Prawns His Sirens

Rebecca Watson​ ’s I Will Crash, her second novel, takes as its subject sibling rivalry, though the phrase seems too mild. Brother-sister conflict most often appears (as it does for instance in Cocteau’s Les Enfants terribles) in the guise of a fatal closeness, but the struggle between Rosa, the book’s narrator, and her unnamed brother is a radical antagonism – even if his successful campaign of torture and intimidation when they were teenagers wasn’t visible to outsiders or their parents. ‘Rivalry’ implies an external object or an objective both parties seek to secure, but here it is hardly less than the right to exist. It’s as if each of them blocked the other’s light simply by being alive. Still, if that were the case, the matter was settled with the brother’s death in a car crash. It can’t be a clean break with the past, however, since before the crash he had made an attempt at reconciliation, knocking at her door one day in a mood that seemed conciliatory. She turned him away.

When they were teenagers, Rosa’s brother stole away her best friend by starting a romantic relationship with her. The implication is that isolating Rosa by bereaving her of her most important friendship was one of his motivations, if not the primary one, in dating Alice. In fact he isolated both young women, refining his cruelty on Alice with no let-up in the campaign against his sister. Rosa wonders if there wasn’t a sexual interest at the root of his bullying, remembering an incident when he seemed to be spying on her in the bathroom, but takes cold comfort from the fact that his attitude predated the disconcerting miracle of puberty: ‘It didn’t start when my body arrived.’ The suggestion remains an atmospheric possibility rather than disappearing altogether. Her brother pressured Rosa into giving him Alice’s number by threatening to crash the car, accelerating and swerving as proof of his sincerity until her resistance broke down. The book’s title sums up this scene but also hints at Rosa’s own fear of collapse. Implosion seems more likely than an outside impact, unless it’s the collision of past and present that will do the damage.

If a standard family dynamic has no application here, nor does standard scene-setting. The siblings attend a school where a teacher can be bullied in class by oblique references to her son, who has been arrested on suspicion of killing farm animals (including a lamb that Rosa watched learning to walk), something that strongly suggests a rural community, but no attempt is made to describe or evoke the context. The approach is closer to expressionism, privileging intensity over nuance, than realism of a social sort. In the half-week of the book’s action, from a Wednesday to a Sunday, the reader must work to keep track of Rosa’s here and now, separating it out from the various thens and elsewheres her wounded memory dredges up.

Male readers (in particular) may be startled by the way Rosa’s experience of sexual assault acquires the status of countersubject. It is somehow communicable, unlike her experiences with her brother, even potentially an agent of bonding:

Unspoken, not hidden, a nod really
the night we both said we had been raped
it wasn’t a surprise, just one of those sad
inevitable matches
like playing Snap
if half the cards were the same

Such intimacy comes at the expense of her relationship with her partner, John, since as a male he can’t be allowed to trespass onto territory that seems oddly sacred, given that it represents the violation of body and will. If he crossed that boundary, ‘my reply could only be an outburst, could only be Fuck you, this is not yours, not yours to feel, not yours to fucking think about.’ It seems almost a triumph from her rapist’s point of view to have made this self-protective separation necessary. Rosa imagines him triumphant, certainly, not carrying a guilty burden but enjoying ‘the lightness, I imagine a lightness, it must be light to be without knowing you are being, walking being walking, all safe as it can be.’ John is an academic specialising in Gertrude Stein, which may account for this touch of Stein’s cubist manner.

In the reader’s experience of the book, extremity of subject matter takes second place (chronologically, since it insists on being noticed before any language can be processed) to the impact of the printed page. Rosa’s narrative is laid out in a jittery format that doesn’t quite correspond to either prose or poetry – the justified left-hand margin makes a claim for prose, but the high proportion of blank space insists on poetry. On the rare occasions when the lines present formally as couplets, their diction and rhythm remain prosaic and low-key:

I wish I had been out
I wish I didn’t know that he tried

it’s not that I didn’t speak to him
it’s that I had the choice

An extra element of abstraction perhaps tips the balance towards poetry:

We exist, carefully, in the present
following the day as if it is infinite
as if this is always where we will be

When there’s a half-rhyme it’s not clear whether the effect is intended:

he makes his way past my sentences
in the forefront
almost making an entrance

Infrequent use of the full stop argues for poetic status, while commas, though not rationed, are sometimes eccentrically situated:

maybe,                      he’d understand.

