DESCRIPTION 359 The final sentence sums up the scene and states the impression directly, as to the modifiers "neatly," "clean," "gay," but on the whole the images create the sense of middle-class fulfill- ment. Any ugliness is excluded. If the lawn were disfigured by crabgrass, if weeds leered among the flowers, the facts are discreetly omitted. Very different are the details—and the impression—in this account of the homes of miners in the north of England: I found great variation in the houses I visited. Some were as decent as one could possibly expect in the circumstances, some were so appalling that I have no hope of describing them adequately. To begin with, the smell, the dominant and essential thing, is inde- scribable. But the squalor and the confusion! A tub full of filthy water here, a basin full of unwashed crocks there, more crocks piled in any odd corner, torn newspaper littered everywhere, and in the middle always the same dreadful table covered with sticky oilcloth and crowded with cooking pots and irons and half-darned stockings and pieces of stale bread and bits of cheese wrapped round with greasy newspaper! And the congestion in a tiny room where getting from one side to the other is a complicated voyage between pieces of furniture, with a line of damp washing getting you in the face every time you move and the children as thick underfoot as toadstools! George Orwell Sometimes a writer concentrates on one or two images which symbolize the impression. In the following passage Al- fred Kazin projects into two key symbols his childhood de- spair at being forced to attend a special school because of his stuttering: It troubled me that I could speak in the fullness of my own voice only when I was alone on the streets, walking about. There was something unnatural about it; unbearably isolated. I was not like the others! At midday, every freshly shocking Monday noon, they sent me away to a speech clinic in a school in East New York, where I sat in a circle of lispers and cleft palates and foreign accents holding a mirror before my lips and rolling difficult sounds over and over. To be sent there in the full light of the opening week, For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 360 DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION when everyone else was at school or going about his business, made me feel as if I had been expelled from the great normal body of humanity. I would gobble down my lunch on my way to the speech clinic and rush back to the school in time to make up for the classes I had lost. One day, one unforgettable dread day, I stopped to catch my breath on a corner of Sutter Avenue, near the wholesale fruit markets, where an old drugstore rose up over a great flight of steps. In the window were dusty urns of colored water floating off iron chains; cardboard placards advertising hairnets, EX- LAX; a great illustrated medical chart headed THE HUMAN FACTORY, which showed the exact course a mouthful of food follows as it falls from chamber to chamber of the body. I hadn't meant to stop there at all, only to catch my breath; but I so hated the speech clinic that I thought I would delay my arrival for a few minutes by eating my lunch on the steps. When I took the sandwich out of my bag, two bitterly hard pieces of hard salami slipped out of my hand and fell through a grate onto a hill of dust below the steps. I re- member how sickeningly vivid an odd thread of hair looked on the salami, as if my lunch were turning stiff with death. The factory whistles called their short, sharp blasts stark through the middle of noon, beating at me where I sat outside the city's magnetic circle. I had never known, I knew instantly I would never in my heart again submit to, such wild passive despair as I felt at that moment, sitting on the steps before THE HUMAN FACTORY, where little robots gathered and shoveled the food from chamber to chamber of the body. They had put me out into the streets, I thought to myself; with their mirrors and their everlasting pulling at me to imitate their ef- fortless bright speech and their stupefaction that a boy could stam- mer and stumble on every other English word he carried in his head, they put me out into the streets, had left me high and dry on the steps of that drugstore staring at the remains of my lunch turning black and grimy in the dust. In Kazin's description selection is extremely important. The passage focuses onto the images of THE HUMAN FAC- TORY and the two pieces of salami. Kazin tells us what his feelings were (he is quite explicit). But he communicates the despair of an alienated child in the salami with its "odd thread of hair turning black and grimy in the dust," and the in- human little robots endlessly shoveling food into a body that For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org DESCRIPTION 361 has become a machine. In a world symbolized by such images there is little room for humane values, for love and compas- sion and tender understanding. Kazin's paragraph shows the importance of the "crystalliz- ing image," the detail that precipitates the scene in the reader's mind. The writer must make readers see (or hear or taste or touch). He or she cannot achieve this merely by relentlessly listing every detail that falls within the perceptual field. Even in catalogue descriptions like that by John Peale Bishop, we are shown only a portion of what exists to be seen. The writer must select relatively few details but render these so vividly that a reader sees them in his mind's eye. These will then crystalize the perception, making it solid and true. It is rather like developing a photograph. The writer begins the process, carefully choosing details and expressing them in compelling images; readers, developing these images in the fluid of their own experience, complete the picture for themselves. The point to remember is this: select only the details essen- tial to the impression you want to convey; describe them pre- cisely and concretely; then readers