Suzanne Batty, "Jesus on a Train from Mumbai"

unity and effect

 

"Jesus on a Train from Mumbai" is found here.

 

First lines:
I was dragged from the train by English tourists as the tall man
from Tamil Nadu called “coffee coffee” in his soft, sad voice.

 

Words coordinated in a poetic way create an effect when read. I am not talking about an emotional effect. Emotional effects are simple effects simply evoked by the narration itself. As the saying goes, a puppy can bite your ear and you will experience an emotion. We are talking about something a little more sophisticated than that. We are talking about an aesthetic effect. And not every combination of words creates an aesthetic effect. A brute narrative, a tale that offers merely what happened in the sequence that it happened, will offer no aesthetic value whatsoever. Thus: words coordinated in a poetic way. Which does not mean I am only talking about verse. And which also does not mean that all verse is poetic.

Take a look at these well-known lines by William Carlos Williams, "The Red Wheel Barrow":

so much depends upon   a red wheel barrow   glazed with rain water   beside the white chickens

We begin with its physical characteristics. Four stanzas, each with two line, the first, three words, the second, one. Each stanza is its own thought, though the four combine to a more complex thought. As well, it is worth noticing that the two lines of each stanza break in between two words that go together: depends/upon, wheel/barrow, rain/water, white/chickens. It creates an aural effect because the verse is asking you to stop where you would not normally want to. The verse fights against a reading that would string the words together into a single sentence, even though it is a sentence. It fights against the words being read like:

So much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

Every phrase is brought forward and made important, especially the first line of every stanza. (Can you hear how the second line reads almost like an unstressed syllable?) The verse is structurally organized in a way that creates an effect beyond what the words themselves, in their semantic relations, would create.

And then there is the meaning making. There is an opposition: the red wheelbarrow, the white chicken. That opposition gives strength to each side. The red is made the more red for it being compared to the white of the chickens. So also is the white made more white for being compared to the red of the wheel barrow. Yet it is carried even further by the structure of the poem. Each element has its own stanza, and in those two stanzas the most important words are red and white, given even more emphasis by how the lines are broken. For it all. the red is very red, and the white is very white.

It is the wheel barrow, though, that is our focus. For it is not merely so brilliantly red, it is also "glazed with rain / water." Glazed: for the water, the wheel barrow is made even more visually attractive. And it is rain water, which, being of nature, amplifies it that much more. The poem would not work so well if it was "glazed with hose / water."

And what are we doing with this visually pleasing wheel barrow? We are recognizing that "so much depends / upon" it. A physical effect is given philosophical resonance: so much depends upon that a thing can be beautiful. That a thing can be made beautiful by its situation and context. And if we dare to take it one more step out, with this a verse that very much makes you aware that you are reading verse: so much depends on that words, organized in the right way, can be beautiful.

The poem is a unified whole. Every part works with each other, every part works to the generating of the whole. Importantly, every part works to the creation of an effect that is generated by the whole and its coordinated parts. Something has been made that is outside its parts, and that is greater than the sum of those parts.

In opposition, let's look at this short verse – and I am intentionally choosing very short verses – by Richard Wilbur, called "The Shallot."

The full cloves Of your buttocks, the convex Curve of your belly, the curved Cleft of your sex –   Out of this corm That's planted in strong thighs The slender stem and radiant Flower rise.

Starting again with the physical elements, there are two stanzas divided in subject: the first stanza identifies the midsection of the woman, the second stanza identifies that which is above. That first stanza is a list of three elements broken across four lines. I question if the structure is in error, and whether the stanza would be better with a stronger parallelism, following that which was started by the first line and a half:

The full cloves Of your buttocks, the convex curve Of your belly, the curved cleft Of your sex –

It is something of an issue of weight. It seems in the way Wilbur breaks the lines, too much strength is given to the adjectives, and the nouns and following prepositional phrases are left to trail behind as kind of necessary afterthoughts. The nouns, though, are doing as much work as the adjectives in the text, and I do not believe they should be separated. Just a gut reaction, though. In truth, I do not find the stanza strong enough for either way to greatly stand out.

