Meander, Spiral, Explode. Jane Alison
follows is a brilliantly counterintuitive pause. All action in the story has stopped, and we are told instead what is not happening: what Anders doesn’t remember. Not his first lover and “the cordial way she had with his unit,” not his wife, not his daughter, not the sweet moments when he saw that he loved literature. The account of what Anders did not remember goes on for a page, and while we read, the story has frozen. Lots of text, but no event: the slowest narrative speed, a pause. But given what we are waiting for—to see what Anders does remember, and for the bullet to “do its work and leave the troubled skull behind”—I’m happy to sit suspended.
When the pause is over, we learn at last what Anders recalls, in a return to scenic treatment. But it’s the sort of scene that exists in memory, occupying an enchanted space in Anders’s altered brain-time: “This is what he remembered. Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects . . .” Do you hear that word heat? A single word, small as can be. But it takes up time: the long diphthong; the reconfiguration of my inner mouth to move from remembered to the opening H; another reconfiguration to move from that final t and onward. Heat. This single word slows me, creates a lull between the act of remembering and what’s remembered. This word clears a glade in the mind for the potent, lingering scene that will be Anders’s final memory and the end of his story.
Why have a menu of speeds? For illusion, economy, variety, of course. Also for magic and power. See the reader, paralyzed by a white page marked with tiny pictures. Only her eyes move, from cluster to cluster of letters, a dot or two, a curl, but in her brain: synaptic lightning, a whirring glade, heat.
PATTERNING WITH SPEEDS OR FLOW
Choosing different types or lengths of words, sentences, and speeds lets you design a narrative as variegated as a garden. But you can also create patterns with speeds, manipulating the story so that repetitions and rhythms emerge just below the surface. You can switch among narrated action, a reflective pause, speedy summary, more action, a curious gap, a pause for comment, and so on: you can make a pattern of flow and still-spots. Chandra’s story “Shakti” is a fine specimen of this.
VIKRAM CHANDRA’S “SHAKTI”
This long story from Love and Longing in Bombay is about Sheila Bijlani and her cheery ambition to rise socially, which means battling the old-world socialite Dolly Boatwalla. It’s a mini–mock epic told by gossiping men:
What you must understand about Sheila Bijlani is that she was always glamorous. Even nowadays, when in the corners of parties you hear the kind of jealous bitching that goes on and they say there was a day when she was nothing but the daughter of a common chemist-type shopkeeper growing up amongst potions and medicines, you must never forget that the shop was just below Kemp’s Corner. . . . [S]he saw the glittering women who went in and out of the shop, sometimes for aspirin, sometimes for lipstick, and Sheila watched and learnt a thing or two.
Two pages of chatty summary follow Sheila as she becomes a hostess for Air France, marries unlikely, sweaty Bijlani, who manufactures “mixies” (blenders), and lands in a huge apartment on Malabar Hill. “So now Sheila was on the hill, not quite on the top but not quite at the bottom, either, and from this base camp she began her steady ascent. . . . [T]he top of the hill was the Boatwalla mansion, which stood on a ridge surrounded by crumbling walls.”
Clear lines. Sheila belongs to a world of mixies and airplanes: newness, fluidity, ascent. Dolly, atop the hill, belongs to crumbling walls and old freighters (she is a “kind of stately ship”). A battle will rage between women and social classes, and it will last years, from a snubbing to a blackballing, to the founding of an exclusive club, to a marriage proposal to a buyout effort, and at last to a marriage-merger. Chandra could sum up all incidents in a few sentences, or give each incident full scenic treatment. Neither would be smart. Instead, he gives each element its due time on the page. He shows scenes that are truly dramatic, where something happens that we must see, and intersperses them with summary, gaps, and so on. Good pacing. But the variations in speed over forty pages also reveal two patterning systems that help give the story motion and form.
I see the first system in the content of the scenes. Each (insulting) act meets a counteract: attack A, counterattack A’, attack B, counterattack B’. This system of retribution has a larger parallel in the social rectification going on throughout the story: the Sheilas of India will rise, and what helps Sheila do this is her ability also to “descend”: unlike Dolly, she is empathetic to the woman who works for her, Ganga, who’s on a far lower stratum but will repay a favor of Sheila’s with an even greater one. Like the airplane that would be her attribute were she painted as a goddess or saint, Sheila can fly up and down. Dolly can only glide on a level. This first pattern, then, is a system of balances.
But when I look through content and instead chart the shifts among speeds, I find another kind of patterning. At the story’s key moments, after a dramatic scene comes a nearly still spot. Dolly snubs Sheila in a vivid scene, and then Sheila “sat in her office among the books and tried to think about what she had felt at that moment. It hadn’t been anger, more a kind of recognition,” which she parses for a paragraph. We watch her think—time passes—but it is slowed, making this a dilation, and one the narrative’s health needs. An incident happens and then is pondered, its deeper sense revealed. A comparable still-spot comes pages later, once Sheila has delivered a crafty snub to Dolly, again in real time. After this friction, narrative and reader need a chance to recover, and we get this in a relaxed description from a safe distance. This pairing of drama with stillness soon happens again, and here the story’s flow is not reflective so much as compressed, an inward rage that would look motionless from outside. Sheila wants to crush the Boatwallas. She’s thinking about money, but the image is apt: “she saw how it could be like a stream, unpredictable and underground, and she was going to turn it into a torrent that would flow up the hill instead of down, crumbling the bloody Boatwalla gate like paper. It was going to burst out of the hillside under the mansion like a fountain from the interior rock.” Later, sleepless,
[s]he could see the shapes of the companies they owned, how they fit together, and she moved the segments against one another like the pieces on a chessboard, looking for the nuance that would give them the edge. . . . Again she tried to sleep, but now it was only the zeros that spun before her, symmetrical and unchanging. Shunya shunya shunya, the words came to her in her father’s high voice teaching her some forgotten childhood lesson: shunya is zero and zero is shunya. She felt very tired.
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