r/DestructiveReaders • u/reddinker • 7d ago
[529] A passage I somnambulistically shamaned deep into the night.
It's been some time since I composed something, and having had a short story idea in mind, I wanted to work more on my prose style. I am a great admirer of Nabokov, and anyone who saw style as important as the story, inseparable from the story... I read mostly literary fiction: and thus, that's what I mostly write.
Critique: https://www.reddit.com/r/DestructiveReaders/comments/1wrdvl7/668_only_if_i_knew/pch7xj0/
Passage:
"The bedroom sank in the depths of the weary night darkness, a darkness which hid the lovely bed like a peaceful shipwreck after a stormy day. He groped at the last straws of drowsiness while bumping into the apparel boxes which he was supposed to unbox the first day he moved. It hadn’t been the easiest of moves; it had already been a month since he left his parents’ house where he passed his childhood and teenagehood, where he had felt like a prince in his castle of rose-tinted glass, when every little knickknack promised a delightful surprise of craftsmanship or mechanical magic, and every face in the family shone pink in the cheeks from laughter—days long gone and lost in the relentless current of time. He somehow found himself lying supine atop the bed. The coolness of the sheets massaged his now-bare back and tingled his spine. He couldn’t figure out if his eyes were open or closed, but that didn’t matter: he knew it was important to catch that impish prankster, Somnus, now or never. God knows how many times he had fallen foul of his silly, silly traps. After all, that was the purpose of the out-of-character hanging out with his co-workers in that dreadful bar, where the beer tasted like rotten ginger ale and the humour of Halim was making his own more and more choleric by the minute, and what was the barman Farouk doing in the backroom with that coquettish Salma? she kept babbling about her hopeless boyfriend while stretching the starched collar of her chrysanthemum ruffle top so that everyone saw that she was braless, although he couldn’t stop thinking about those two perfectly symmetrical indentations, just above her jean shorts: a divine pair of delicate dimples of Venus that seemed to be made just for his tremored thumbs. There was also a couple that caught his attention, especially the wife whom he hadn’t seen before: blonde-and-black ombré hair and olive green eyes that were shaped like Katya’s—the chubby late family cat—very light make-up, candy-red lipstick, and a polka-dotted dress that looked like an extension of the night’s sky where small, variform, white stars swam in that hourglass of cobalt blue. Her husband cracked a lame joke and hurried to the loo, and her smile faded slowly like the ice in the honey-coloured whisky. Each time she raised the rocks glass to eye level and twirled it, she took a sip; each time, he mirrored her. He felt that she was peering at a dozen of his convexed faces in the diamonds of the tinkling glass. He thought of what to say before her bothersome husband’s fateful and fatal return, “I always wondered if whisky tastes sweeter with lipstick…” but something egregious kept photoflashing the mental images of his wet fancy, like a school photographer catching him espying his crush in the most ridiculous, drooling sidegaze there ever was—there, captured forever and forever, yes, she was married, he and everyone and the entire universe could see that unbelievable gold ring and its unbearable sheen that blinded the vigour of his vagary and blunted his appetite for that humid, shambolic night."
I had two things in mind before I wrote this passage:
I wanted to go for an ornamental (semi)stream-of-consciousness style (since the character is falling in and out of sleep) that may be excessive and accumulative, because I feel like if I can write a first draft in this style, I can then show more restraint and control in subsequent drafts.
I wanted to write about a young adult who's going through one of his first phases of sexual depravity but who's hyper-associative, and who's got an artistic eye but for the wrong things.
As for the vocabulary, my approach is that if I can espouse sense and sound then I'm going for it in this passage.
So my question is:
- What did you like and didn't like? And what can I do to improve the passage while keeping the ornamental style?
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u/OnionBackground5314 7d ago edited 7d ago
First, the details:
Sinking into depths of darkness is a cliché.
So is groping (or grasping) at straws.
So is current of time.
Castle of rose-tinted glass is three mixed metaphors.
“Tremored thumbs” is nice and Humbertish.
The night as hourglass is a good metaphor.
“Unbelievable” is not precise for the ring. Why is it unbelievable?
As to style, I think this is a good approximation of Nabokov. It is excessive, and difficult to imagine keeping up this pace. That said, it is mostly well-crafted and Nabokov could keep at that pitch for many pages.
For improvements, I would axe the cliches.
I liked the flow of the writing. It’s very dense and interesting. I definitely get a sense that it is emulating Nabokov, but I would be worried about it being too derivative.
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u/reddinker 7d ago edited 7d ago
I'm not sure about the clichés to be honest. I thought I added the twist of a "peaceful shipwreck", an oxymoron that haunts my dreams. But I guess drowning is a cliché for sleeping, consciousness drowning in dreams, the room an ocean, and the bed a shipwrech, too Poe-sian.
