my awareness that the colors overhead were complicated by the peripheral sense that the intense light of the launching rockets has lit up the water a peculiar army-surplus green, while a cheerful little blue and yellow inflatable skiff to our right rocked on the wavelets beneath all that celestial action.
But what struck me most was this: as the bits of fire came arcing down, they streaked across the night at the same time that I became aware of the spider-smoke behind them, strange contrails and patterns left where the flares had been; these were already shifted and lengthened by the wind--so that beneath the descending display of lights, a kind of ghostly display moved at a right angle to the first, strangely, like a visible history of fire."

Beautiful. And now we're seeing deeper into the event--we're seeing what Mark noticed. The fireworks have become his experience, and he has parsed it carefully and offered it to the reader. It is singular, particular, sensual, supernatural, historical--a way into the strangeness of the real. Can we guess the state of mind of the person who wrote these lines? Yes, we can come up with some possibilities. Can we begin to construct a story based on this description? We could--we could. Description isn't only an enhancement; it can be a point of origin.

The key to deepening the practice lies in the opening phrase of the last sentence-- what struck me most. 

Me. Most.  These fireworks occurred to this particular mind in this way, with this moment being the most resonant. The event has become filtered through a particular sensibility (a highly refined one, in this case.) Meaning has been made.

We were exhilarated, so much so that we spontaneously began to laugh. Then--the room filled with light! We shrieked! I had no idea what was going on...had we materialized fireworks ourselves? The people facing out said there'd been a display of lightning bolts for the past twenty minutes or so. I missed it. But there were witnesses.

Flaubert's Four Pages in Four Weeks

Last night in class we discussed Madame Bovary, specifically the scene when Emma goes to the curé for spiritual sustenance or steadying when she is feeling herself slip. The curé only half pays attention to her; he is too busy trying to round up the wayward boys for their catechism class to notice the subtlety of her distress. It is a beautiful little scene told with Flaubert's careful description and to the point dialogue.

We then read a letter Flaubert wrote to his lover and muse, Louise Colet, about his composition of the scene.
"Finally I am beginning to see a little light in my accursed dialogue with the curé. But frankly, there are moments when I almost feel like vomiting physically the whole thing is so low. I want to express the following situation. My little lady, in an excess of religiosity, goes to church; at the door she finds the curé who in a dialogue shows himself to be so stupid, inept, sordid that she goes away disgusted and undevout. ... This must have 6 or 7 pages at most and must contain no comment, no analysis; it will all be direct dialogue. .... So: you are initiated into the torture I have been undergoing for a fortnight. By the end of next week, I hope I will have it off my hands."

I have edited the letter to the salient parts--those that show how fully aware he was of his intention, and that reveal how long it took him to get this little scene right. A fortnight already, now the week he is in, and his guess that it will take him another week. I count somewhere between three and four weeks. The final version has the feeling of inevitability of all great literature. It is simple, clear, and completely alive. This vivid inevitability takes deep thinking and a lot of work. I love Flaubert's letters for many reasons, one of which is that he reveals how long he spends on certain scenes and sections--and he was writing over long, uninterrupted days. He has a plan, always. He knows exactly what scene he needs to write, what must happen, who's present, how it must feel to the reader, how long it should be. His worldly ambitions--he was determined to be famous--enhance the quality of his thinking; he knows what he has to do, how much focus he needs to do it, that he has to give up Paris to write his book.

For the past ten days I have had a toothache, a root canal, and pain in its aftermath. Returning to Flaubert and his anguish over his recalcitrant scenes has been so soothing. Such an angry young man, so determined to be famous. I have the feeling he'd write to Louise about the annoyance of his toothache but he'd still be laying down the tracks of description.