The use of description to establish character in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest

Here is a fine piece of descriptive writing from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey.

I realised I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was scared to look outside. Now I had to open them. I looked out the window and saw for the first time how the hospital was out in the country. The moon was low in the sky over the pastureland: the face of it was scarred and scuffed where it had just torn up out of the snarl of scrub oak and madrone trees on the horizon. The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon. It called to mind how I noticed the exact same thing when I was off on a hunt with Papa and the uncles and I lay rolled in blankets Grandma had woven, lying off a piece from where the men hunkered around the fire as they passed a quart jar of cacturs liquor in a silent circle. I watched that big Oregon prairie moon above me put all the stars around it to shame. I kept awake watching, to see if the moon ever got dimmer or if the stars got brighter, till the dew commenced to drift onto my cheeks and I had to pull a blanket over my head.

As an example of how to integrate descriptive writing into narrative, this cannot be beaten. The narrator is Chief Bromden, an inmate in an asylum who is doubly cloistered by the perception in his head that the world is under the control of ‘The Combine’, which controls thoughts and actions in secrecy. Not long before this passage, there is a harrowing scene in which the Chief describes the impenetrable fog which he thinks The Combine brings down on the world in order to go about its business. This, then, is a man wholly confined. And yet, of course, he is a countryman, used to freedom and open spaces. It is a tragic situation he has found himself in.

And so, in this passage, we get the first inkling of the Chief looking outward once more. He notices for the first time the rural location of the hospital and gives a vivid description of it. This seamlessly leads him into a reminiscence of a happy experience from his childhood. The shift is beautifully handled – a moment of relaxation in the present, releasing repressed memories of the past. In this way, description of landscape is being used specifically to build character and character development. It is beautifully handled.

The passage continues, and it is worth quoting at length because it is superbly done:

Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window – cast a long spider of shadow out across the grass as it ran out of sight behind a hedge. When it ran back to where I could get a better look, I saw it was a dog, a young, gangly mongrel slipped off from home to find out about things went on after dark. He was sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour. He’d run his muzzle down a hole, butt up in the air and tail going, then dash off to another. The moon glistened around him on the wet grass, and when he ran he left tracks like dabs of dark paint spattered across the blue shine of the lawn. Galloping from one particularly interesting hole to the next, he became so took with what was coming off – the moon up there, the night, the breeze full of smells so wild makes a young boy drunk – that he had to lie down on his back and roll. He twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray came off him in the moon like silver scales.

He sniffed all the holes over again one quick one, to get the smells down good, then suddenly froze still with one paw lifted and his head tilted, listening. I listened too, but I couldn’t hear anything except the popping of the window shade. I listened for a long time. Then, from a long way off, I heard a high, laughing gabble, faint and coming closer. Canada honkers going south for the winter. I remembered all the hunting and belly-crawling I’d ever done trying to kill a honker, and that I never got one.

I tried to look where the dog was looking to see if I could find the flock, but it was too dark. The honking came closer and closer till it seemed like they must be flying right through the dorm, right over my head. Then they crossed the moon – a black, weaving necklace, drawn into a V by that lead goose. For an instant that lead goose was right in the centre of that circle, bigger than the others, a black cross opening and closing, then he pulled his V out of sight into the sky once more.

I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound. The dog could still hear them a long time after me. He was still standing with his paw up; he hadn’t moved or barked when they flew over. When he couldn’t hear them any more either, he commenced to lope off in the direction they had gone, towards the highway, loping steady and solemn like he had an appointment. I held my breath and I could hear the flap of his big paws on the grass as he loped: then I could hear a car speed up out of a turn. The headlights loomed over the rise and peered ahead down the highway. I watched the dog and the car making for the same spot of pavement.

The dog was almost to the rail fence at the edge of the grounds when I felt somebody slip up behind me. Two people. I didn’t turn, but I knew it was the black boy named Geever and the nurse with the birthmark and the crucifix. I heard a whir of fear start up in my head. The black boy took my arm and pulled me round. ‘I’ll get ‘im,’ he says.

‘It’s chilly at the window there, Mr Bromden,’ the nurse tells me. ‘Don’t you think we’d better climb back into our nice toasty bed?’

‘He cain’t hear,’ the black boy tells her. ‘I’ll take him. He’s always untying his sheet and roaming ‘round.’

There is an astonishing poignancy to this. We have this man, physically trapped in an asylum and mentally enclosed by his own irrational fears, and it is counterpointed by, firstly, the flighty dog, then the skein of geese and finally by a car – all of them free, going about their own business unhindered. Meanwhile, the Chief describes all of this in exquisite detail – ‘blue shine of the lawn’, the ‘black, weaving necklace’ of geese, the steady and solemn lope of the dog. Be clear, whatever the Chief’s current situation, here is a man at ease with nature.

