Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition

8. Images

129 8 Images The late E. B. White, undoubtedly one of the great stylists in modern American literature, wrote successfully for the toughest audiences. He caught the notoriously wandersome attention of children and held it for generations in such classics as Charlotte’s Web. He not only met but set the standards by which the personal essay is judged by sophisticated readers of such publications as the New Yorker. In one widely anthologized essay, “Once More to the Lake,” his prose fairly glimmers, sliding with seeming effortlessness from plain to grand style within the space of a single paragraph , the one that ends the essay, leaving the reader with a chilly finish for the nostalgic performance: When the others went swimming my son said he was going in too. He pulled his dripping trunks from the line where they had hung all through the shower, and wrung them out. Languidly, and with no thought of going in, I watched him, his hard little body, skinny and bare, saw him wince slightly as he pulled up around his vitals the small, soggy, icy garment. As he buckled the swollen belt suddenly my groin felt the chill of death. (White 385) If you want the secrets of how he accomplished such wonders of prose performance—how he connects the familiar old chill in the crotch of the swimsuit to the hug of mortality and the passing of the generations—don’t +ROFRPE.LOO&KLQGG $0 130 / Images expect to find them in another of White’s perennially best-selling books, The Elements of Style, which he built up from the class notes of his old English teacher, William Strunk. “Strunk and White,” as the book has come affectionately to be known, never gets past the barest conventions of how to write English prose. If, as the ancients said, style is the dress of thought, The Elements of Style only gives us underwear. We don’t get much farther in any of the dozens of other imitators or new and improved books on style that vie to replace Strunk and White in the hearts and libraries of writers and teachers. They all give advice on grammar and important hints for how to achieve readability. But they rarely go beyond this baseline of good writing and hint at how we might achieve magically evocative prose. One recent book seems to promise something larger and stronger with its witty title, The Elephants of Style, but it too sticks mainly to rules for punctuation, usage, and sentence grammar, and steers clear of the hugely vibrant, complexly evolved, thinking, breathing, stomping, charging, trumpeting, ear-flapping effects of language. This chapter takes a modest step toward a fuller understanding of evocative prose with a discussion of imagery, a technique that White puts to good use in “Once More to the Lake.” The image of the boy pulling on the cold swimming trunks, along with White’s compact interpretation of the image, somehow gathers the whole wistful tone of the essay up into a single sweep of prose. The study of imagery has a long history, extending from the ancient rhetoricians who spoke of vividness—of putting a scene before the eyes of the reader—to modern literary critics such as I. A. Richards who developed a full-blown theory of the image. The easy definition of the image as a “word picture” is a bit of a paradox or an oxymoron. A word is a word, and a picture is something different, right? But the very weakness of the definition opens the way into the mysteries of imagery. More than a Word Picture What we seem to have here is another case of style trying to overcome the disabilities of writing. We’ve already seen one such disability in chapter 4: Writing cannot speak. Style tries to overcome this disability by imitating the spoken word—hence “conversational” or “colloquial” style. And because the voice is so closely allied with individual identity, we use the metaphor of voice to describe a deeply personal or comfortable style. “The author really has a voice,” we say, or “You’ve really discovered your voice.” If the conversational style tries to overcome the disability, the metaphor of the virtual voice may well be an attempt to ignore it. +ROFRPE.LOO&KLQGG $0 Images / 131 Another disability is that writing cannot paint, draw, or otherwise display pictures. Common sense tells us as...