As for the second stanza, there is not much to speak about it, except he again is breaking a two word phrase at the end. And part of the reason there is nothing exceptional about the structure is because there is, really, nothing exceptional about the meaning making. Except for the word cloves, the first stanza is straightforward identification: there is the buttocks, and the belly, and the sex. Nothing interesting is being done there except that that word cloves brings the idea of the botanical into that list. But that is the verse: it is a comparison of something botanical to something anatomical. And when you look at stanza two, the verse is simply continuing that movement. The midsection of the woman is identified with the corm of the shallot, and out of that corm rises but a "slender stem" and a "radiant flower."

The verse is absolutely mechanical. As a whole, it is nothing more than saying A is like B. It takes eight lines to describe how a woman's body is like a shallot, but does nothing with that perfunctory comparison. No greater idea rises therefrom. The coordination of the words is hardly more than a grammatical exercise, with a little line breaking thrown in.

Consider this opposition:

Williams is offering the reader an aesthetic experience. Wilbur is only offering information.

 

What we are describing is aesthetic unity. To go to Harmon and Holman's definition of unity in A Handbook to Literature (7th ed.),

The concept that a work shall have in it some organizing peinciple to which all its parts are related so that the work is an organic whole. A work with unity is cohesive in its parts, complete, self-contained, and integrated. [. . .] A work may [. . .] be unified [. . .] by any means that can so integrate and organize its elements that they have a necessary relation to one another and an essential relation to the whole of which they are parts. (emphasis mine)

I emphasize the word organic as it may be the most important word therein. Only an organic text can find unity. Only in the lyrical and mythic. Blunt narrative, documentary texts, and the like, generally do not have unity. Indeed, the closer a text moves to straight reportage – the farthest into the prosaic that can be had – the more there is the impossibility of unity. Not difficulty, but impossibility. Note here also, the prosaic need not be prose, and Wilbur's little verse is wholly prosaic.

While it is important to point out that unity and organicism walk hand in hand, I am not here going to dwell on the idea of the organic text. I just wanted to put the word in your head. My main point, here, is merely to get to the idea that unity resides in the poetic side of literature, not the prosaic. Indeed, to write a poetic text is by definition to write a unified text, to whatever degree of success.

Of course, it is easiest to create unity in a small verse. Though, perhaps something as miniature as "The Red Wheel Barrow" presents but a different set of difficulties than something slightly longer. I would say it is a little more difficult in a short story. After all, in most shorts you are creating out of a narrative framework, and the mechanical playing through of narrative works against poetic unity. Though that was Poe's aim and purpose: everything in the story worked to creating a singular, intense, impression. James sought organic unity in the novel. Though, at such a large size, the nature of that unity might be different than with "The Red Wheel Barrow." Poe argued unity could only be found in the length of a single sitting of reading, half an hour, I believe. And Eliot speaks how a very long poem must by needs be broken up by moments of mechanical action, to wit, getting everyone from the dining room to the parlor. But, that said, one can argue Beckett's The Unnameable is a unified work, without such breaks. And perhaps the same can be said for Burroughs's Naked Lunch, even for its episodic nature. You enter into an experience with that book that does not break between the episodes. One can call The Waste Land episodic, but it absolutely offers the reader a unified experience, if a complex one. And unity should not ever be conflated with simplicity.

We are here focused on verse, and with such, unity pretty much equates to the single impression, the single organic experience. Presenting two experiences – assuming they do not meld into a different single experience – would split a verse in two, reveal internal instability, an internal dichotomy, the verse at odds with itself.

Consider, then, Suzanne Batty's "Jesus on a Train from Mumbai." Does this verse present a unified experience, or is it at odds with itself? I am going to ignore the physical characteristics, because this verse pays no real attention thereto. There is not much crafting of verse form going on here, if any. We are offered but sentences arbitrarily cut into long lines and two-line stanzas. So let's just stick to ideation. Note right off that this verse is loosely structured by way of narrative. Do not, however, let that narrative pull you away from that which is being strung together therewith.