will perceive them. Metaphor and Simile in Subjective Description In addition to selecting and arranging details, the writer of description may also introduce comparisons, often in the form of metaphors or similes. In Bishop's paragraph about the Decatur Street Market, for instance, the proprietor is "fat as Silenus" (an ancient god of wine), the leeks "sea-green" with roots "like witches' hair," and the squashes "long and curled like the trumpets of Jericho." Metaphor is even more central in the following passage about the Great Wall of China. The Wall assumes a mon- strous power as it marches over and dominates the lands: There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. Solitarily, with the indifference of nature her- self, it crept up the mountain side and slipped down to the depth For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 362 DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION of the valley. Menacingly, the grim watch towers, stark and four square, at due intervals stood at their posts. Ruthlessly, for it was built at the cost of a million lives and each one of those great grey stones has been stained with the bloody tears of the captive and the outcast, it forged its dark way through a sea of rugged moun- tains. Fearlessly, it went on its endless journey, league upon league to the furthermost regions of Asia, in utter solitude, mysterious like the great empire it guarded. There in the mist, enormous, majestic, silent, and terrible, stood the Great Wall of China. W. Somerset Maugham Exaggerating Details An impression may be embodied in distorted and exaggerated details. Mark Twain, an adept at the art of hyperbole, or ex- aggeration, tells of a trip he took in an overland stage in the 1860s. The passengers have spent the night at a way station, and Twain describes the facilities for cleaning up before breakfast the next morning: By the door, inside, was fastened a small old-fashioned looking- glass frame, with-two little fragments of the original mirror lodged down in one corner of it. This arrangement afforded a pleasant double-barreled portrait of you when you looked into it, with one half of your head set up a couple of inches above the other half. From the glass frame hung the half of a comb by a string—but if I had to describe that patriarch or die, I believe I would order some sample coffins. It had come down from Esau and Samson, and had been accumulating hair ever since—along with certain impurities. We are not supposed to take this literally, of course. Twain is exercising the satirist's right of legitimate exaggeration, le- gitimate because it leads us to see a truth about this frontier hostel. Process Description A process is a directed activity in which something undergoes progressive change. The process may be natural, like the For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org DESCRIPTION 363 growth of a tree; or it may be humanly directed, like an au- tomobile taking shape on an assembly line. But always some- thing is happening—work is being done, a product being formed, an end of some kind being achieved. To describe a process you must analyze its stages. The anal- ysis will determine how you organize the description. In a simple case, such as baking a cake, the process has obvious, prescribed steps; the writer needs only to observe and record them accurately. On the other hand, complicated and abstract processes—for instance, how a law comes into being as an act of Congress—require more study and thought. Here is a simple example of a process, a natural one—a small frog being eaten by a giant water bug: He didn't jump; I crept closer. At last I knelt on the island's win- terkilled grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the frog in the creek just four feet away. He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. I watched the taut, glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and fall. Soon, part of his skin, formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the water: it was a mon- strous and terrifying thing. I gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided away. The frog skin bag began to sink. Annie Dillard At the beginning of the description the frog is whole and alive, sitting in the creek; by the end it has been reduced to a bag of skin. This change is the process Dillard describes. It is con- tinuous rather than divided into clearly defined steps. Yet it is analyzed. Verbs, the key words in the analysis, create sharp images of alteration: "crumpled," "collapse," "shrinking," "deflating," "ruck," "rumple," "fall." The similes and meta- phors translate an unusual visual experience into more famil- iar ones: "like a deflating football," "formless as a pricked balloon." For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 364 DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION The next example of process description involves an assem- bly line at a cosmetics plant: Cream-jar covers joggle along a moving belt. Six iron arms descend to set paper sealers on sextuplicate rows of cream pots. Each clat- tering cover is held for a moment in a steel disk as a filled cream jar is raised by a metal wrist and screwed on from underneath. At the mascara merry-go-round a tiny tube is placed in each steel cup—clink. The cups circle—ca-chong, ca-chong, ca-chong—till they pass under two metal udders. There the cups jerk up—ping— and the tubes are filled with mascara that flows from the vats up- stairs in manufacturing. The cups continue their circle till they pass under a capper—plump. The filled, capped tubes circle some more till they reach two vacuum nozzles, then—fwap—sucked up, around and down onto a moving belt. All along the belt women in blue smocks, sitting on high stools, pick up each mascara tube as it goes past. They insert brushes, tamp on labels, encase the tubes in plastic and then cardboard for the drugstore displays. At the Brush-On Peel-Off Mask line, a filler picks an empty bottle off the belt with her right