The Art of Crossing: Transitions in Salon Writing

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The Art of Crossing: Transitions in Salon Writing

Transition is one of the least discussed arts of fiction. We talk endlessly about beginnings and endings, character, dialogue, point of view, exposition, structure, pace, all the things a novel is supposed to do while it is going somewhere. Transition gets treated as connective tissue, a little carpentry between rooms, something the writer should accomplish quietly enough that nobody notices the hammer. I have come to think almost the opposite is true, particularly in the kind of novel I think of as a salon novel. The transition is often where the deepest work is being done. It is the place where one time becomes another, where one consciousness admits another consciousness, where history enters the present without knocking, where a landscape suddenly ceases to be scenery and becomes memory. It is not simply how the writer gets from here to there. Sometimes it is the moment we discover that here and there have been beside each other all along.

Proust understood this more completely than almost anyone. The madeleine has become such familiar literary furniture that it can obscure the larger thing he discovered. It was not merely that an object or taste could remind us of the past. The past could still exist inside the sensation. A taste, paving stones beneath the feet, a napkin, a phrase of music, the peculiar atmosphere of a room could open time itself. The object does not symbolize memory. It contains it. That distinction seems important to me. Symbolism keeps the past at a polite distance. Proust lets the distance collapse. The man is not standing in the present thinking about another time. For a moment he is living inside both.

I began working with something similar in The Vigneron’s Wife, although the mechanism belonged naturally to another landscape. Vineyards do not experience time the way people pretend to. They return. Winter pruning, spring growth, summer heat, harvest, bare vines, then the whole thing begins again, except nothing actually begins again because everything that happened before is still there. The land has absorbed it. Weather has absorbed it. The people working the vines have absorbed it. A knife, a row of vines, the smell of crushed grapes, a meal after work, the first cold wind can move a character backward or forward without my having to put up a road sign announcing a flashback. The season becomes transition. The vineyard becomes memory. Time is not a line running through the novel. It circles the house and comes back through the kitchen door.

Virginia Woolf takes us somewhere stranger, and The Waves may be her purest exploration of it. The novel hardly behaves as though six consciousnesses are six separate rooms. Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny and Louis speak individually, yet their voices accumulate until individuality itself begins to feel provisional. One voice gives way to another without the heavy machinery of conventional transition because rhythm has already joined them. Between those voices the sea returns, the sun moves, light changes, waves rise and fall. The interludes do not merely mark time. They make human time seem part of another rhythm altogether. Childhood, youth, desire, friendship, separation and death move forward, but the waves keep returning. Woolf gives us transition as recurrence. A voice disappears and another takes it up. Morning becomes noon, noon becomes evening, but the movement is not merely chronological. Consciousness itself seems tidal.

That interests me because transition in a salon novel need not always mean leaving one place and arriving somewhere else. Sometimes it means discovering that the border between two consciousnesses was never as firm as we assumed. The Waves moves through changes of speaker almost musically. One voice leaves a phrase hanging in the air and another seems to breathe the same air. The connective tissue is rhythm, image, repetition, emotional pressure. Woolf understood that a novel could change speakers, ages and states of consciousness while remaining inside one larger movement. The wave is individual when it rises and part of the sea when it falls.

That becomes important in The Cat’s Paw, because families do not experience time chronologically either. They pretend to. They produce photographs and dates and stories about who married whom and when the children were born, but beneath that orderly arrangement something stranger is happening. A father appears in a son’s gesture. A phrase spoken by someone dead twenty years suddenly comes out of another mouth. An old injury changes the meaning of a new argument. An inherited object passes from one hand to another and acquires another layer of moral weight. Family history does not remain behind us. We drag it through the house. The transition can therefore happen in a gesture, a sentence, a mannerism, an object. The dead do not require a formal entrance because the family has never entirely allowed them to leave.

Faulkner knew this territory well. In Absalom, Absalom! the story keeps being told because nobody owns the entire story. One consciousness passes it to another, and every telling changes what was supposedly known before. In The Sound and the Fury, past and present do not behave themselves because consciousness does not behave itself. Faulkner lets one generation live inside the grammar of another. Sometimes the sentence becomes an inheritance. That interests me because a family novel cannot finally be about what happened next. Families are full of things that happened before and keep happening afterward.

Sebald approaches the same problem through association. He can begin with a walk, a railway station, a ruined building, a conversation with someone half remembered, and suddenly we are somewhere else entirely, perhaps in another country, perhaps another century, and strangely we have not felt the floor move beneath us. The Rings of Saturnis full of this. So is Austerlitz. Architecture opens into history. A station becomes exile. A photograph becomes a life. One person's story contains another person's story, which contains another memory, and the narrator keeps walking. Sebald does not always transition so much as uncover. The other time was already under the floorboards.

That became particularly useful to me in They Carry Their Songs. That novel moves through testimony, memory, regret, song, judgment and survival. Elionor carries one portion of the world, Arnaut another, Adelita another, and the later judgment changes what those earlier voices mean without erasing them. Nobody can tell the whole story. The story survives because it is passed from hand to hand, mouth to mouth. Transition becomes inheritance. When one voice is exhausted, another carries what remains.

Song makes that movement possible in another way. A refrain can travel farther than the person who first sang it. “Canta, rossinhòl, canta” returns, but it never returns to exactly the same world. That is the wonderful thing about repetition and something workshop thinking occasionally misunderstands. Repetition is not necessarily redundancy. A bell rings more than once. The sea returns to shore more than once. A prayer survives because people say it again. A drum would be a ridiculous instrument if it struck once and became embarrassed about repeating itself. The repeated phrase gathers what has happened since its previous appearance. When it comes back it is carrying more weight. The transition occurs through recognition.