And then the reality, perhaps portended by the arrival of that car – humanity, modern progress – and the Chief becomes aware of a presence behind him. The ‘whir of fear’ starts up in his head. His reverie is over, his moment of freedom finished. The black boy and the nurse deal with him gently enough, but consider the nurse’s words, her patronising use of the first person plural, the childish description of a ‘toasty bed’. This to a man who could conjure such magical descriptions, who demonstrates a remarkable sensitivity to nature, but the nurse blithely assumes that there is nothing happening in his brain, that he is some sort of zombie wandering the ward aimlessly and staring vacantly into space. And the scene concludes chillingly, with that reminder of the Chief’s situation, the sheet that has to be tied around him nightly to confine him to his bed. It is clear that the Chief may have found a solitary, fleeting moment of escape, but it was a chimera. He is unable to comprehend our world. But we, to our shame, are equally unable to comprehend his. A more poignant description of mental illness it would be hard to find.

Harbinger in print

I have a flash piece published in the new volume by Palm-Sized Press.


It's adapted from my first novel, which I'm currently rewriting, and features the introduction of one of the main characters, old man Disdain. 

You can order it here:
 
 http://bit.ly/PSVol1 

I wrote this in February 2009, over ten years ago:

It is very easy to view fascism as a mid-twentieth century aberration, a peculiar blending of circumstance and history, poverty, desperation, the opportunism of extreme nationalists. It was all of that, but it was much, much more. To an extent, there's no such thing as fascism - it is too tangled and confused to be easily isolated into a single, coherent doctrine. But what it is, most certainly, is the most anti-human of all political belief systems. It reduces the human to an element, a part of the system. This, of course, is deeply ironic since one of the triggers of fascism is a mistrust, bordering on hatred, of systems, the machine, the totality of modern living which has the effect of pushing people in a direction they don't like. But it is a sorry fact of life that revolutions against a state generally end up replicating that state: constant revolution is impossible, it will always retreat into reaction.

The consequence of this casual approach to fascism, however, is complacency. It happened then. It won't happen again.

Look around you. Fascism reacts against the 'system'. It is the reactionary made political. It hates reason, abjures argument. Its method is dogma - shouting from the rooftops, making slogans, creating scapegoats, raising the temperature. Anything that reduces debate and increases passion. In all of this it displays an antipathy to progress - 'it was better the way it used to be, before...'

Before. Before what?

'Before the immigrants came. Before the bankers and politicians stuck their noses in the trough. Before we got joined to Europe. Before all these black people/Muslims/terrorists starting coming here and changing our ways of life. Before kids were feral. Before our jobs were being lost in their thousands. Back when it was just us, and we were in control. The good old days. What we need now is a return to volkish tradition. Innerlichkeit.

Fascism was and is a reaction against enlightenment. It uses religion, that fundamental spirit that is inside all of us, some relic of our prehistoric forbears, to foment disaffection. It uses fear. It uses jealousy. It uses anger. It takes the concerns of the present and uses them as a way of suggesting the past - a mythical past - was better, and that the way to progress is to retreat.

We're in dangerous times. The seeds are there, ready to germinate. All they need is indifference. The casual way we are casting aside our civil liberties suggests to me that such indifference is already present.

I didn't realise, sadly, how dangerous the times are becoming. I'm researching the 1930s at the moment for a fiction series I'm embarking on, and the parallels between today and the 1930s are horrifying and frightening. I've always been a believer in Jock Tamson's Bairns, the house of the human family which will prevail through all evil, but it's getting increasingly difficult to believe in it. These are dark, dark days.

Saul Bellow

Saul Bellow wrote:

Critics often translate important books - write them again, as it were, in the fashionable intellectual jargon. And then the books are no longer themselves. They have been borrowed by Culture, with a capital C. There are two things here that we must clearly distinguish. One is the work of art with its direct effect on people. The other is a work of art as a cultural commodity, as a piece of society's property in Culture. In the second form, art becomes a fertilizer for the cultivation of languages, vocabularies, intellectual styles, ornaments, degrees, honors, prizes, and all the rest of that. That's Culture with a capital C. That's what I'm talking about. And this is what always happens. Our model for it is the Christian religion, which started with faith and ended with churches.

So let's here it for visceral responses to the written word. How does it make you feel, not how does it make everyone else feel, so you have to feel the same?

Katherine Mansfield - how to write an opening

 

The opening of Katherine Mansfield's wonderful story, The Doll's House, is worthy of analysis. Here it is:

When dear old Mrs. Hay went back to town after staying with the Burnells she sent the children a doll's house. It was so big that the carter and Pat carried it into the courtyard, and there it stayed, propped up on two wooden boxes beside the feed-room door. No harm could come of it; it was summer. And perhaps the smell of paint would have gone off by the time it had to be taken in. For, really, the smell of paint coming from that doll's house ("Sweet of old Mrs. Hay, of course; most sweet and generous!") -- but the smell of paint was quite enough to make any one seriously ill, in Aunt Beryl's opinion. Even before the sacking was taken off. And when it was . . .

