True Craziness- The Author Is Driven To Confess

Today's GLAWS Writer's Group encouraged this. Please forgive me.

A perfect paragraph:

Cocklepickers.  They waded a little way in the water and, stooping, soused their bags, and lifting them again, waded out. The dog yelped running to them, reared up and pawed them, dropping on all fours, again reared up at them with mute bearish fawning. Unheeded, he kept by them as they came towards the drier sand, a rag of wolf’s tongue redpanting from his jaws. His speckled body ambled ahead of them and the loped off at a calf’s gallop. The carcass lay on his path.  He stopped, sniffed, stalked round it, brother, nosing closer, went round it, sniffing rapidly like a dog all over the dead dog’s bedraggled fell. Dogskull, dog sniff, eyes on the ground, moves to one great goal. Ah, poor dogsbody. Here lies poor dogbody’s body.
- Tatters! Out of that, you mongrel.

Page 46, Ulysses- James Joyce, Random House 1961, 4^th printing.

Joyce did not use quotation marks. The dash means it’s a line of dialog.

In old grammar books, a paragraph is defined as:

1.       A topic sentence

2.       Exposition, expanding that topic statement

3.       Antithesis,  the opposite view or argument

4.       Conclusion

Since this is fiction writing rather than expository –essay writing, we must show not tell.  So if you are interested in using this structure, then you have use it with physical symbols that will act out the same dynamic  as an expository paragraph would.

Joyce starts us off with just telling us who they are & what they are doing. “Cocklepickers”  The previous paragraph described a man & woman and the dog coming down the beach, leading the viewer, narrator to decide here what they are doing.  We are given the dynamics of the two and their dog. The two are looking for cockles; the dog is trying to engage them without success. The dog is very active, very excited, very alive. It encounters its opposite, the carcass of the dead dog, reacts to it, even gets emotional about it as Joyce sort of implies the dog’s interior monologue with the “Here lies poor  dogsbody’s body “  which could be the viewer trying to imagine what the dog is thinking or the narrator giving us the dog’s actual thought processes.  Here is the antithesis. The Conclusion is the owner of the dog telling it to get away from it, a combination of the dynamic between them and at the same time acknowledging life and death simultaneously.

If you look at the description of the dog before it finds the dead dog, all of details demonstrate how alive and active the dog is.

So we are given the tension between the two people and their dog, how it plays out with its experience of its opposite- a dead ownerless dog- and the result. All of the description is tied to the logic of the paragraph structure.

This is all combined with Joyce’s ear for the language, matching the cadence of the words with what is occurring and his willingness to play with convention and communicate with the notion that meaning is strung over the words like icing on a cake.

There are variations upon this structure.  Faulkner will use this very same structure over a page and ½ of narrative and dialog with several paragraph like separations.  There are certain passages in Hemingway where the reader creates the part of the structure that is missing because Hem could make his reader do that. This structure is all through Joyce’s books (I’ve never been able to do Finnegan’s Wake, so I can’t speak to that), all of Faulkner’s, John Gardner, early Ray Bradbury,  James Agee,  Virginia Woolf, Thoreau.  I have always meant to do more of a survey of other authors, but this understanding gave me my own style and no one really wanted to hear me talk about how I write.  The paragraph above,  I tell people who want to listen, is seamless (like Jesus’ robe) – you cannot see the logic. Joyce was the most conscious of writers in the 20^th century. He knew 7 or 8 languages, had read everything and included every nuance and every literary forbearer in Ulysses.  http://www.amazon.com/James-Joyces-Ulysses-Stuart-Gilbert/dp/0394700139 is the book to read if you want to tackle Ulysses.  You should read Homer, Dante,  & Rabelais as well.    

You can use the same structure for building structure for sections of dialog between characters.  I am asking for an overview reaction to the play, because I will be trying to apply this structure to the dialog on the second draft and detail critiquing at this point won’t help if I restructure a ½ page of dialog to meet a logic criteria.  I’ve been working this way the last 25 years- and you see where it’s gotten me.

I gave up years ago trying to convince folks this was a valid approach. An editor friend suggested that a paragraph was the amount of words that fit on her computer screen at one time.

The best description of a paragraph I’ve heard is: imagine a dog lapping water.