A similar experience can potentially occur in a work of literary art, because the narrator sits in your sensibility as a character. The voice of that character can offer the reader a sensual moment-to-moment experience. For a later session you all will have read my short story "Open Arms" [see appendix]. In the first sentence, the narrator says, "I have no hatred in me." Well, hatred is an abstraction, and it's a bit of an analysis. But the next sentence is "I'm almost certain of that." With that "almost" we have a context in which we hear something different from what he's saying. Dramatic irony is now at work. We have a place to stand that allows us to interpret differently from the way he interprets. His abstraction doesn't engage our minds; it engages us in the response to his personality, which is a sensual response.
You will find many voices, even in extended passages, that use some abstraction or analysis in literary fiction, but you will never find those modes of discourse used for surface effects or surface information. They have to do with the sensual presence of voice. This is especially true of first person narrators, but each third person voice also is absolutely distinctive. All writing, in fact, has a narrative persona — your cereal box this morning had a personality. All writing has within it a persona identifiable by diction, vocabulary, syntax. You don't analyze it. You respond to it directly.
You understand why this is a dangerous notion for you, when you're still trying to find your way into your unconscious and trying not to avert your eyes? The little voice that has failed to get you to cut your nails instead of writing, or clean the toilet instead of writing, or read a good book instead of writing — that little voice is going to seize on this paradox and say, "Oh well, my character can explain that; it's just his character." Very dangerous.
I want now to give you some examples from literature of this slippery, evasive, most important thing called yearning. I'm going to read four passages from four diverse works by four wonderful writers and then look at them in terms of yearning.
The first piece is the opening of Janet Burroway's novel, Cutting Stone, a novel set back early in the twentieth century. Eleanor, our point-of-view character, and her husband, Laurel, are on a train heading west. He has tuberculosis. They're going to Arizona for his health; he's taken a job there as a bank manager. Notice that the yearning is not addressed here explicitly, but the first epiphany happens very early.
Outside the club car window, flat desert nothing as far as the eye could see; endless stubble in level light. They were still two days short of Arizona. Eleanor sipped an early aperitif, perspiring jagged rings on the armholes of her pongee suit. Laurel was skimming a Commerce Chronicle, occasionally coughing a discreet, dry cough. He had taken off his jacket, self-deprecating, murmuring, "When in Rome…" and in pin-striped vest and four-in-hand he looked crisp, compact.
Under the rhythmic chug of the train ran a thinner sound, a continuous screech of metal on metal that put Eleanor in mind of rending silk. She felt this image through her abdomen as if the track were a single tear all the way back to Maryland. A copy ofHouse Beautiful lay in her lap, and she read, "No nation has studied homebuilding so persistently and long as the English, and consequently none has arrived at anything like such general excellence."
This sentence had nothing to do with her and could not logically be met with grief. But the raw lot of her unbuilt house rose in her mind, overgrown with lush creeper, a stand of oak. She had spent the better part of a year imagining, then sketching, a facade in that little Baltimore wilderness, and a layout she knew so well that she could walk it out on the ground.
She was losing everything. Everything in memory and all that never was to be; and things the more poignant because she hadn't noticed that she cared for them. The wood planes in Daddy's warehouse, her hand
patting along the shelf as she told over their names by heart: plow, bull nose, dado, beading, rabbet, slitting. Who ever would have thought she'd grieve for the planes?
"Outside the club car window, flat desert nothing as far as the eye can see; endless stubble in level light." This is our first image. We have not yet placed the point of view, although we will shortly see that this is Eleanor's perception and see the landscape as revealing character. What's missing there? First of all, there's no home, no house, there's no place to live here, and — interestingly — there's no verb. Very quickly, the yearning for a place in the world becomes clear. In a world where there is no place, there is no life, and so the very part of speech which signifies life and movement is missing from the first image in the book. A pseudosentence — even, ironically, a semicolon, as though there were sentences on either side, but it's grammatical nonsense — displays the fact that there's no verb, no life. I talked to you about the organic nature of art, everything echoing everything else. This is a wonderful example of that.
"They were still two days short of Arizona. Eleanor sipped an early aperitif, perspiring jagged rings on the armholes of her pongee suit." A silk suit, pongee silk. And what we now see is this arid place, and a woman out of place, displaced, but in the reflexes of a life that is about to change. Sipping "an aperitif." I dare say the word had never been spoken in Arizona in 1914. Laurel "skimming a Commerce Chronicle" — again, it's as if they were sitting in their parlor, whereas in fact they're being carried far away from the life of their past. And Eleanor is conscious of that. We're in her point of view, so we under-stand that she's aware of the jagged rings of sweat. Laurel's first comment is "When in Rome" — a facile patrician use of a cliche, just because he's taking off his coat. He's still dressed in his pinstriped vest and four-in-hand!
We hear the train running, and the very movement of the thing carrying her away suggests — what? — the rending of silk. Silk already represents the life that she's lived, and it's being rent apart, and then she's all the way back to Maryland. It's House Beautiful! she reads, talking of homebuilding in England and, meanwhile, the desert is all around them. We find that she has an unbuilt house — and this is where the epiphany of yearning is strongest. Because her grief is not just for aperitifs and silk dresses. In fact her potential is separate from her privilege — and where is that potential found? In the intense memory of something very concrete, very sensual, very specific: her father's wood planes. And then comes that wonderful verb, her hand patting along the shelf, touching these planes and knowing the rich, various names of them. As we see that potential for something of the hands, of building something new, we see that potential in her. She grieves not for her parlor and her silk dresses, but for the planes — and that's where the yearning comes through clearest. If you combine that moment with the devastating desert image in the beginning, her yearning suggests, ironically, her potential for the rougher parts of life and the challenge to come.
There's nothing analytic here about yearning; it is manifest in every detail. I yearn not only for a literal home but also for a place in the world—a lack reflected in the empty landscape.