Some notes on "About 5,750 Words"

[alecaustin]

I recently bought and read Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw for the first time, since I wasn't aware it had been reprinted by Wesleyan (way back in 2009) until Patrick Nielsen Hayden mentioned it to me at Viable Paradise this year. Those of you who are longtime readers will know that I have a great deal of respect for Mr. Delany's critical

Comments

[shweta_narayan]

So taking it absolutely literally, I agree with you; a 60 000 word story is probably more like a few images modified 5000 times :)

But. Even if we take the phrase as our basic unit (and there's some research suggesting that in fact people are processing & changing their expectations based on sub-word information, even) if you change any words in a phrase, you've... modified that phrase. If you don't have the right words in it, you've got the wrong phrase. And thus modified the imagery that people are getting. This will bother some readers more than others, but I think that's orthogonal to reading speed & size of basic parsing-units. And as such I'm not sure your point about reading speed/parsing units really undermines his point about building up & modifying the reader's mental images

[alecaustin]

Short on sleep here, and LJ ate the first version of this reply, but I guess the point I'm trying to make is that while changing a phrase => modifying that phrase, modifying the phrase doesn't necessarily imply modifying the imagery that every reader (or even *most* readers) are getting? There are times when changing a single word will actually ramify to nearly everyone, and then there are times when you change the word for the exact shade of red in someone's dress when the description of said dress is just set dressing (or rhythmic punctuation).

I feel like your sense of where we agree is accurate, and I'm not trying to argue that we should pick the words we use out of a hat. I just tend to feel like there's a lot of rhetoric aimed at driving people towards trying to make all of their words sing floating around, whereas I feel that the words that fade into the background and carry the structural weight of a story are a lot more important than people tend to imagine.

[shweta_narayan]

and then there are times when you change the word for the exact shade of red in someone's dress when the description of said dress is just set dressing (or rhythmic punctuation).

Right, but while changing the word there is unlikely to change much about how readers envision the dress per se (or whether they even bother, consciously), that word is going to have associations to do with the tech level and origin and historical usage of the dye, to the extent the reader knows, so it will change other aspects of their image (using image more broadly than just visual). It may also have other cultural associations (scarlet, f'rex, with culturally unsanctioned sexual activity in women) and while little or none of this may become conscious unless it's hideously out of place, it's still going to modify the reader's experience

[timprov]

Some random thoughts:

Two-word disproof of Delany's premise: folk music.

I do tend to parse word-by-word, and I still think this is silly.

Several of Delany's peers proved definitively that style could in fact be divorced from content.

[alecaustin]

Several of Delany's peers proved definitively that style could in fact be divorced from content.

Heh.

Could you unpack the folk music point a bit?

[timprov]

Delany's point seems to be that stories that are distinguishable are distinct, and I would suggest that there are a couple hundred distinguishable versions of the story "Stagger Lee, what a loser, shot a guy for his hat" that are completely indistinct.

[alecaustin]

I suspect that Delany is taking an absolutist and determinist view wherein minute variations in verbal resonance and imagery count as "distinct" here.

My counter-argument seems to be that resonances that don't exceed a certain threshold of obviousness are going to be lost on nearly everyone, with the result that you describe.

[alecaustin]

Delany does seem to write novels like poetry, and I'd be the last person to argue with his results. I just don't think that his method is something that can healthily be used as a model by all and sundry.

My suspicion re: the importance of words is that some of us embody our texts to a certain extent as we composed and remember them? And that yes, individual words or phrases can be pivotal to *our* conception of the work, if not that of the reader.

The thing with inhaling paragraphs is that I know that my experience of reading like that wasn't (and isn't) always linear? I can't speak for anyone else, but often when I read a particularly brief line of dialogue, say,
"When it works," Mrs. Bereton said grudgingly.
I see 'grudgingly' and the dialogue tag first, and only then does my brain go back to unpack the dialogue proper

[redbird]

Speaking of argument by anecdote: I wonder whether the difference in ways of reading is connected to Delany's dyslexia.

Also: While the general argument may be sound, I don't think the word "The" creates an image at the beginning of the story. Nor do some other ordinary English words. Consider:

"There was a wall." That creates an image, very deliberately, but there's no image in my mind from "there" or "There was" or even "There was a." The noun is needed. (If the sentence had been "There was a stone wall," maybe some readers would first think "there was a stone" and envision one stone, large or small, before getting to the wall. But as written, it takes four words for that image to form.)

[alecaustin]

I was going to mention his dyslexia as an explanation for his peculiar description of the reading process, but I couldn't find where he'd mentioned it in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, and I try to cite my sources.

I agree with you quite strongly re: "There was a wall," which is where my claim that the phrase is the minimal unit of meaning in prose comes from. "There was a" is an empty grammatical structure in want of a subject (at least outside of dialogue or certain specific kinds of stunt-writing). "There was a wall" actually signifies.

(You can have phrases of a single word, of course, but not any word will do.)

[thanate]

Also of note is that readers will bring their own context, and (for instance) wander off into mental digressions such as the comparison to a recent conversation regarding presidential libraries and how the "high point" memory-wise of the Clinton administration had pretty much nothing to do with what was actually going on in terms of governing the country at the time. It is possible that I have had to go back and reread whole paragraphs due to this sort of thing... (not this time, but in the middles of perfectly nice books) which would definitely muck up a word-by-word progression, not to mention adding imagery that the author didn't think was there.

(My mental model is more based on making up the story as best I can, and then letting it go off and play in other people's brains, over which I have little control.)

[alecaustin]

Yes, precisely. The author has no control over what associations their reader will bring to a work, or an image, or a word or a phrase, which helps make the endeavor of controlling reader reactions especially futile. At best, we can try to manage the range of possible interpretations that a reasonable reader might come to.

[thanate]

So, given that as a fundamental difference of opinion... would you still recommend the book as worth reading?

[alecaustin]

Glib answer: Delany is always worth reading, if only to argue with!

More serious answer: I feel like approximately half the material in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw has either passed its expiration date or been overtaken by events? I mean, Delany displays a higher standard of scholarship and criticism (both in terms of coherence and readability) than you usually see in the field, but I'm not sure I can point to any one essay in the book and tell people "You have to read this!" The Alyx introduction has a very skewed sense of what Sword & Sorcery is, for example, while 'Letter to the Symposium on "Women in Science Fiction"' describes a world where sexism was, if not more prevalent than it is today, certainly far more overt in its virulence.

My personal recommendation would be to read About Writing first, if you haven't already, and see if you want more in that vein. If you do, I recommend poking at Shorter Views and The Jewel-Hinged Jaw to see which of those two speaks to you more.