Actors will talk about breaking the fourth wall, by which they mean disregarding the imaginative belief that their character is living and moving within its own world, and that we the audience are watching it all from a point outside that dramatic stage world. It’s an odd notion to think about, needing the sophisticated agreements we adults live under to be successful. Unlike us, young children have been known to yell to an actor from their seats, telling him where on stage to find that stash of loot his character has been looking for. Ironically, we adults are the ones alive in the imaginary world while those children want in on our realism.
With all that in mind, let’s look for a moment at the opening passages of two stylistically very different short stories and see how easy and how difficult it can be at times to enter an imaginary world. The first example begins Nelson Algren’s short story “A Bottle of Milk for Mother,” published in 1941. Algren was an American author of the last century whose language and stories grittily depicted urban life and its very realistic characters. His story opens like this:
Two months after the Polish Warriors S.A.C. had had their heads shaved, Bruno Lefty Bicek got into his final difficulty with the Racine Street police. The arresting officers and a reporter from the Dziennik Chicagoski were grouped about the captain’s desk when the boy was urged forward into the room by Sergeant Adamovitch, with two fingers wrapped about the boy’s broad belt: a full-bodied boy wearing a worn and sleeveless blue work shirt grown too tight across the shoulders; and the shoulders themselves with a loose swing to them.
Those two sentences, the first relatively short and the second by any measure long, are built with only two subordinate clauses (after…had had their heads shaved and when the boy was urged forward) and only one abstract noun (difficulty). The latter device, of preferring concrete nouns to abstract, is no doubt what accounts for the grainy objectivity of the passage (and the story in full) and the ease with which most readers will enter its world. We recognize these characters and the scene they are creating, and in that recognition we comprehend without too much hesitation where we are in the world and what is about to go on. Important to this easy acceptance is our conviction that we already know this place and what’s possible in it, and Algren’s style will not overturn our familiarity.
Contrast that opening now with this one by Henry James, the great American novelist writing here in the year 1900. His short story “The Tree of Knowledge” begins like this:
It was one of the secret opinions, such as we all have, of Peter Brench that his main success in life would have consisted in his never having committed himself about the work, as it was called, of his friend Morgan Mallow. This was a subject on which it was, to the best of his belief, impossible with veracity to quote him, and it was nowhere on record that he had, in the connexion, on any occasion and in any embarrassment, either lied or spoken the truth.
Here again are two sentences, but their structure (and our reception of them) is quite different from Algren’s. Where Algren states the subject of his first sentence (the concrete, proper noun Bruno Lefty Bicek) right at the head of the main clause, organizing our train of thought as we let ourselves be brought into an imaginary scene, James wants not to signal our eyes, but conjure our thoughts. The subject of his first sentence, it, is as the first word of the sentence placed, admittedly, in the strongest position possible in an English sentence; but the word it, the impersonal pronoun, cannot therefore name its meaning (its antecedent) until the sentence unfolds a bit and we come to the subordinate clause that his main success in life would have consisted in…. That is what the initial it means, and between those two points we must hold on to our attention as we pass through an aside (such as we all have), tumble around with a subjunctive in would have consisted, catch a gerund as the object of the preposition in (his never having committed himself), and not succumb to another descending aside (as it was called) before we feel something sure again in the concluding proper noun Morgan Mallow. And that’s just the first sentence. Look as closely at the second complex sentence with all its similar slowing subordination, and you’ll have immediate evidence for why such a periodic sentence is called periodic: it’s like (-ic) a winding (peri-) road (od).
Many of us—most of us—do not rise to James’s prose style any longer, in large measure because we have come of age in a fast world of obvious realities, the kind of world Algren is writing about. James, on the other hand, requires of us that same imaginative propensity and patience we are shushing those children in the theater for not having. But they want to be adults, and we, when we’re at the theatre or reading a story, want blessedly for a moment to return to their first world of imagination. But to enter there, we sometimes have to do what doesn’t come naturally anymore: put down what we know, expect the unfamiliar, wait to see meaning arise from it, and in the end let ourselves belong to it.
The English novelist John Cowper Powys, in his The Meaning of Culture, says that when we read literature properly, our “interior response…is allowed to sink into temporary passivity. We are…hypnotized by this alien mind. While we read our world is Balzac’s world, not ours; Henry James’ world, not ours; Herman Melville’s world, not ours.” And when we then put the story aside, we will find, he says, that we have “assimilated” the author’s style and point of view as we return to our conventional world, now the richer because we are filled with another’s awareness of things similar. All of which suggests that the study of language and literature might just be able to teach us that priceless childlikeness which will save us from the too familiar world.
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