From time to time I've reviewed individual chapters from Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction by Charles Baxter, which I believe to be an inspired critical work. One of his chapters is devoted to "stillness" in literature.
For many of us stillness may be something we rarely encounter. When we're out in nature perhaps we notice an animal who upon seeing us becomes frozen in fear. Whether this scene strikes us as elegiac, spiritual, or transcendent, we instinctively know it's special. Out of respect for this living soul standing so deathly still, we make ourselves still, or attempt to, so as not to exacerbate its tremulous state or its racing heart. Everything is still. Everything is brimming with potential.
Perhaps one summer day we come upon a meadow in late afternoon. As a breeze rustles a tree's leaves, we're struck with the thought that everything we're seeing is intensely alive, full of potential. Stillness is like that, a moment born of portent when nothing much happens. If you want to get technical, plenty happens but when we become aware of stillness we overlook that, we decide to believe nothing happens. We might be in touch with the potential for healing and wholeness or we might sense we're on the cusp of breaking through to something fresh, something we've never experienced before.
I intuitively seek out stillness. I find it life enhancing. We sometimes find it in films when no one speaks and all we hear is the sound wind makes; sometimes we see it happen in plays when silence reigns on stage. Can moments of stillness happen in novels where everything depends on words flowing at a steady rate one after another? Can there be silence even while words on the page continue to flow? There can be. Stillness, an artificial stillness, can be created out of words. And these moments can be as moving as when we encounter stillness in nature.
Here's Baxter making a cultural point about how we as a society don't hold silence and stillness in high regard. Quite the opposite: "What's remarkable is the degree to which Americans have distrusted silence and its parent condition, stillness. In this country, silence is often associated with madness, mooncalfing [meaning "simplemindedness"], woolgathering [meaning "indulging in idle daydreaming"], laziness, hostility and stupidity. Silence is… associated with death.
Stillness is an "intensifier."
society's opinion, Baxter writes, "…silence [in the context of a story] is an intensifier. It strengthens whatever stands on either side of it. Directed in this way, silence takes on different emotions, a different color, for whatever it flows through or flows between."
how can it be that an author can serve up a moment of stillness when a writer's only tools are words. In films it's easy to show silence. In novels, it's not as easily done, but it can be accomplished.
In the opening chapter of my novel, Charging the Jaguar, I portray stillness. The principal protagonist, Jake Lancer, who is an incurable, inveterate daydreamer, is alone in his home one afternoon as a thunderstorm gathers. The only other character in the opening chapter is a housecat named Homer, who provides more than enough action for Jake to play off against.
surrounds Jake. He's trapped by it like a prehistoric fly is trapped in a block of amber. In Jake's case he is overwhelmed by what Jake calls in Spanish soledad, or, in English, solitude or loneliness.
Baxter righty insists that in our society "the daydreaming child, or daydreaming grownup, is usually [thought of as] an object of contempt or therapy." He writes, "Vitality in our culture, by contrast, has everything to do with speed and talk."
In the opening chapter of my novel, I present my readers with Jake Lancer, a Peace Corps Volunteer in his early twenties who is anything but a fast-talking man of action. As Jake looks out his front window in Duodango, Colombia, and watches rain clouds build in the sky, he ruminates on the negative outcomes likely to visit him tonight when his boss arrives and gives him a "promised assessment" of his rooky Peace Corps career. While admittedly it's a risky thing for a writer to pull off, I believe stillness becomes Jake Lancer and his character; that is why I present him in that manner in the opening chapter of my novel.
How does one create silence or stillness in a fictional narrative?
Baxter quotes Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the opening to Chapter 19, where Baxter so aptly states, "attention flows away from what is supposed to command it…" [instead, action flows] towards "the peripheries: the river the bank, the trash floating down the river, the sound of the cricket. In a moment of stillness, the atmosphere supplants the action…" At this point, Baxter writes, "Twain follows this observation with a sentence of over three hundred words… which is something of a rhapsody, the longest sentence in his book and, I think, one of the most beautiful sentences in American literature." Baxter points out that this "rhapsody" occurs in close proximity to two deaths by firearms in the book; he concludes, "It is as if Americans typically have their moments of stillness when [they] are framed on both sides by violence."
How did Mark Train create stillness in that sentence of three hundred words back in 1884? This is the sentence. See for yourself. I'd say Twain does it by focusing in on exactly what happens when stillness happens, and by describing all that happens in detail. (Once again, I emphasize this: When we notice stillness, we have the impression nothing is happening, but in fact plenty is happening if we wish to look closely. That's part of the trick of stillness; it's a time when we wish to ignore all the little things going on.)
Here is the first half of that rhapsodic sentence: "Not a sound anywheres—perfectly still—just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-clattering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking way over the water, was a kind of dull line—that was the woods on t'other side—you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky, then more paleness, spreading around; then the river softened up, away off, and warn't so black any more, but grey; you could see little dark spots drifting along, ever so far away—trading scows, and such things; and long black streaks—rafts; sometimes you could a sweep screaking, or jumbled up voices, it was so still and sounds come so far…"
And that's only the first half of the 300-word sentence. But that's how Twain did it in 1884, and how stillness even today can be delivered up to readers.