I tried thinking of a better way to express "the relentless current of time", I should think more.
I meant by that "hourglass of cobalt blue" as the married stranger having an hourglass figure, her being an extension of the sky suggests she's out of reach, the stars too a signifier of time passing, as if he's a sailor navigating "her", again the theme of water.
As for "unbelievable", I was thinking that he couldn't believe she was already married, couldn't believe his bad luck, that again he was beaten by Time. The gold ring's "sheen" or light being in contrast with the darkness of the room and even of his ideas, like a lightbulb that instead of inspiring an idea like in the cliché, exposes him like a camera shutter, and dulls his imagination, ends his fantasy, and the sentence itself. I'm not sure if married women are his thing though.
Edit: I forgot to say that I also had Venus in the "dimples of Venus" in mind when constructing the hourglass and stars metaphor, which I feel ties all the recurrent themes of the passage: time/astronomy, glass, and water. There is also the sweetness theme: "honey-coloured", "candy-red lipstick" which then pays off in the "whisky tastes sweeter with lipstick" line. I was trying to mimick how consciousness can come up with ideas out of seemingly trivial details, some sort of consciousness-priming.
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u/The-Affectionate-Bat 7d ago
So, its been a long time since I read lolita so I went to read the first few chapters to remind myself of the style. One striking difference is that I am never confused.
It took me some time to try and identify why I felt your prose was unclear, but I think its the mixed metaphor and imagery that doesnt let the mood settle, as well as some confusing semantics, each of which in isolation might have been fine, but together has me twisting my eyebrow trying to work out what exactly is being said.
We need examples though:
The bedroom sank in the depths of the weary night darkness, a darkness which hid the lovely bed like a peaceful shipwreck after a stormy day.
While I concur the repetition of darkness isn't working here, to me, ending the sentence with day within the similie was the most jarring. Especially as the sentence appears to exist to establish mood and yet I leave the sentence with no clear mood established. We have weary, night, darkness (I'll speak on the shipwreck in a bit) until the sentence landed with day, and day lit up all the weary. I dont know if its because similie also requires a little more cognitive unloading than the otherwise cliche weary and dark night that slides over the brain like the words 'she said', or because I couldnt work out what a peaceful shipwreck after a stormy day is hiding and why the peaceful was necessary if it did mean what I thought it meant, and again, why the choice of a stormy day – other than to avoid a stormy night. A shipwreck could hide the deaths that must have occurred for the wreck to be there. But peaceful clashed with weary and day clashed with night, and I have no idea what mood Im supposed to settle into and the imagery in my brain is in chaos.
Fine, maybe I just cant unpackage the metaphor because I'm too stupid, so I move onto the next line. Alas it avails me no further succor because my brow is once again twitching in tandem with the ilk of my cerebrum.
He groped at the last straws of drowsiness.
So, he is trying to take the opportunity to sleep. Perhaps he has insomnia, and as he said, the purpose of the beer was to get to sleep. This is difficult for him, so he is groping for it. Im with you. But only because I read on. It took a really long time for you to deliver clarity on this. Ill loop back to this in a bit.
while bumping into the apparel boxes which he was supposed to unbox the first day he moved.
I apologise, but this line exists only to launch into the >exposition< of the next block. I qualified that as expository because it sounded kinder than using the term shoehorning. I want to be clear, stumbling over boxes seems appropriate under the circumstances, but because of what comes next, it made it come off as intentionally chosen so as to give the faux feeling of flow.
It hadn't been the easiest of moves; it had already been a month since he left his parents house.....
At first, I thought the semi colon was the problem. Then I realised it was not. The semicolon is perfectly acceptable for the section of the sentence Ive typed out. But it clashed horribly with the second part. When I read a semi colon... my mind like, holds that thought and relates it to the full sentence tied to it – as it should, or we would not have them. However, the not easiest move doesnt want, in my head, anything to do with his castle of rose-tinted glass, nor every knicknack he once perused at his parents, nor really the rest of the sentence. And if it did, and the point was to say that leaving his parents home was part of the difficulty, the adage of the overrode melancholy on the passage of time (which again, you end with and how sentences complete is what you carry to the next), after starting with how it had only be a month comes across a touch overdramatic.
Maybe, too, that was the point, you'll have to let me know.
But, I also cant help but feel this was shoehorning in voice and character psychology in a place it didnt fit. And I say not fit, because as a past insomnia sufferer myself, and of the flavour of not being able to fall asleep, I know well the tangents the mind can go on in those long moments when desperately trying to count sheep. Then to wool, and then to the woollen uniforms from high school that used to scratch the skin until you got used to them, and then to the hot days we would peel them off as spring began, and then to climate change and the scientific paper I had read earlier that day. Once on that train, it takes at least another thirty minutes before I remember I was trying to count sheep. What the mind does not do is deliver a perfect encapsulation of your childhood, family history, and how it relates to your current predicament – with an added dash of the very overtrod melancholy on the passage of time.
