Appreciate for a moment the extravagant detail, or what we could call the involvement, of this description of a character in Katherine Anne Porter’s short story “Flowering Judas.” This is Braggioni, who waits every evening for Laura, to sing for her with his guitar:
Braggioni catches her glance solidly as if he had been waiting for it, leans forward, balancing his paunch between his spread knees, and sings with tremendous emphasis, weighing his words…. His mouth opens round and yearns sideways, his balloon cheeks grow oily with the labor of song. He bulges marvelously in his expensive garments. Over his lavender collar, crushed upon a purple necktie, held by a diamond hoop: over his ammunition belt of tooled leather worked in silver, buckled cruelly around his gasping middle: over the tops of his glossy yellow shoes Braggioni swells with ominous ripeness, his mauve silk hose stretched taut, his ankles bound with the stout leather thongs of his shoes.
Quite someone this Braggioni, whom Porter has drawn so fully for us here. Remember the obvious: that piece of paper Porter had on her desk or in the typewriter before her was blank when she began to write; Braggioni was alive in her mind, but it was up to Porter the writer to involve her character in a world—a world made up of things—which we, her readers, could recognize. She had to bring this conjured wooer to life on the page before us, and that she does by commanding this piece of detail and that to enflesh what she finds in her imagination for us to live with as well. Is Braggioni’s physique large or small? She doesn’t say outright, but she shows: a paunch so large it must be balanced, cheeks so bulbous they balloon, a grandiosity so great that this crooner doesn’t just swoon, but bulges. As the writer John Gardner says in his The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers (Vintage, 1991), “Vivid detail is the life blood of fiction…. The reader is regularly presented with proofs—in the form of closely observed details—that what is said to be happening is really happening.” This detailing proof, he says, is the cause of the verisimilitude that makes fiction work.
It is Porter’s last sentence of this passage, however, that catches and impresses our close attention, because that lengthy assertion combines even more ancillary detail about Braggioni in a sophisticated sentence structure which gives that detail an energetic presence. A first reading of those sixty words will highlight the outlines of the grammatical foundations: the preposition over occurs three times, establishing a parallel repetition of structure called anaphora, a design meant to secure and enforce the emotional overtones of what is being depicted. Unusual here, though, is the fact that these three prepositional phrases are separated not by two commas as one would expect, but by two colons (after hoop and after middle). Colons are generally used either to explain or to enumerate what they abut, but here, the two colons act as what engineers call a linear motor, which produces not the twisting energy of torque but an advancing, linear force. The result is that the energy of the ideas in the prepositional phrases gathers on itself and pushes one unobstructed up to the one main clause of the sentence, Braggioni swells with ominous ripeness. From that height, the sentence swoops down like a roller coaster through the remaining detail of his appearance and dress.
Where that one main clause is placed—midway through the sentence with subordinate elements before and after it—is the reason such a configuration is called a centered sentence. Not common, centered sentences both build up to and release a lot of energy in the form of detail, but in doing so they look for a requisite amount of attention and concentration from the reader to be successful. This, then, points to a general rule about composition which John Gardner also explains in his Art of Fiction. What we write, he says, must be
vivid and continuous—vivid because if we’re not quite clear about what it is that we’re dreaming, who and where the characters are, what it is that they’re doing or trying to do and why, our emotions and judgments must be confused, dissipated, or blocked; and continuous because a repeatedly interrupted flow of action must necessarily have less force than an action directly carried through from its beginning to its conclusion.
This passage of Katherine Anne Porter’s is a wonderful illustration of just how much attention to craft the serious writer gives to the work of composition and how much work that same serious writer expects from the serious reader. And work it is. We forget that sometimes—to our own unnecessary frustration when ideas don’t quickly flip from mind to page or page to mind. No first draft is a final draft, and sometimes we have to read again, as the writer certainly has to write again. The traditional adage has it that writing is rewriting. Perhaps reading is rereading, too.
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