One more brief interlude, then back to Summer Reading.
CLYDE
A friend recently told me he’d heard a successful writer of short fiction proclaim that there is no such thing in literature as foreshadowing. That someone believed this was not news to me; 25 years ago a colleague, also notorious for believing Beowulf had nothing to say to contemporary readers, told me the same thing, but I have never been able to see the notion as other than preposterous.
Set aside the famous case of “Chekhov’s Gun” (“no one should put a loaded gun on stage,” he said in a letter, “unless someone is thinking of firing it”). After all, he wrote it in a letter and it’s in Russian, two conditions that may not argue for divine authority.
But here’s my half-informed perspective. Can we assume, for practical reasons, sequence, at least in narrative. The story unfolds word by word, seemingly linear (and vertical, in English). Things don’t all happen at once in fiction. Sydney Carton has to get to France before he can be guillotined. Addie has to die before Anse can get those teeth. And yes, this is conventional. The Discovery Channel is staffed with people who’ll tell us that everything is happening right now. Still, are we also perceiving it all simultaneously? Too much work, so the fictioneer doles it out in portions, delivers according to this or that pace. Action, information. But also – and here’s where the convention of foreshadowing comes in – we have insinuation. Call it adumbration, if you like. Or Gumby. I call it seepage. Readers are not getting the goods (the emotional or political or intellectual bullion) laid out on a table like a patient etherized on a table. We have to observe and respond to connotative clusters and repeated morphemes and phonemes. Sort, arrange, discard, reorder, recover, remember. Little detective fanfare here, as the reader engages with the work and, quite curious to know what’s going to unfold, forms surmises, hypotheses, which evolve, some falling by the wayside, some gaining in persuasiveness. Suspects are eliminated, emotions rise or fall with the narrowing of options. After all, fiction depends on suspense. You don’t have to be James Lee Burke to understand that the reader has to be fed but denied, offered both momentum and resistance in a plan of not quite predictable reinforcement. I call it seepage.
To be nearly literal for a moment, what are all those early water images doing in The Mill on the Floss? Do they presage a flood, make the coming flood plausible, start the trickle? Or is the novel just a meditation on fluid mechanics? George knows what she’s doing, and she believes we dear readers know or suspect or hope, fear, expect that we’ve got an inkling, too. I think it’s about the conversation between author and reader where those inklings are sown, apprehended, seized, then clung to and employed or abandoned as other seeds crowd them out. The foreshadowings are the phrases sown (or bird-shat, those “wings”), cultivated and brought to flower in ways that matter to the characters and the reader. Seepage. And what’s all that water doing early on in The Virgin and the Gypsy? And just how many dams break with a gushing overflow as the novella reaches crescendo? Doesn’t matter what you call it. Name it Clyde, if you like, but it’s about setting the stage, nocking the arrow, then providing motivation for the reader to hold that set, that shaft in mind until the lights come up and the string is allowed to twang. Setting the stage credibly, mind you, in keeping with early premises and atmosphere, historical time, season, possibilities that bond to become probabilities.
Here’s an exercise: go through Joyce’s “The Dead” front to back, then back to front, and see if second time through you don’t see hints, keys, tips, whispers, traces whose presence helped you shape your expectations and move you forward, even when you barely registered them. Peripheral vision is important for a writer to stimulate and a reader to employ. The mind will herd it toward the center. Some whispers are crucial to the final discovery, imagery, snow on the river and the graves and all. Others were just temporary guides, but no less useful. They foreshadowed something intermediate rather than enterprises of great pith and moment.
And I don’t mean that foreshadowing is forecasting. That there are witches at the beginning of the Scottish play is foreshadowing. What they predict, even to concussed broadsword wielders, is forecasting, and when that happens in stories, it’s often misdirection. William Stafford wrote of the kindred sounds in a poem linking together and setting up the final music. He called it “a little touch-by-touch trail through the mountains.” A little seepage music, please.
Perhaps the real most suitable arena for conducting this discussion is not literature (or music; now there’s a country of careful, ingenious seepage) but in practical human discourse. Telling a story, making a rhetorically intricate argument delivering a sermon. We repeat and vary our themes in those (going literary again) microcosmic ways that prepare the field for what’s to be harvested.
But to contradict myself, sort of, maybe all these tactics are part of the sublime lyrical simultaneity of every work of art, All the King’s Men happening or just shimmering between the covers whether anybody reads it or not, and what some call “foreshadowings” are just part of the loop stitch of the text, not to be viewed in linear fashion. Let’s say I could go on like this, let’s even say I did, but I’ll spare us.
I’m not inclined to do much fencing over nomenclature, but I see a narrative tactic, feel certain it’s deployed consciously, even do it myself; I want a name, and Clyde will suffice. There are great and momentous briefs to be filed and cases to be argued on both pro and con and every nuance in between, so let the games begin. And perhaps I can be converted, convinced to swap sides and, as turncoats said they did during the Civil War, “swallowing the puppy,” but before that can transpire, somebody’s going to have to persuade me that, when Melville finished correcting his final proofs he didn’t grin (if grimly) a little about Ishmael “involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses” on page one and all that business about coffins and hearses in the last chapter, culminating in “the great shroud of the sea.” Seepage, foreshadowing? I think I’ll say “Clyde,” just to avoid ruffling feathers. But as for those who would dismiss foreshadowing as a fraud, a ghost or a failure of the bicameral mind, Horace had a phrase: Tu parem castis inimica mittes lucis. (In my ponied translation, “Send this enemy back to the woods with lightning speed.”)