Olga Tokarczuk gives us another freedom entirely. In Flights, one thing can simply stand beside another thing. Travel leads to anatomy, anatomy to history, history to an anecdote, an airport to a body, a body to a museum, and she does not continually stop to explain the legal basis of the association. Adjacency is enough. Human beings think this way. Something catches against something else and suddenly another room opens. What matters is not always causation. Sometimes proximity is an argument.

That freedom has become increasingly important to me while writing The Hidden Wake. Sam Douglas is aboard Delphis, crossing an ocean and later entering the Strait of Gibraltar, surrounded by stars, shipping, weather, darkness, water, navigation lights and the accumulated history of people going somewhere in boats. The conventional temptation is to explain each descent into history. Sam remembers the Phoenicians. Sam imagines them. Sam thinks about them. Sam dreams. Each phrase carefully reassures the reader that we have not lost control of the chronology.

I increasingly think those reassurances weaken the experience.

If Sam is in the Strait and knows the Phoenicians sailed these waters, why does the novel have to ask permission before Abd appears? The water is there. The wind is there. Africa is on one side and Iberia on the other. Sam sees the lights of Cádiz. A man saw another version of that coast two thousand years before. They do not have to meet through an explanatory paragraph. They are already occupying the same geography. The transition may be nothing more than a sentence ending and another beginning.

This has given me a growing vocabulary of crossings. There is the invisible handoff, where Sam notices something and the historical world simply takes possession of the page. Tokarczuk is useful here because she shows how little explanation adjacency requires. There is the voice arriving before the man, something Sebald makes possible again and again when another speaker enters the prose before we quite understand whose story we are now hearing. Sam may hear, “Keep her west until morning,” before we know that Abd is the man who said it. The voice crosses first. The body follows.

There is the change of tense, another crossing Woolf understood instinctively. In The Waves, however, her larger lesson may be that transition does not always require grammar to announce itself at all. Rhythm can carry us. One consciousness falls away and another rises, just as one wave collapses while another forms behind it. Sam watches the coast. Ships had watched it before him. Abd watches the coast disappear. Grammar changes the century, but the rhythm of the sea has already prepared us for the crossing. There is also the repeated object, which belongs in Proust's family: a rope in Sam's hand becomes hemp in another sailor's hand; phosphorescence breaking against Delphis becomes the same green fire beside an ancient hull. The object does not bridge the two periods because from the novel's point of view the object was never entirely divided between them.

There is also the sound bridge. The halyard knocks against the mast in the Atlantic night. Knock. Knock. Knock. Somewhere else, someone hammers a plank back against a hull. The century changes but the sound continues. Woolf understood the strange authority of waves, voices, recurring phrases and natural rhythm, and Joyce understood it too. Sound does not tell us which year it belongs to. That ambiguity is useful. The sea striking fiberglass and the sea striking cedar are separated by history but not necessarily by the ear.

Then there is the abrupt transition, which may be the purest of them all. Sam thinks that the Phoenicians sailed this route before Rome existed. Paragraph break. Abd dislikes the wind before dawn. Nothing else is required. The reader either accepts the grammar of the novel or does not, and by that point the novel should already have taught him how to read it. We sometimes underestimate readers because so much contemporary advice is built around the anxiety that they will become confused and flee. I think readers who have entered this kind of book are perfectly capable of learning its weather.

The transition that interests me most now may be the sentence that crosses before the narrator does. A sentence can begin with Sam's hand on the wet rail and finish with Abd's hand against cedar planking. Somewhere in the middle two thousand years disappear. There is no doorway because the sentence itself has become the doorway. Proust can do this through the duration of syntax. Faulkner can make several times inhabit one grammatical breath. Sebald can place memory inside memory until no useful border remains between the walk and the history discovered during it. Woolf can allow one voice to rise out of the rhythm left behind by another. The technique is not theirs alone, of course. What matters is the freedom they found.

Looking back across these novels, I realize I have been approaching the same problem from several directions without originally naming it. The Vigneron’s Wife finds transition through land and seasonal return. The Cat’s Paw finds it through family inheritance, gesture and recurrence. They Carry Their Songs finds it through voice, testimony, refrain and the persistence of art after the singer disappears. The Hidden Wake is moving toward something still more porous, where historical time and present consciousness begin to occupy the same physical place.

This is where salon writing becomes different from a novel organized primarily around propulsion. The familiar narrative question is: What happens next? It is a perfectly good question. Entire magnificent novels have been built from it. But it is not the only question available to fiction. The salon novel can ask: What lies beside this?

Beside this vineyard is another harvest. Beside this gesture is a dead father. Beside this song is the mouth that first sang it. Beside Sam's boat is another boat, and another one before that, and another, until the sea becomes crowded with the invisible traffic of the dead.

I do not mean this entirely mystically, although I do not object to a little mystery. We live in places other people inhabited. We sail passages other people sailed. We use words whose first speakers have vanished. We eat food made from migrations we barely remember. We sleep in houses built from the stones of older houses. Human consciousness is continually brushing against things that happened before we arrived. The conventional transition often hides this by carefully marking the border between then and now. Salon writing can leave the border open.

Proust recovered another time through sensation. Woolf made consciousness tidal. Faulkner made inheritance grammatical. Sebald walked until history rose beneath his feet. Tokarczuk discovered the enormous freedom of adjacency. What interests me is not imitating any of them. I would rather know what door each writer found and then walk through it differently.

The water does not remind Sam that others crossed before him.

They are crossing.

Perhaps that is the transition I have been trying to write all along.

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