There stood the doll's house, a dark, oily, spinach green, picked out with bright yellow. Its two solid little chimneys, glued on to the roof, were painted red and white, and the door, gleaming with yellow varnish, was like a little slab of toffee. Four windows, real windows, were divided into panes by a broad streak of green. There was actually a tiny porch, too, painted yellow, with big lumps of congealed paint hanging along the edge.

But perfect, perfect little house! Who could possibly mind the smell? It was part of the joy, part of the newness.

"Open it quickly, some one!"

The hook at the side was stuck fast. Pat pried it open with his pen- knife, and the whole house-front swung back, and -- there you were, gazing at one and the same moment into the drawing-room and dining-room, the kitchen and two bedrooms. That is the way for a house to open! Why don't all houses open like that? How much more exciting than peering through the slit of a door into a mean little hall with a hat-stand and two umbrellas! That is -- isn't it? -- what you long to know about a house when you put your hand on the knocker. Perhaps it is the way God opens houses at dead of night when He is taking a quiet turn with an angel. . . .

The point of view in the opening paragraph is interesting: it is omnisicent third person – an external narrator telling us the story. But it is also closely told from the point of view of Aunt Beryl. “Dear old Mrs Hay” and “Sweet of old Mrs Hay” could almost be her speaking. This is an example of the Uncle Charles Principle, where the voice becomes so linked to a specific character it begins to take on characteristics of that person. The fact that the opening is so closely linked to Aunt Beryl alerts the reader to the fact that she will be a key person in the story.

But then there is an ellipsis (…) which clearly separates this paragraph from the next one. And now the second and third paragraphs are more closely linked to the children. The doll’s house is described in loving detail. “Perfect little house! Who could possibly mind the smell?” This is a totally different POV from the first paragraph. Compare the constant references to paint (and even glue and varnish) with the staid distaste for the smell in that opening paragraph. Could a greater distinction be made between these opposing viewpoints?

And then in paragraph five we have “there you are”, which has the effect of drawing the reader into the story. But which point of view are we drawn into? Aunt Beryl’s or the children’s? It is the children’s, of course, and in this way the reader becomes complicit in their excitement.

In the space of very few words, Mansfield has brilliantly established the tension in the story –  the doll's house – and the source of conflict – Aunt Beryl. This opening is rich in description. There is strong characterisation of both Aunt Beryl and the – as yet unnamed but clearly excited – children. But there is clearly a distinction between the reactions of Aunt Beryl and the children, and it is clear that this is where the tension will develop in the story. It is also clear, from that fifth paragraph, where the reader's sympathies are expected to lie.

The economy is exemplary. A brilliant piece of writing.

Remarkably, Katherine Mansfield was dissatisfied with her short stories. She said: "I've been a selective camera, and . . . my slices of life have been partial, misleading, and a little malicious. Further, they have had no other purpose than to record my attitude which in itself stood in need of change if it was to become active instead of passive." I think she is being unnecessarily hard on herself here. While many of her stories end in great unhappiness, there is nothing malicious in them. On the contrary, the stories are designed to allow us, the impartial readers and observers of these people’s misfortunes, to assess what might be done to remedy those misfortunes. They are, then, entirely hopeful and honest endeavours.

Shortly before her death (at the very early of 34, from tuberculosis), she wrote witheringly of her friends in London who:

have come to an agreement not to grow any more, to stay just so – all clipped and pruned and tight. As for taking risks, making mistakes, changing their opinions, being in the wrong, committing themselves, losing themselves, being human beings in fact –no, a thousand times!

And this, it seems to me, is the key to her work. There is a serious and earnest searching for something in these stories, some understanding of what it is to be human, to be alive, to be in love.

Delta Wedding by Eudora Welty

 

It is a rarity to completely fall into a novel and experience its slow unfolding almost as though one were a character oneself but, with Eudora Welty’s masterpiece, Delta Wedding, this is exactly what happens. The action is relayed through the various perspectives of the extended Fairchild family and, indeed, sometimes the same events are seen through more than one set of eyes with inevitable, subtle shifts of emphasis and interpretation. Even within the best of families there will be tensions, and there certainly are with the Fairchilds, some of whom have a grip on reality that is tenuous to say the least. Nonetheless, there is a real spirit, a kinship which overcomes all. This is a family that is rooted in its Delta homeland and that looks after its own, and the result is that the reader is swept up in their close and happy embrace. It is as though we have been privileged to stay with them for those few days before and after the grand family wedding and, at the story’s conclusion, at the end of our stay, we are forced to bid them an unwilling farewell.

