Theme & Variations: Readings and Responses
What Raymond Quineau’s Exercises in Style lacks in plot it more than makes up for in rich narrative variation and substance. Beginning with an establishing notation, we understand a small series of events which see a man get on a bus, witness an altercation between two passengers, one of which is noted as having a long neck and a strange hat, and then later one of them is seen again getting advice about adding a button to his overcoat. This establishing notation provides the base from which Quineau moves through a series of stylistic deviations, which hold the components of the story consistent, but adjust the telling of them in adherence to an enforced literary rule. It takes the original, applies a stylistic constraint to it, and tells the story again.
These deviations move from double entry, where the individual elements of the story are repeated and rephrased inside of their original sentences and contexts, to often redundant effect, to litotes, exercises in metaphor, and retrograde narrative where the story is told in reverse. Quineau repeats the short story through these exercises as a means of illustrating how tone and style, when applied to the same base experience, can affect the reader’s understanding of what is being told. In its ritual of repetition comes the lesson of stylistic approach for students reading Quineau. How might a story change based on the style applied to it? Does a story become more urgent when told in reverse? What if the writer applies a heroic language to a seemingly banal event? What if the tale is told through smell? Through taste? How does it change? How should it change? These questions ask the writing student to consider the impact upon the reader. If we tell a story through a series of reactions, how is it different from telling the same story as if it was a cross-examination in a court room? How should it be different? And in considering these choices and their impact upon the reader, Quineau provides a practical exercise for both students and teachers of writing, and a framework for a discussion of tonal choice which wraps around the events of the story.
Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story echoes Quineau’s work in rendering a similarly banal set of events as malleable panels in a graphic novel. Again, not much happens. A man is working on his laptop, gets up, is asked the time by a voice upstairs, after which he goes to the refrigerator but cannot remember what he was looking for. Like Quineau, Madden tells the short story through a series of different stylistic approaches. First as an establishing template, from which all deviations are referenced, and then through a series of graphic diversions and visual viewpoints such as monologue, the voice upstairs, a voyeur across the street, the inventory of elements used, and even through the language of the funny papers. The exercise here is the same as Quineau but the outcome produced is different. Where Quineau uses the deviations in literary framework and applies them to his events, Madden uses the language of the graphic novel and comic book to apply the same approach but with a different experiential outcome. Madden’s exercises broaden Quineau’s original approach by adding a visual layer on top of adjustments to the language used.
Where Quineau is describing the events differently, Madden is showing us what those events look like through different eyes. Quineau is telling us what’s happening in each deviation, Madden is showing us with crisper visualization, even if it changes every time. We might imagine further expressions of this approach which are entirely sound-based, or told through the eyes of different cultures and languages of the world. We might apply a framework of different mathematical approaches to the events or set the events in a wide range of historical contexts. We might tell the story through a lens of different movie genres or political biases. What Quineau and Madden show us is the elasticity of these applications, and the enormous breadth of choice inside of the decisions which wrap around how we as writers might tell the story. And by holding the events consistent but applying thematic variations to them, we are able to apply a method of discovery and exploration to our work which can often yield wonderfully unexpected results.
I’ve recently been experimenting with a framework of constraint in building more habit around my writing practice. I am trying to remember my dreams and write into them at the start of every day. Every morning it’s the same. Whatever was going on behind my eyes during the night is gone. I wish I could remember my dreams more clearly than I do. The melatonin has made my dreams more vibrant and terrifying than ever. Each fragment remembered both end and beginning. The compulsion here is to find a way to get what’s in… out. To get what’s there… here. To make a new path which bridges something I’m told when I’m not conscious, and to manifest it in the real world. Not in a dadaist or surrealist sense. I am not interested in weird for weird’s sake. But I am interested in trying to surface something new as a creative outlet. I’ve often thought that dreams are like the pages of your life, skimmed forwards and backwards. I don’t remember where I heard that, but it still resonates with me. It doesn’t come naturally, or some mornings even at all, but when it does I’m choosing to linger upon the alarm going off, and lean in with a curiosity to see what follows. The mental constraint is to try to remember, but also apply the discipline of physical habit to it every day in visualizing what remains. What it affords me is the opportunity to think broader about subject matter, not necessarily in style and tone like Quineau, but in imagery and event, like Madden. So far it’s produced some fun results as short stories:
https://www.anthologymatt.com/laboratory/those-in-coach-were-the-first-to-go
https://www.anthologymatt.com/laboratory/marking-time
https://www.anthologymatt.com/laboratory/the-red-star-sales
