Genre Language; Syntax's Meaning

This one is for writers.

As well as notes for myself. 

I know the kind of language for hard-boiled detectives. Who doesn't? There is Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross MacDonald, and Robert B. Parker for those needing examples.

I learned there is a language for speculative fiction from The Speculative Aesthetic: How Language Communicates Genre By Devon Halliday (CRAFT). This I admit missing in my reading, but Halliday's examples make sense.

There’s nothing more conventional or real-world than the weather. In her speculative novel Duplex, Kathryn Davis describes a rainstorm as follows: “Often it happened that the world’s water got sucked aloft and came down all at once as rain.” What I love about this sentence is how Davis frames realism in speculative terms: she captures the real-world feeling of being caught in a sudden rain (as if all the world’s water is suddenly bearing down on you), but she does so with a vastness and a vagueness that feel speculative. “Often it happened” has a haziness akin to “once upon a time”—a fabulist unwillingness to commit to a timeline. The image of the world’s water getting sucked aloft seems plausibly in keeping with the alien powers at work in this speculative world, a world in which “the blue-green lights of the scows, those slow-moving heralds of melancholy, would begin to appear in the night sky.” Simile is eschewed for metaphor; it’s not “as if” the world’s water is getting sucked up into the sky, it’s actually happening, an assertion that blurs the limits of the world we’ve just entered.

So, if I might quickly sum up the emergent techniques of the “speculative aesthetic,” I’d include: agency and intent imparted to the story’s natural world or environment, sweeping yet vague assertions, metaphor in place of simile, and chaotically mixed imagery....

***

Added to our growing list of speculative techniques, then, is the division of setting into an inside (enclosed, stymying, inescapable) and an outside (tantalizing, unknowable, infinite). We have this sense at the beginning of Duplex, as the story zeroes in on a particular suburban street, and even as the edges of the setting expand, we return (and the characters return) to the street as the focal point of all that follows. The characters aren’t technically trapped, and yet they never manage to stray too far from the original street, continually corralled back inside the neighborhood, as if they would soon run out of oxygen anywhere else.

We begin to arrive at a preliminary list of craft choices that “feel speculative,” or that serve as markers of the speculative aesthetic: active, conscious, agentive setting; lyrical and contradictory imagery; metaphor presented as possible truth; impermeable boundaries separating the inside world from the outside world; and juxtaposition of the tangible with the sweeping and universal. Though this list is rather broad, and not necessarily confined to speculative stories, I’m interested in how it might be put to practical use. Some speculative stories announce their absurdities right out of the gate. But others begin in the real world, or seem to, only to gradually reach some speculative twist, some decisive threshold crossed between the real and the impossible. How can these latter stories avoid the reader critique that the speculative twist comes out of nowhere, or fails to feel plausible? The answer might be to write even the real-world mundanities of the story in the speculative aesthetic, so that the story feels off-kilter and atmospheric and slippery long before anything officially speculative needs to happen. 

 I swear German screwed up my syntax. That excuse may be getting thin since my last German class was around May of 1978. What really troubles my syntax is that I am talking in my head while I am typing, and I might not be paying enough attention. Well, that's why there is revision.

Brian Patrick Eha's I Sing the Electric Body essays the issues with syntax.

If a change of style is a change of subject, as Wallace Stevens averred, then a change of syntax is a change of meaning. Word order is, if not all, then nine tenths. I exaggerate, but I do so advisedly, as a corrective to the overemphasis on word choice, the unjust rule of the mot juste (recall here the old saying about the difference between lightning and a lightning bug) that dominates, to the detriment of other concerns, contemporary literature and creative writing. At times, this passion for the right—or the unusual—word reaps dividends; at others, it merely produces an uncalled-for flood of verbed nouns, portmanteaus, adjectives wrenched out of joint.

So in verse or prose you might find a sentence like “The jackdaw raises its head from the feeder, slipstreams away”—where that unusual verb, divorced from its usual meaning, is used in novel fashion to suggest fluidity of movement, speed. Or take the opening of “Pulse,” a short story recently published in The New Yorker: “He footed off his shoes, the logs balanced on an arm, and tugged the door shut.” Novelty is fine (so long as it’s not mistaken for originality), but it is hardly the only way to catch the reader’s eye, or, hold her attention. Word order all by itself can make a sentence new.

***

One of the most common syntactical cock-ups is the misplaced or dangling modifier. “Having been accused of taking bribes to steer research, Harvard University has suspended Professor Jane Doe.” See the problem? It is, presumably, the professor who has been taking bribes, not the university, yet the word order suggests otherwise. This sort of mistake crops up everywhere; the preceding sentence is my own invention, but I could easily have pulled similar examples from mass-circulation magazines, online media, wire services, or newspapers of record. This is how a New York Times writer recently described the 1998 film Dark City: “Set in a noirish metropolis, where the sun never sets and its citizens cannot recall their pasts, humankind is ruled by mysterious telekinetic beings.”

I might take refuge in others sinning as I do, if my eyes were not bulging at the idea of what does get published. There are times I have fought myself over dialog (rarely do I have qualms about ripping out stupid narrative text) where I want the speaker to sound distinctive. I usually come down on the side of change - I am not sure that what I am trying to do will be understood by an editor.

Eha gives an example of good syntax:

We might look profitably, first, at the famous opening of Ulysses: “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed.” Joyce’s unerring eye and ear give this sentence a feeling of inevitability such as few others possess, so much so that (though I checked my work to be sure) I was able to copy it out from memory, verbatim. Is it the word choice? Partly. But even without altering a single word or committing a gross offense against grammar, we can easily muck things up....

I leave with this paragraph as a reminder to myself:

To begin a sentence is to launch into the void—I wanted “launch voidward” here but was too chicken—and syntax plays a large role in determining whether, plummeting toward the sentence’s end like a parachutist, you come to rest violently or serenely, with a broken leg or with a smile on your face. And for that matter, syntax does a great deal to determine what the descent itself is like, whether the peregrine’s killing stoop or the autumn leaf’s timorous fall.

sch 9/6