It’s hard to assess the weight of this comma, which represents the taking of a breath and/or prepares for a sidestep in grammatical structure, since it comes before an actual break in the text, seeming to insist on a pause before a caesura.

Indentation is used not to signal a new paragraph but a change of register:

Sarah had told me how                her cheeks pinking in the heat
recently, on the way home          freckles disappearing                                                    
she had bumped into her cat.

For the duration of this short passage the first part of the line reports a conversation, the second describes the moment of telling. Multiple indentations are common (and hard to reproduce in these narrow columns):

Did you        he said through a set mouth        or didn’t you
hear              eyes ahead, not looking                 me

The conventions shift constantly, so that it’s always a bit of an effort to sort out what belongs where. Here, for instance, a real effort has been made to present two elements as simultaneous, the context being a conversation between Rosa and her semi-estranged mother:

You hadn’t seen him in two years?
I knew it was infrequent but             I can’t remember
I didn’t realise it had got worse.       whether I knew already

Italics usually though not always denote dialogue (they do here), while a new line usually indicates a change of speaker (here it doesn’t). The gain in effectiveness by laying things out in this fashion isn’t obvious.

Every page of the book is sprinkled with line gaps, but they don’t necessarily come where they’re needed. Here for instance is a tender aubade made puzzling by unhelpful spacing:

how many mornings has my head
been angled on his chest,
my shoulder to his centre slightly glazed,
Pritt-Sticked to each other
that change after sleep,
from separate to together
with a good morning, a kiss, or simply
a line drawn down his arm with my finger

It takes time (and a fruitless search for an antecedent) to establish the grammatical status of ‘that’ – it’s an emphatic adjective not a conjunction, which doesn’t carry on from what has been said but starts a new unit of sense. The artificial difficulty of decoding the episode scatters its charge of emotion.

It’s as if the writing engages two gears simultaneously. Gaps on a page, however precisely calibrated, don’t act like the notated rests in a musical score. They produce an aesthetic of space rather than a record of duration. The reading eye makes no distinction between a gap of three lines and one of five. So the effect of the layout’s open texture is to ratchet the attention forward, to spin it on, but then come oblique or knotty formulations (an enigmatic free-standing phrase such as ‘comparing stills’), clumps of language that require a slowing down if not a skidding halt.

It would seem obvious that Watson’s priority is to manifest a voice, but this sort of punctuation addresses the eye exclusively. It’s hard to imagine how an audiobook could convey the book’s disruptions of layout and stay on the right side of intelligibility. What may seduce the eye muffles the voice on the page, by reminding us of an intelligence calculating effects, an intelligence that can’t be the same as the narrator held in the grip of ravaging emotion. When Rosa uses the words ‘blank space’ to indicate a pause in conversation, and the effort to remember something, the phrase is bound to seem coy on a page full of them. The wink to the reader can only come from the writer, not the character.

The urgent appeal of first-person writing can’t be overstated. Human skulls resound with a million statements in the first-person singular, trivial and portentous, to the point where a line from a book such as ‘For a long time, I went to bed early’ or ‘Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again’ can seem to install itself near the centre of consciousness. The corresponding weakness of first-person writing is a thinness of context, a lack of connective tissue embodying a character in her environment. This is Rosa’s predicament – she isn’t securely stitched into a shared world despite her strong connection with John – but it leaves Watson with some technical difficulties. John needs to attend an academic conference at which he is a keynote speaker, and Rosa insists on him fulfilling the engagement, though he offers to stay with her. They text and speak on the phone, but she spends most of the book in free fall, alone with her thoughts, despite a visit from a friend bearing cake, an unwelcome appearance by her mother and an evening at a local pub where an older man’s attempt to pick her up at least allows her to express raw feeling. She can leave out the sentiment that convention demands the bereaved accept from friends and acquaintances.