hand, presses a pedal with her foot, fills the bottle with a bloop of blue goop, changes hands, and puts the filled bottle back on the line with her left hand, as she picks up another empty bottle with her right hand. The bottles go past at thirty-three a minute. Barbara Carson Garson's description provides a fine example of how analysis determines paragraphing. Three products are involved— cream, mascara, and the "Brush-On Peel-Off Mask"—and each is treated in a separate paragraph. For the mascara two are used, marking the two-stage process of the tubes' being first filled and then packaged. The sentences are also determined by the analysis. Thus the three sentences of the first paragraph distinguish (1) the covers on the conveyor belt, (2) the iron arms placing sealers on the pots, and (3) the fixing of the lids onto the jars. Notice, too, the long sentence in the fourth paragraph; it uses parallel verbs to analyze the filler's movements. For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org DESCRIPTION 365 Process description may be either objective or subjective. Both the foregoing examples are relatively objective, though each suggests responses. Even though Dillard's subject is hor- rifying and she actually expresses her reaction ("it was a mon- strous and terrifying thing"), her images are objective. Dillard concentrates on rendering the visual experience in and of itself (which in a case like this perhaps best communicates the horror). Despite its objective surface, Garson's description also im- plies a reaction. Her diction—especially the words imitating sounds—suggests the inhuman quality of the assembly line. Her fourth paragraph cleverly hints her feelings about work on the line. The long elaborate first sentence describing the worker's mechanized movements is followed by a brief matter-of-fact announcement that "the bottles go past at thirty-three a minute." The implication makes sensitive read- ers wince. For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org CHAPTER 31 Narration A narrative is a meaningful sequence of events told in words. It is sequential in that the events are ordered, not merely ran- dom. Sequence always involves an arrangement in time (and usually other arrangements as well). A straightforward move- ment from the first event to the last constitutes the simplest chronology. However, chronology is sometimes complicated by presenting the events in another order: for example, a story may open with the final episode and then flash back to all that preceded it. A narrative has meaning in that it conveys an evaluation of some kind. The writer reacts to the story he or she tells, and states or implies that reaction. This is the "meaning," some- times called the "theme," of a story. Meaning must always be rendered. The writer has to do more than tell us the truth he sees in the story; he must manifest that truth in the characters and the action. Characters and action are the essential elements of any story. Also important, but not as essential, is the setting, the place where the action occurs. Characters are usually people— sometimes actual people, as in history books or newspaper stories, sometimes imaginary ones, as in novels. Occasionally characters are animals (as in an Aesop fable), and sometimes For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org NARRATION 367 a dominant feature of the environment functions almost like a character (the sea, an old house). The action is what the characters say and do and anything that happens to them, even if it arises from a nonhuman source—a storm, for instance, or a fire. Action is often pre- sented in the form of a plot. Action is, so to speak, the raw material; plot, the finished product, the fitting together of the bits and pieces of action into a coherent pattern. Usually, though not invariably, plot takes the form of a cause-and- effect chain: event A produces event B; B leads to C; C to D; and so on until the final episode, X. In a well-constructed plot of this kind we can work back from X to A and see the con- nections that made the end of the story likely and perhaps inevitable. Stories can be very long and complicated, with many char- acters, elaborate plots, and subtle interpenetration of charac- ter, action, and setting. In writing that is primarily expository, however, narratives are shorter and simpler. Most often they are factual rather than imaginary, as when an historian de- scribes an event. And often in exposition an illustration may involve a simple narrative. Being able to tell a story, then, while not the primary concern of the expository writer, is a skill which he or she will now and again be called upon to use. Organizing a Narrative As with so much in composition, the first step in narration is to analyze the story in your own mind. In the actual telling, the analysis provides the organization. The simplest kind of narrative is the episode, a single event unified by time and place. But even an episode must be organized. The writer must break it down into parts and present these in a mean- ingful order. In the following case the episode is the brief landing of a passenger ship at the Mediterranean island of Malta. After describing the setting in the first paragraph, the writer divides For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 368 DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION his story into two parts: the problems of getting ashore (par- agraphs 2 and 3), and the difficulties of returning to the ship (4). We called at Malta, a curious town where there is nothing but churches, and the only sound of life is the ringing of church bells. The whole place reminded me of the strange towns one often sees in the nightmares of delirium. As soon as the ship anchored, a regular battle began between the boatmen for possession of the passengers. These unhappy crea- tures were hustled hither and thither, and finally one, waving his arms like a marionette unhinged, lost his balance and fell back into a boat. It immediately