Counterfactuals

Counterfactual reasoning is an attempt to see what can be learned by assuming things otherwise than what they are. It’s an intellectually respectable game that can be played with almost any subject to see more deeply than we might have at first. In grammatical terms a counterfactual is a condition contrary to fact, and with language and literature, we might call it a contrary explication, where we begin by understanding an author’s original composition and then ask how that intended effect might have been different had other choices in construction been made.

Here are the first five sentences of James Joyce’s story “The Boarding House,” a short tale depicting the unsuspected complexity of human character which might lie beneath its ostensible intent, come to light here in Joyce’s story through the figures of the proprietress Mrs. Mooney, her daughter, and a young boarder. We may easily expect the eventuality which results, but we’re left wondering at the end whether maternal protection might not also at times be skeined with a secret (but loving?) scheme. Joyce blazes his story onto the page with a short, simple, and metaphorically foreshadowing sentence, followed by four more of interesting designs. Keep your eye on the sentence types (simple, compound, or complex) and the punctuation:

Mrs. Mooney was a butcher’s daughter. She was a woman who was quite able to keep things to herself: a determined woman. She had married her father’s foreman and opened a butcher’s shop near Spring Gardens. But as soon as his father-in-law was dead Mr. Mooney began to go to the devil. He drank, plundered the till, ran head-long into debt.

We remember that every clause, every combination of subject and predicate, expresses a thought. When a statement has only one such independent assertion, it constitutes a simple sentence, and the first sentence here serves to make a singular pronouncement of sorts, identifying the subject, Mrs. Mooney, with her slaying parentage. Obvious enough, but reading closely we should ask why Joyce does this, because he could have identified the subject with myriad other personal characteristics: her appearance, her health, her dreams, or hopes, or fears, and done so in a long and winding and inviting compound sentence. But he introduces her to us simply and directly as a butcher’s daughter, and expects us, no doubt, to hear certain overtones, whichever we may catch, and to anticipate other notes which will harmonize with them as the story proceeds. At the very least, the decisiveness of the sentence is to suggest Mrs. Mooney’s own.

Joyce’s second sentence employs a colon, and that too is worth thinking about. This mark of punctuation is meant to draw us up fast and sudden to the edge of an explanation or exemplification. The complex design of the sentence now asserts outright that being a determined woman is the result of Mrs. Mooney’s keeping things, quite ably, to herself; she is as decisive, we now know, as the arm of her butcher father. This second sentence, then, builds out from the first, to enlink three ideas—butchering, self-knowledge (of a sort), and determination—in depicting the story’s protagonist. We, of course, are meant to wonder why.

But how would that clear, swift picture have been different had Joyce composed the phrase after the colon as an expanded clause: She was a woman who was quite able to keep things to herself and she was determined to get what she wanted in life? The reference to life would have connected with the biographical details that follow in the third sentence smoothly enough, but changing the grammatical elements like this would have introduced another articulated thought altogether (every clause being a thought), and the assertion that she was determined would have simply reported another color of her character rather than implying, as it does in the short, concentrated phrase of the original, an impending consequence of that singular, though double-edged, trait.

And look at the last sentence of this passage. That one statement comprises three clauses, and there is no conjunction present to connect them. This rhetorical design is called asyndeton (the omission of conjunctions), and it has the effect of compressing, and thereby increasing the power of, each assertion. It works powerfully here because it rifles off the specific consequences of the immediately preceding sentence, that Mr. Mooney began to go to the devil. Had Joyce designed the sentence with the opposite technique called polysyndeton (the accumulation of conjunctions), the effect would have been weaker and out of keeping with the clear-cut picture he had been drawing: He drank and plundered the till and ran head-long into debt. That sentence sweeps where the original fires. Conjunctions always work logically, explanatorily, and including the conjunctions like this would have impeded the emotional power of the original three-shot sentence. The explicitness of this revision would have been patient with Mr. Mooney’s walk to the devil; Joyce’s original is tacitly censoring.

If we can learn to play this counterfactual game every once in a while with a passage we find compelling in its original, we can find our way both to a deeper appreciation of what an author accomplished and to more confidence in revising our own compositions. In any creative undertaking, imagination and reflection yield ideas to us, but the expression of those ideas, the shape and form we give them, is ours to cut and trim and join and polish. And to learn to do that, we must read closely.

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Another Short Course Coming in February

Joyce’s story, along with fours others by William Carlos Williams, Jean Stafford, H. L. Davis and Elizabeth Parsons we have looked at here in recent weeks, will be the last of the five we will be reading and discussing in an upcoming new offering of Writing Smartly’s four-week online short course called Reading Closely to Write. As in the past, we will examine each week the grammatical structure and stylistic design of sentences from one or two short stories written by celebrated authors. Each story averages about fifteen pages, and our effort will be to see more deeply into the meaning and implication of the author’s written composition.

The exact dates and time of the course will be set this week, but if you have questions in the meantime (or if you would like to express your intention to enroll), please email me directly at ultimo@writingsmartly.com.

I hope you can join us for a winter of close reading as we await the welcome of spring.

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