Rosa is a schoolteacher (one with a particular sensitivity to possible sibling abuse among her charges) and has an English degree: at least one passage brings a pleasing echo of Virginia Woolf, when she reflects that regretting the past is to deny ‘the whole thickness, allness, impossible complexity of the present moment, the density yet fragility, is that it, yes’. It was a dream of modernism that everything could be expressed at once. Rosa’s need to express the allness of her relationship with her brother is more modest but not necessarily more practicable. Watson tidies up dialogue but leaves Rosa’s thoughts and emotions in stylised disarray. Before it happened, she assumed that her brother’s death would leave her free to explain him to the world, ‘would make all of this possible to recount’, but it didn’t. Mourning a hated presence in your life isn’t necessarily easier than mourning a loved one. The painful reabsorption of projected feeling may make the process harder.

Layout on the​ page is a larger affair than mere punctuation, but punctuation, the set of interruptions that promotes flow, has its own set of powers. It is assumed to be a relatively trivial matter, a form of tidiness or good manners, but it’s more than that. Is it in fact part of the meaning of a piece of writing? The notion travels remarkably quickly from the preposterous to the self-evident – something on which meaning depends, without which meaning is defective or unrecoverable, must be part of the meaning.

It’s certainly part of the style (which is itself part of the meaning). The use of conventional marks can have strong associations with particular writers: choose dashes as a primary resource and you summon up the ghost of Sterne or The Pickwick Papers, while the reputation of the ellipsis hasn’t fully recovered from its long collaboration with Céline. Particular symbols arouse disproportionately strong emotions. Joyce disliked what he called the ‘perverted commas’ used to open and close dialogue, and favoured the em dash (otherwise known as the French dash or ‘tiret long’). Kurt Vonnegut abhorred semicolons, describing them as ‘transvestite hermaphrodites’ that served only to advertise the user’s advanced education. He made avoiding them not just one of his tips for writers, but the first on the list.

Why should a full stop set a little way above another one, or a stop floating over a comma, shift a reader’s perception towards artificiality, when the whole business of inflecting a page with marks is artificial? All such marks are conventional, but the compound ones (colon, semicolon) seem provokingly posh and self-conscious, like double-barrelled names. They seem more written, which is silly since everything on a page is by definition written, but then there is no logic to punctuation, or rather its only logic is consistency, just as its cardinal virtue is clarity. There’s a single anomalous semicolon in I Will Crash, consequently snagging the attention. ‘He would be dead; I would have felt, and I would be done.’ It’s the sort of thing that can happen during proofreading, the replacing of an original comma seen to throw the meaning off, making the clause in the middle parenthetical, when a full stop would break up the rhythm too much.

In 20th-century prose, above all as Hemingway wrote it, there was a rejection of the long sentence in all its grandeur, its emulsified assurance. The modern world seemed to call for a different rhythm and texture. Something staccato. Short bursts of information matched the tempo of modernity, machine guns and telegrams. Even a loyalist of legato style such as Proust punctuated more lightly than many readers would like, leaving them short of guiding threads through his labyrinthine sentences. Lydia Davis proposes that his ‘marked underuse of the comma’ shows not a lack of consideration but a subtle courtesy, by refusing to allow arbitrary subdivisions to get in the way of the reader’s attempt to grasp a complex thought in its entirety: if ‘a sentence is chopped into a succession of short phrases separated by commas that halt its flow, the prose gasps for air; whereas the very long sentence, relatively unimpeded by stops, gives the impression of a rush to yield the thought in one exhalation’.