The first sentence (they are long lines, so I cannot keep them from wrapping):

I was dragged from the train by English tourists as the tall man from Tamil Nadu called "coffee coffee" in his soft, sad voice.

The narrative is begun, the initial conditions are presented. I question whether "as the tall man" should be "while the tall man," but that is beside the point. Next sentence:

They had been to too many temples, mistaken the pigeon-feeding ritual for a message from god.

This is, actually, internally contradictory. The first half speaks of that temples were not important to them because they had been to too many. Yet the second half says that one of the temples absolutely was important, because they received a message from god, even if, from the narrator's viewpoint, that message was a mistaken interpretation. Why does this internal contradiction happen? The usual cause is that "for a message from god" was used because it sounds profound (even if, again, falsely profound), it sound poetic. Blatty went for a poetic "pow" but didn't pay attention and accidentally undercut herself. Notice, though, it sounds like poetry. But let's move on to sentence three, where we get into the meat of the matter.

All they wanted was for me to sing songs   altered by death but when I opened my mouth I vomited water hyacinth— they beat me with metal rods from London buses, whilst the school boy bird   whistled outside.

The first phrase – "All they wanted was for me to sing songs" – starts off fine. It raises the question of why the English want the narrator to sing songs, but in the condensed forms of verse such a question can be answered by the question itself: they want the narrator to sing songs because the narrator is such a person that sings songs, otherwise they would not be asking. But they are to be songs "altered by death" – which, after sentence two, prompts the question: Is this phrase just another attempt at faux, poetic profundity? Then comes "but when I opened my mouth I vomited water hyacinth," which has nothing to do with nothing. Nor the following about beating with rods, nor that they would, somehow, come from London buses, nor the "school boy bird." We have four elements that – beyond that they connect together grammatically and narratively – have nothing to do with the initial set up, and nothing to do, really, with each other. Such a sentence very much sounds like something from contemporary verse; but, does it generate any form of unity?

And so it continues:

Women wrapped in blankets came to view me, carrying boulders on their heads to mend the roads.

More discontinuity.

Verse like this is popular nowadays. (And perhaps we have John Ashbery to thank for that. But he will have to wait for a future post.) Such verse creates the illusion of being poetical, a false feeling that something special is happening. But it wholly lacks unity. It is a string of sentences, a string of phrases, and once a phrase is passed there is no need to keep it in mind. Again, there is the narrative line on which the phrases and sentences hang; but, as said, narrative does not in itself generate unity.

Now, you may say, what about The Waste Land or Naked Lunch and their being broken into episodes? Is this not the same thing, only the episodes are much smaller? Except that these episodes are so small they no longer participate in meaning making. Does the phrase "songs altered by death" have any real meaning? You can take the various episodes of The Waste Land and Naked Lunch and show how they are all pointing toward commonalities, how they build upon each other, how they all work to a generated shared effect. With such as Blatty's verse, however, it is just a string of thoughts that pass by – in the shallowest of manners – that but sound poetic. That is: It does not read poetic, it only sounds it. There is nothing being generated as you move from one phrase to the next. And that is all the reader is asked to do: move from one to the next.

When they judged me   bloody enough, we went for chai at a shack by the roadside, a statue of St. George in a glass case spoke.

A return to the idea of narrative, but the statue, again, has nothing to do with nothing. I have to ask a very simple question: Why is it in the verse? Is there an answer beyond "that's what came to mind next"?

There is no need in continuing through Batty's verse, as I have made my point. And if you read on you will see how phrases – that sound pretty and poetic – are trotted out one after another, without any effort made toward generating a whole, generating an effect – other than the same effect one gets looking out the window of moving vehicle, only without anything passed by having any great significance. There are no moments of "that's a beautiful scene"; there are only instances of "skinny dogs," "model trains," "dead kingfishers," moments so brief and insubstantial they exist only as shallow, meaningless, transience. Things on which nothing depends.

There is no unity, there is no single impression, there is, I would argue, no real impression at all. There is no generated effect, except for that it sounds poetic. Lots of "poetic" phrases that doesn't seem to add up to much. And that is the ultimate question here: What does it add up to?