Asides and Digressions

 LitHub published Peter Turchi on the Power of the Literary Aside In Praise of the Unexpected Path, and I thought it worthwhile to make note of it here. I like digressions; probably because I am prone to them.

But fiction has an emotional component, one that often requires sidestepping the rational, disguising “the point” or the path to it. Humor and suspense depend on indirection, on the calibration of expectation and surprise, and they aren’t the only effects best achieved by taking an unexpected path.

Digression is defined as a turning away or wandering from the main path of a journey. One could argue that The Canterbury Tales consists almost entirely of digressions, if one sees the main path as the journey of Chaucer’s characters from London to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at the Canterbury Cathedral. To pass the time, they agree to a storytelling contest. If these were properly devout pilgrims, their conversation along the way should be incidental. But Chaucer makes the incidental the substance.

At the same time, because the narrative spine is the progression of the journey, he can do whatever he wants with the ribs. The traveler’s tales are varied and, at least potentially, unpredictable, with no obligation to build on or respond to one another. The Canterbury Tales, like Mark Twain’s “The Story of the Old Ram,” is an example of curated digression. Chaucer’s pilgrims get sidetracked in all sorts of ways, but Chaucer knows where he wants to take us, what he wants to show us not only in the individual tales, but in what they reveal about their tellers, and in how other characters respond.

I wonder if the cetology parts of Moby Dick are not another example of a digression. On the other hand, I cannot think of a digression in Hemingway. Although I still have not read Tristram Shandy, I understand it is a very long digression. Finally, how many digressions are there in Don Quixote?

As for asides, I recall the narrator doing this in Vanity Fair, but also a lack in Hemingway:

Asides are essentially shorter digressions—as short as a word or a phrase, as long as a paragraph. While a digression might lead the reader to wonder when or even if we’ll return to the apparent path of our narrative journey, an aside is more of a pause, or momentary diversion. Asides tend to take on a strategic function if and when they accumulate. As we’ll see, their function can be tonal and rhythmic, they can amplify one or more aspects of the narrative voice, they can characterize, and they can even serve to underscore a story’s central movement.

While a story’s narrator is most often the source of asides—as in Jane Austen, Henry Fielding, Jorge Luis Borges, and David Foster Wallace—they can also be a function of character. In “Some Other, Better Otto” Deborah Eisenberg uses asides, initially, for comic effect. Otto is an attorney specializing in intellectual property rights. The particular nature and tone of Otto’s nitpicking establish aspects of his character. As soon as we meet him, on the story’s first page, Otto complains about an impending Thanksgiving dinner he’s agreed to attend. His partner, William, responds indirectly: “I was reading a remarkable article in the paper this morning about holiday depression … Should I clip it for you? The statistics were amazing.” Otto responds by attacking William’s word choices: “The statistics cannot have been amazing, the article cannot have been remarkable, and I am not ‘depressed.’ ” A few pages later, repetition encourages us to see Otto’s focus on diction as a habitual defensive strategy. He and William are discussing the need to visit Otto’s sister Sharon and make an effort to persuade her to go to the dinner.

I can think of another teacher of the aside, probably where I first heard it used, long ago when I was a child:

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Fromn LitHub on 1/30/2023 came Reading Tristram Shandy in an Age of Distraction:

Sterne denies us the narrative order on which we usually rely to differentiate fiction from the messiness of our everyday thinking. His work refuses to behave itself: the story is, as Tristram puts it, “digressive, and […] progressive too, -and at the same time.” The plot of Tristram Shandy is the act of plot-making and the eccentric Tristram delights in his restless creation, telling us that the work is a “machine” that shall “be kept a-going.” Surveying the many cogs of his tale, Tristram is confident that his work can sustain itself indefinitely by turning over its own infinite possibilities.

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Our lives today exist in multiple dimensions: the present, the past, and online. Sterne’s novel might help us to make sense of this tangle. Reading Tristram Shandy for the third time, I realized that my previous frustration was not a failure to understand the book. Sterne’s digressions are both rich and unsatisfying in equal measure, as any surfeit of information must be. But whilst trawling the internet often leaves me drained or feeling numbed by variety, Sterne’s novel invigorates as it overwhelms.

Like a painting with multiple points of perspective, or a piece of music in raucous polyphony, it draws the reader back, entering again through a fresh act of attention. Tristram keeps his story “a-going” by refusing to satisfy his readers and, for this reason, it continues to startle me with its vitality. In denying the neat frame of narrative time, Sterne’s novel chimes with how the world feels to me now: indefinite, uncertain, but charged with possibility.

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