Nevertheless, the general rule of the new accelerated style was that fewer commas meant more full stops. More recently, novelists have explored the possibilities of disrupting this trade-off by doing without the full stop altogether, or at least endlessly deferring it. In Solar Bones (2016), Mike McCormack presented readers with pages that looked conventional enough, although every paragraph began without a capital letter (unless it started with a proper name or ‘I’) and stopped short of grammatical completion. The contrast with I Will Crash and its obsessive skittering could hardly be greater, since in McCormack’s novel the expectation of continuity never quite goes away – it keeps seeming as if normal service is about to be resumed. Only subliminal indication is given to the reading eye that these massive paragraphs, steaming serenely in convoy, have been subtly sabotaged on their mission to deliver conclusive meanings, holed below the waterline – stylistic and formal choices that correspond to the status of the book’s narrator.

Joseph Ponthus’s autobiographical novel, À la ligne (2019), takes a brusquer approach. It describes his working life on production lines (the subtitle is ‘Feuillets d’usine’), first in a fish processing factory then an abattoir. The title, though, has a double meaning, being the French for ‘new paragraph’, and Ponthus writes in short unpunctuated bursts. Since the text avoids indentation – it’s left-justified – the effect reproduces the carriage return of a typewriter (remember those?). For Ponthus, writing is not necessarily a superior form of labour. The two activities are on a par: ‘J’écris comme je travaille/À la chaîne/À la ligne.’ The text presents itself as a series of repetitive gestures, whose intention is to convey not the horror of the factory but its paradoxical beauty, snatching something of value through the narration of something that doesn’t deserve to be narrated:

le travail dans sa plus banale nudité
Répétitive
Des gestes simples
Durs
Des mots simples.

Watson’s punctuation regime is different again, and more conflicted. She resists grammar’s organising claims, putting a spanner in the works of the language machine. Even mental rehearsals show that her experiences can’t be shared. When Rosa imagines articulating them, they somehow evaporate.

when looked at by someone else, they undo
even when I attempt to, when I scrutinise,
I see a shoebox full of the memories
John would open    and    each would float out, light!

Her mother’s response to being told Rosa’s brother used to hurt her is ‘Sweetheart, you were kids.’ In the past her father too had ignored the extremity of her distress: ‘It can’t be that bad, he had said./You know what you two are like/you wind each other up.’ It’s true that some incidents could be written off as pranks (leaving a slice of bacon on the pillow of a recent convert to vegetarianism), but others are sadistic and even borderline criminal. All of it is hard to explain, ‘hard to make it sound like anything other/than what it was yet wasn’t’:

Too late now        if I say it
reduces      bubbled to nothing      not nothing, stupid!
waving slices of bacon                      in the face of death
                                                                               never enough
sieving for examples but what does any of it prove

Writing like that of I Will Crash, governed as it is by the mental movements of a character, is usually referred to either as internal monologue or ‘stream of consciousness’. The more vivid phrase points to something not acknowledged by the more technical one, that the outside world can’t just go missing. A stream is defined by its banks. Cues from the outside world and internal promptings enrich and contradict each other. Physical or social environments channel and shape the subjectivity of individuals. Even in Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, when she’s on the edge of sleep and as far from a shared world as it’s possible to be, Dublin still impinges from time to time. Her doze may not be punctuated by full stops or commas, but there is the occasional train whistle.

Earlier chapters of Ulysses achieve an ambivert balance, an orderly syncopation of self and surroundings. Here is Bloom early on in ‘Calypso’, interpreting his wife’s soft grunt of ‘Mn’ when asked if she wants anything for breakfast.

No. She did not want anything. He heard then a warm heavy sigh, softer, as she turned over and the loose brass quoits of the bedstead jingled. Must get those settled really. Pity. All the way from Gibraltar. Forgotten any little Spanish she knew. Wonder what her father gave for it. Old style. Ah yes! of course. Bought it at the governor’s auction. Got a short knock. Hard as nails at a bargain, old Tweedy. Yes, sir. At Plevna that was. I rose from the ranks, sir, and I’m proud of it. Still he had brains enough to make that corner in stamps. Now that was farseeing.

‘Quoits’ to describe the loose brass rings on the bedstead is a little outside Bloom’s register. It’s not necessarily that he wouldn’t know the word, but it would be odd for him to use it to give a vivid touch to a household item that needs explaining only to the reader. The delight in precise notation (the rings of the game loosely stacked on the pin – the hob or mott or spike – where they happen to have landed) emanates from Joyce rather than Bloom, as does the sly hint at the adulterous coitus on which Molly will embark later in the day.