On a simple reading, Delta Wedding could perhaps be considered Faulkner- or O’Connor-lite – Southern eccentrics doing eccentric things, but without the underlying tragedy of Faulkner or the violence of O’Connor. But this would be to grossly underestimate the novel and to overlook, amid the genuine warmth of its vision, those hints and portents of the darkness of life. There is a remarkable subtlety to the novel which, for me, marks it out as certainly superior to the didacticism of Flannery O’Connor and right up there at the pinnacle of southern fiction. This is not southern gothic: the Fairchilds, although strange indeed, are not freaks. Nor do they dance to their author's tune. They feel like real, breathing human beings.

The novel revolves around the extended Fairchild family, but in particular focuses on three characters. Firstly, nine-year old Laura, whose mother has just died and who is staying with her aunt and uncle and cousins, ostensibly for the wedding but possibly for good, as the Fairchilds decide whether to close ranks and embrace her to their bosom. Secondly, and possibly most importantly, there is Laura’s uncle George, the only person in the family seemingly untouched by southern eccentricity, and someone who is idolised by the family. And thirdly, Laura’s cousin Dabney, who is to marry (beneath herself, as is frequently hinted) the farm overseer Troy Flavin. Besides these, there is a cast of rich and beautifully described family members – mother and father Ellen and Battle, George’s wife Robbie, who has run away and left him, but who returns because she adores him, the remaining children, ranging from the toddler Bluet upwards, each with his or her own character, and a range of eccentric aunts and uncles who lend humour and warmth to the action.

But it is the family as a collective unit that is perhaps the principal character here. Welty establishes a wholly credible family whose kin-loyalties leave them devoted to one another but also insensitive to the needs of others. Robbie, for example, George’s wife, struggling to gain acceptance in the family, complains to Ellen at one point: “Once I tried to be like the Fairchilds. I thought I knew how,” and ends with the devastating critique: “You’re just loving yourselves in each other – yourselves over and over again!” And there is, indeed, a cockiness, even arrogance, about the Fairchilds, demonstrated most tellingly in the novel’s most dramatic moment, told several times in the narrative from different perspectives. On a family outing, they are dallying by the railway line and one of the family, the slow-witted Maureen, gets her foot trapped in the tracks. George calmly tries to free it, while the rest of the family jump clear. A train approaches but George, although he could have escaped, remains resolutely on the trestle, as though facing down the train. Ultimately, the train stops just short of them and the engineer shouts his apologies from the window. It becomes a grand, humorous family story. ‘Inevitable,’ Ellen describes it to herself later, while acknowledging that non-family members would have seen it as ‘conceited.’ George Poore, in his contemporary review, sums this moment up neatly: ‘To the Fairchilds...it was an amusing episode; to outsiders it was a piece of reckless quixotry typical of the Fairchilds, the essence of Fairchildism.’

But then again, it might be argued this was the nature of the Delta people in general. As Dr. Murdoch states at one point: “But – can’t do a thing about Delta people... They’re the worst of all. One myself, can’t do a thing about myself.” The family are summed up best, near the end of the novel, from the point of view of the matriarch Ellen: ‘Passionate, sensitive, to the point of strain and secrecy, their legend was happiness. “The Fairchilds are the happiest people!”’

Throughout, the novel is told in subtly changing voices, from a range of points of view. It is remarkably controlled and beautifully handled, giving each character strength and individuality. However, Paul Binding argues:

In the novel's overall movement there is rather too little overt tension for its theme to emerge as sharply above its context as it should, and again, there is insufficient concentration on one viewpoint. We forsake Laura for Ellen, for Dabney, for Robbie, and a certain dissipation of attention results.

I simply do not agree. The theme emerges from the whole, from the gradual revelation of the family in its various misconceptions and misperceptions, its prejudices and partialities. Throughout, there is a sense of excitement and anticipation and of a tremendous vitality, as everyone awaits the forthcoming wedding. There is the bustle of ordinary family life, given fresh breath by the ensemble nature of the characterisations, and with each shift of point of view we see a subtle change in the narrative frame, are given a slightly different impression, offered another interpretation. In just the way that Faulkner uses different voices in The Sound and The Fury to help establish theme out of narrative, Welty uses her characters to ensure Delta Wedding is more than just a snapshot of an idyllic life. Without these shifts the novel could easily have become bucolic, a comfortable despatch from arcadia, but instead Welty ensures that we see this family as it really is – fine, happy, but as flawed as everyone else’s – and we see the world in all its dark reality. The beautiful girl who, unlike simple Maureen, is indeed knocked over by the train and killed, ensures we do not lose sight of that.

And so Eudora Welty creates something truly memorable. Delta Wedding is a remarkable novel because it is a slice of typical southern realism relayed through characteristically fine dialogue and strong characterisation, while at the same time it manages to convey something deeper, a glimpse of the realities of human nature, in all its good and bad.