bore him off with a cry of triumph, and the defeated boatman revenged himself by carrying off his luggage in a different direction. All this took place amid a hail of oaths in Maltese, with many suggestive Arab words intermingled. The young priests in the second class, freshly hatched out of the seminary, turned vividly pink, and the good nuns covered their faces with their veils and fled under the mocking gaze of an old bearded missionary, who wasn't to be upset by such trifles. I did not go ashore, for getting back to the ship was too much of a problem. Some passengers had to pay a veritable ransom before they could return. Two French sailors, who had got mixed up with churches when looking for a building of quite another character, solved the matter very simply by throwing their grasping boatman into the sea. A few strokes with the oars, and they were alongside, and as a tug was just leaving they tied the little boat to it, to the accompaniment of the indignant shrieks from the owner as he floundered in the water. Henry de Monfreid In each of the two main parts of the story de Monfreid begins with a generalization and then supports it with a specific in- stance. The effectiveness of his narrative lies both in the skill with which he analyzes the episode and the precision with which he renders characters and action. The glimpses he gives us are brief, but vivid and filled with meaning: the tumbled passenger "like a marionette unhinged," "the mocking missionary," the shrieking indignation of the greedy boatman thrown into the sea. For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org [...]... third part of a plot, the climax, resolves the conflict: here, the shooting Finally the plot ends with the denouement, the closing events of the narrative: Peter Romano's being carried off to jail In the simple and often partial stories you are likely to tell in expository writing, it is not always necessary (or even desirable) that you develop all these elements of a plot in detail You may need to spend... capitalist economy, each the victimizer of the other In practice, many stories operate, so to speak, at intermediate points of meaning The meaning of one narrative is realistic tending toward the symbolic; of another, symbolic tending toward the allegorical Whatever its mode, the meaning of a story, if it is to be truly communicated, has to be rendered in the characters and plot and setting It may, in addition,... happens In symbolic stories meaning is neither purely allegorical For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 37* DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION nor purely realistic It is both at once Such stories are realistic in that characters and events correspond to life as we know it, and we can generalize from them to real people At the same time the stories—like allegories—point to another level... exposition has a special meaning with reference to narration The exposition is that part of the plot which gives us the background information about the characters, telling us what we need to know in order to understand why they act as they do in what is about to unfold Exposition is usually, but not always, concentrated at or very near the beginning of a story Wilson's exposition occupies the first three... dollars left By June, he owed his landlord two months' rent, $52 The landlord, Antonio Copace, lived only a few blocks away on Lexington Avenue, in a house with a brownstone front and coarse white-lace curtains in the windows The Romanos lived above the fruit store, on the same floor with a cheap dentist's office, in a little flat to which they had access up a dirty oilcloth-covered staircase and through... Great Depression of the 1930s: Peter Romano comes from a little town in Sicily For years he kept a large and prosperous fruit store under the Second Avenue elevated at the corner of Twenty-ninth Street A few years ago, however, he got something the matter with his chest and wasn't able to work anymore He sold his business and put the money into Wall Street When the Wall Street crash came, Peter Romano... tell us necessary facts about his history Exposition gives way to conflict, the second part of a plot Conflict involves two or more forces working at cross purposes (Sometimes this takes place between a character and a physical obstacle such as a mountain or the sea; or it may be internalized, involving diverse psychological aspects of the same person.) In this story the conflict, obviously, occurs... their causal connections are relatively unimportant For example, the sailors do not toss their boatman into the water because of what other boatmen did earlier to the unfortunate passenger The two events relate not as cause and effect but more generally in showing the greediness of the Maltese In more complicated stories, however, events may well be linked in a plot of cause and effect A brief example... rich man, but he, too, no doubt, had been having his losses At any rate, he was insistent about the rent Peter Romano had a married daughter, and her husband offered to help him out He went to Mr Copace with $26—one month's rent But the old man refused it with fury and said that unless he got the whole sum right away, he would have the Romanos evicted On June 11, he came himself to the Romanos and... away, he would have the Romanos evicted On June 11, he came himself to the Romanos and demanded the money again He threatened to have the marshal in and put them out that very afternoon Peter Romano tried to argue with him, and Mrs Romano went out in a final desperate effort to get together $52 For more material and information, please visit www.tailieuduhoc.org 37° DESCRIPTION AND NARRATION When she . Peter Romano's being carried off to jail. In the simple and often partial stories you are likely to tell in expository writing, it is not always necessary. way to the speech clinic and rush back to the school in time to make up for the classes I had lost. One day, one unforgettable dread day, I stopped to