The new technique of interior monologue, not only historically new but new at this stage in the book, is already showing off its possibilities. Bloom is in the kitchen, and so both Molly and the bedstead are offstage, but the noises they make in conjunction are enough to prompt his chain of thoughts. Never mind that everything he thinks he knows about the bed and its previous owner is contradicted elsewhere in the book: Molly’s father didn’t buy it at auction, could hardly have fought in the Russo-Turkish war of which the siege of Plevna was a critical stage, didn’t make money from stamps. The bed is a great deal more solid than the mental furniture Bloom associates with it, but that’s part of the point. His mistaken ideas take up room in his head just the same, and reflect his character all the more for being mistaken.

It is striking how much flotsam the stream can carry with it. What is being described as a ‘pity’ – the fact that the bed is showing its age or the obligation on Bloom to repair it, which will tend to silence the movements he enjoys overhearing? ‘Got a short knock’, which must be superannuated slang, suggests some sort of setback rather than the bargain Bloom means by the phrase. These moments of imperfect comprehension don’t weaken the effectiveness of the passage but almost enhance it, by reinforcing the reader’s impression of eavesdropping on the character rather than being addressed by him.

These are the advantages of third-person narration closely shadowing a spotlit consciousness, lending support and stability. It’s much harder to achieve a comparable dimensionality in a pure first-person present tense, unobtrusively supplying neutral detail without diluting emotional intensity. Watson shows the trick can be managed when Rosa takes her second shower of the day, simply to distract herself, and reads aloud from the back of the shampoo bottle, until she’s brought up short by the mysterious ingredient ‘silk molecules’. Afterwards she dries herself on a towel ‘still hinting wet from the morning’. The writing wriggles free of the constraints imposed by its choices.

Techniques have their sweet spots and their blind spots, and it may be that interior monologue isn’t a good fit for moments of crisis, experiences of turmoil. Watson’s attempt to honour incoherence can give way to it, as it does in this beginning of a remembered scene:

Can I tell you something?                remembering
Drunk                     tipsy more honest              on the brink
                Alice’s mum laughing,
                cigarette wedded to the ledge between two fingers
This was real,        I know I thought that.
Jesus, this is real.

Who is speaking? Who is drunk, or at least tipsy? How many people are present? The assertiveness of the last two sentences, not to mention their grammatical completeness, makes their elusiveness all the more frustrating. When economy on the page comes at the reader’s expense, it starts earning itself a less flattering name.

Some sort of dailiness seems to be required for the formal balance to be kept – and Ulysses, marking the point at which literary ambition parted company from the intrinsic interest of subject matter, had dailiness in spades. Even an atrocious dailiness will serve, as À la ligne shows, with the narrator processing seafood in a factory where the maximum temperature is 8 degrees, or fetching beef carcasses from the rails on which they are hung, invariably at the very back of the cold store. Ponthus’s version of stream of consciousness doesn’t overlap with Joyce’s, though one passage echoes Ulysses, with the food-processing works reconfigured as the narrator’s Mediterranean, prawns his sirens, whelks his cyclopes, the breakdown of a conveyor belt just one more storm at sea through which he must journey to reach the Ithaca of wife and home.

Interior monologue​ seeks to render on the page the simultaneous experience of mental freedom and submission to circumstance, not something that repetitive manual labour would be expected to produce, but here it is. Ponthus notices the grotesqueness of the abattoir’s management encouraging workers to give blood, remembers that the first recorded use of the word crevette is in Rabelais, can compare his co-workers sucking sweets with exaggerated slowness (so as to make their shift pass as quickly as possible) to Beckett’s character Molloy sucking stones, and all without any sense of superiority to his surroundings. It’s not that he isn’t alienated but that alienation is the general condition. It doesn’t make him special. At one point – he’s a veteran of Lacanian analysis – he even describes the factory as the equivalent of his therapist’s couch, encouraging a self-examination without limit.

