We read works of literature both for their ideas and for the ways in which their authors convey those ideas to us. In his collection of essays entitled The Cutting of an Agate, the poet W. B. Yeats says that “it is not possible to separate an emotion or a spiritual state from the image that calls it up and gives it expression.” Art, in other words, embodies ideas, and we both read and write with greater satisfaction when we understand how a writer can craft an image.
The English author E. M. Forster, probably best known for his novels Howards End and A Room with a View, wrote as well a number of short stories, among them one entitled “The Eternal Moment.” A middle-aged British writer of some repute, Miss Raby, is sitting with her maid, Elizabeth, in the lounge of a grand hotel in the Alps as the author waits for a friend. After explaining this setting as a new scene begins, Forster then has this sentence to just perfectly draw the distinction between the two Edwardian characters, lady and lady’s maid:
So Miss Raby had afternoon tea, while Elizabeth behaved like a perfect lady over an ice, occasionally turning the spoon upside down in the mouth when she saw that no one was looking.
That is vital imagery at work, and it carries its picture to us not through any particularly sophisticated rhetorical design, but by means of a simple, homely, specific image: turning the spoon upside down in the mouth. Worlds collide in respectable opposition: a spoonful sufficient for a lady is insufficient, it seems, for a lady’s maid. An expressive image illustrative of Yeats’s tenet: our emotions and states—our consciousness—arise on the flight of images, here at full thrust despite the absence of any directing subordinating conjunction. Imagine how quickly this sentence would descend had it read although she occasionally turned the spoon…. Much too logically explicit for the image to take flight.
Another passage in the same story illustrates this time how the materiality of the sentence will do yeoman’s work to carry the picture to us. Here, Miss Raby is sitting at a table outside an inn, and a waitress with a tray has arrived to suggest that the distinguished lady might wish to find a seat elsewhere, away from the “lower classes” who regularly eat where she is seated. Gently but sarcastically Miss Raby asks how long the waitress has been classifying her guests “according to their birth”:
For many years, it was necessary, replied the admirable woman. She returned to the house full of meat and common sense….
This bright shot of human character, a character combining present necessity with practical wisdom, is taken through a rhetorical lens called zeugma, a figure of speech which syntactically connects two words of different connotations. Here, both meat and common sense are objects of the preposition of. That adverbial phrase is meant to explain in what way, or accompanied by what, the waitress returned to the house full. The discrepancy comes between the corporeality of meat and the intellectuality of common sense, both of which, however, at times like the present are necessary and practical. The term zeugma, a Greek noun meaning a bond or tie, is related to our nouns yoke and yoga, where the governing idea is of joining things—contextually different things. This incongruence surprises the mundane expectation of the reader, wherein lies its emphatic light.
Finally, there is this intellectually magnificent sentence in Forster’s beautifully written story. The narrator is in the midst of describing the early evening of an Alpine town:
The weather was delightful, and the sun had so far declined that its light had become spiritualized, suggesting new substance as well as new colour in everything on which it fell.
Once again the construction of this sentence, though complex and interestingly designed with a long participial tail sweeping out the result of the previous clause, is not what impresses the effect. That, rather, is the juxtaposition of contrary ideas: delight yet amidst declining light, declining light yet spiritualization nonetheless, and most implicatory of all, that spiritualization causing substance—the very world of solid things made new again in bright new colors. A few pages later, and after the emotional flare around which the story revolves involving Miss Raby, Forster restrengthens these same permanent ideas in yet another commanding sight:
She was still detached, looking back at a fire upon the mountains, marveling at its increased radiance, but too far off to feel its heat.
The power of sentences like these derives not from serially collecting isolated things—the sun and color, fire, heat, radiance, and heat—but from the texture, the context, the weave into which the writer enlaces them to convey a particular world whose significance includes, but does not end with, those named things. In his last book, Literature and Science, the English writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley explains this work:
The scientist’s aim…is to say one thing, and only one thing, at a time. This, most emphatically, is not the aim of the literary artist. Human life is lived simultaneously on many levels and has many meanings. Literature is a device for reporting the multifarious facts expressing their various significances.
Huxley’s simultaneity is what the artist is compelled to achieve. A difficulty not unlike that of squaring the circle or fetching water in a sieve. But the artist does not ultimately wish to square or fetch: only to let fly and watch.
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