The point of revision is to find meaning. You revise to clarify the meaning of something. You understand, I'm doing this terrible artificial thing, to be forgotten instantly, giving you a little analytical summary to show what's going on here in the moment. The moment is the point: her attachment to Connor comes from the moment she knew that he took her body seriously. The yearning is to find meaning and appropriate relevance in her life.
The last example is from James Joyce's story, "The Sisters," from Dubliners.
There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind, for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me, "I am not long for this world," and I had thought the words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and
yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.
At home he learns of the old man's death:
"Well, so your old friend is gone, you'll be sorry to hear."
"Who?" said I.
"Father Flynn."
"Is he dead?"
"Mr. Cotter here has just told us. He was passing by the house."
I knew that I was under observation, so I continued eating as if the news had not interested me. My uncle explained to old Cotter.
"The youngster and he were great friends. The old chap taught him a great deal, mind you; and they say he had a great wish for him."
"God have mercy on his soul," said my aunt piously.
Old Cotter looked at me for a while. I felt that his little beady black eyes were examining me, but I would not satisfy him by looking up from the plate. He returned to his pipe and finally spat rudely into the grate.
"I wouldn't like children of mine," he said, "to have too much to say to a man like that."
"How do you mean, Mr. Cotter?" asked my aunt.
"What I mean is," said old Cotter, "it's bad for children. My idea is: let a young lad run about and play
with young lads of his own age and not be. am I right,
Jack?"
It seems to me evident from the very first sentences what this young man's yearning is. A man is dying, and our narrator has carefully watched the process "night after night." The passion, the yearning, is in that phrase instantly. It's vacation time, and this time the old man has suffered "the third stroke," and our narrator is still walking past that window, studying the lighted square of the window "night after night." Of course, the deep connection the dying man has with our narrator is immediately clear as well. "He had often said to me, 'I am not long for this world,' and I had thought the words idle." The suggestion of an ongoing relationship — that the dying man had been his adviser and confidant, and even that the narrator had taken his words with a grain of salt — all represents a kind of intimacy between them. The impact of this man's process of dying is clear, too, in the words our narrator repeats to himself. The deep connection, as it turns out, between the narrator and this priest, and the institution and worldview with its mysteries that the priest represents, is reflected in our narrator's focus on the words that he says softly to himself, not only in the "paralysis" that the man of God now suffers, but in the definition of gnomon, which is "an interpreter, a pointer," and simony, which is the buying and selling of religious pardons. These words take on a kind of personality, as he says that the words sounded to him like "some maleficent and sinful being."
When the narrator gets home, he keeps his own counsel and is very quiet, but he is critical of the adults that surround him, his aunt and uncle and old Cotter. The adults contend that you can learn too much; that you really need not pay attention to the dark and serious things of the world; that, as Cotter says, education is bad for children because their minds are so impressionable. All of this adds up organically, and deepens our understanding of the boy whose hunger for learning, and knowledge of the darkness and the seriousness of the world, whose very impressionability leads us to identify with him.
I caution you once again to understand that this is a secondary and artificial way of responding to literature, and that this philosophical articulation of these characters' yearning runs counter to the ways in which we are meant to and do respond to them in a story. But here our narrator yearns for the truth. He's going night after night past the window, reading the implications of what sort of candles are lit and working through the mysteries of religion in terms of where this man may be headed when he dies. The narrator yearns to face the dark things honestly. He's doing so in a world commanded by adults who would keep him ignorant, who would prevent him from knowing, much less speaking, the truth. And this yearning is inherent in every detail of image, of voice, moment by moment in the narrator's experience.
4. Cinema of the Mind
Fiction technique and film technique have a great deal in common. We're not talking here tonight about how to translate a book to the screen or how a film could be transformed into a novel, but about deep and essential common ground.
The great D. W. Griffith (I say great in the sense of moviemaker; he was a loathsome human being) — who did those massive silent screen epics in the teens of the last century, Intolerance and The Birth of a Nation—was rightly credited with inventing modern film technique. Griffith himself credited one man with teaching him everything he knew about film, and that was Charles Dickens. Of course, Dickens died several decades before film was invented, but what Griffith learned from him about this new art form of the twentieth century goes to the heart of the experience of reading literature.
Pause for a moment and consider what goes on within you when you read a wonderful work of fiction. The experience
is, in fact, a kind of cinema of the inner consciousness. When you read a work of literature, the characters and the setting and the actions are evoked as images, as a kind of dream in your consciousness, are they not? The primary senses — sight and sound — prevail, just as in the cinema, but in addition to seeing and hearing, you experience taste and smell, you can feel things on your skin as the narrative moves through your consciousness. This is omnisensual cinema. Consequently, it makes sense that the techniques of literature are those we understand to be filmic.
All of the techniques that filmmakers employ, and which you understand intuitively as filmgoers, have direct analogies in fiction. And because fiction writers are the writer-directors of the cinema of inner consciousness, you will need to develop the techniques of film as well. I want to deal with some of those techniques tonight, because I think they can help you overcome some of the problems I've been describing in the past few weeks: the impulse for abstraction and analysis, for summary and generalization, problems of rhythm and transition— how to get from one scene to another or one image to another or one sentence to another — how to put all the parts together, where to place your own personal focus when you're in your own creative trance.
I inveigh against abstraction in these works called novels and stories. Consider how Jack Nicholson as a crotchety old bachelor in a movie looks at Helen Hunt. We see his face on the screen; he lifts an eyebrow; his lip curls. If the screen suddenly went blank and the word "wryly" came up, or "sarcasm," or "contempt," how would you react? You can imagine: with great discomfort. For readers who know how to read, abstraction, generalization, analysis, and interpretation have the same deleterious effect.