There’s much less dialogue in À la ligne than in I Will Crash, but when it comes it is clearly signposted with the French dash, and sometimes with double chevron marks, which Joyce avoided but didn’t explicitly condemn. The dash had formal advantages for Joyce, marking the beginning of speech though not its end, but it was also pointedly un-English. It may have the same appeal for Irvine Welsh, one of the few current writers to champion it, as if deferring to some Auld Alliance of mise en page.

Watson’s readers are likely to have real difficulty in deciding who is saying what, particularly since indentation, helpful in marking a change of speaker (and disproportionately important in the absence of quotation marks), has been co-opted for more immediately expressive purposes. The reading brain experiences a subliminal resentment at the extra fluttering required to determine the register of a particular passage, confronted with a seeming seamlessness that in fact requires constant unpicking to produce sense. Perhaps this is part of the calculus that makes a piece of writing ‘readable’, irrespective of genre or level of literary ambition, not solely a question of plot-driven page-turning but of well-oiled paragraphs moving understanding forward, the derailleur gear train of grammar shifting the sense smoothly between sprockets. It’s only when understanding is stymied or when, for instance, apostrophes seem to be withheld or supplied on a case-by-case basis, as in some of Cormac McCarthy’s novels, that punctuation acquires a self-defeating prominence. When a standard set of marks is present (at the minimum: weak pause, strong pause, indicator of speech), collectively they disappear.

To resist the homogenising drive of language is also to resist the larger grammar of drama. You can’t hope to build a greater structure of tension if you resist resolution on the level of the sentence, with conflicts routinely ushered towards the brief truce of a finite verb and signed off with a full stop. If there’s no construction then there can be no shaping of the reader’s experience, but the moment an element of construction puts in an appearance (climactic revelation, backstory revealed after strategic delay, both of which are part of Rosa’s Sunday) the book’s organising intelligence, distinct from the narrator, becomes a palpable presence, even if it persists in hiding behind the fixtures and fittings.

On Sunday, Rosa takes a train to Portsmouth Harbour, but this departure from routine doesn’t attach her any more firmly to her surroundings. The two-way traffic that gives stream of consciousness writing its vitality is choked off. External stimuli such as the noises made by a faulty sliding door – ‘What am I doing? Thwack. What am I doing? Thwack’ – or the sensation of cold in the carriage are no more than cues for rehashing old patterns of thought. It seems to require an effort of will for her to wrench herself back into shared space, by connecting the memory of eating a maggot (out of bravado, not physical compulsion) with a fellow passenger, however arbitrarily:

Woman near me now,
with her early egg-and-cress sandwich
wouldn’t want to know about the maggot      no      no      no

The day trip to Portsmouth is a success, in the sense that it forces Rosa to reconsider everything she has ever thought about her brother, making her realise how little she knew of him, but it doesn’t enhance her ability to engage with the moment, and perhaps even saps it:

I stir    a street away from our flat    dehydrated, head aching
like I’ve accidentally fallen asleep on the sofa

I was on the train, I remember, autopilot taking advantage.

There’s a limit to how much of a first-person, present-tense narrative can be handed over to autopilot without straining the contract between writer and reader. Put it another way, though, and the technical problem is that there’s too little autopilot on show. Too little of the secondary intelligence that enables us to perform familiar actions without giving them thought.

Ponthus closes À la ligne with a rhetorical flourish, saying there can be no full stop since the (production) line goes on forever: ‘il n’y aura jamais/De/Point final/À la ligne’. Watson too chooses not to end the sentence that ends her book, though so much resolution has been bearing down on Rosa over the last forty pages that it seems a bit late to refuse grammatical and emotional closure. It isn’t easy to write a narrative of collapse that isn’t also a narrative of reconstruction, though both Coetzee’s Disgrace and Alasdair Gray’s 1982, Janine came close. It’s not so much that a story demands an ending, more (as Rosa says herself) that ‘you can’t give an ending without a story.’ That’s the danger of sudden movement after stasis.