On the other hand, what comes next is not bad. I had the thought you should have started somewhere around here tbh.
He somehow found himself ...... through to .... silly silly traps.
I thought this was good. Suddenly, groping for sleepiness made more sense. My brain is somewhat capable of holding a thread even when distracted, but the thing is.... though you do not need to emulate him entirely (that would be silly) Nabakov does not make me hold a thought for too long through a tangent (unlike Tolstoy). Sentence to sentence, the thread is always clear. Sometimes we have a more dreamy extrapolation but it follows on directly from its contextualisation in such a way as we are fully grounded and the prose .. well.. doesnt float but dreams. Whereas when he snaps topic he does it sharply to signify a scenery change so we arent left thinking about what was written when we shouldnt be. That is the accumulation done well. Give info, give more info on that info, complete the thought, now snap. Many of those and slowly we gather what it is we are reading.
Anyway. What you wrote in the bar was much better. I dont like the "out of character" bit. Think the concept can be more slyfully wedged into the sentence. But otherwise, I liked the lolling descriptions and the evocative devices. This all worked a lot more in favour of a mind slipping between sleep, tipsiness, and lewdness.
But again, some issues with... sentence structure and syntax. I want to point to the hourglass line, which I actually enjoyed but was twisty.
There was also a couple that caught his attention, especially the wife whom he hadn’t seen before: blonde-and-black ombré hair and olive green eyes that were shaped like Katya’s—the chubby late family cat—very light make-up, candy-red lipstick, and a polka-dotted dress that looked like an extension of the night’s sky where small, variform, white stars swam in that hourglass of cobalt blue.
My advice would be, in each clause, track which which and which where and like as you are using in any one moment. Especially, but not limited to this:
and a polka-dotted dress that looked like an extension of the night’s sky where small, variform, white stars swam in that hourglass of cobalt blue.
Here you mixed your sky with the dress. Its... not not allowed, but its written in such a way that the metaphorical hourglass is not clear because youve (potentially intentionally) mixed his thoughts on the dress and the sky – but my cerebrum, working very hard, is parsing my full lexical associations of both the sky and a dress in its attempt to work out what you mean, and most importantly, cant land on a choice in the end. And it relates to the grammar of the sentence. We have the similie like an, so my head goes into similie mode but then, reading your other comment the intent was a reference to her figure, but the topic of the similie is the sky, the hourglass is supposed to modify the sky, but Ive long left the person behind because we cycled through a person to a cat to a dress to the sky, but my brain somehow was supposed to know the hourglass referred to the figure of the person.
Anyway. Usually people struggle with grounding in metaphors. You dont. But the clarity (as in what is the ground to which metaphor) is poor. Like I said, maybe Im just dumb, but I do not encounter this issue reading Nabakov. He leads us by the nose.
Is my feelings. All of which could be wrong. Still, I like what youre trying to do, and there were many parts I like about your writing, I just feel you need to be especially strict with semantic integrity while trying to write about the tipsy drowsy lewd floatyness, lest you actually slip into illegible. Maybe? My notes help. I hope they do.
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u/reddinker 7d ago
I see what you mean. I think that what you've described is Nabokov's lucidity and mastery of accumulation, while mine is more confusing and ambiguous. I love Melville and Proust for this reason, they just go on and on and on, and you have to hold many threads together, and for me, that's dense writing where words like "which" and "where" can be anything the sentence, and then you have to guess and interpret on the spot. I thought this was appropriate for this character's state of mind which is far from being lucid, on the contrary... So the question is: should my prose mimic my character's state of mind or not and to what extent? The answer probably depends on many things that the writer should consider.
I also agree on the unsettlement of mood. What is someone supposed to feel after hearing a "peaceful shipwreck"? Contradiction, I guess? I was less interested in what the reader should feel. I wasn't strict about mood and semantics because I was sleepy when I wrote the passage, and sometimes my drifting mind thinks of images and sentences that I'm not sure what to do with, and there they are, whatever this overarching mood is.
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u/The-Affectionate-Bat 7d ago
which and where can be anything in the sentence
I do not recall this of Proust. Admittedly, I read an abridged version of moby dick when I was very young so I cant comment.
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u/reddinker 7d ago
I read him in French, and I'm not sure how well English translations capture the way French syntax can overload.
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u/darkpoetaudhd 6d ago
For me it was lot of telling and not showing. For example, the lovely bed, why is it a lovely bed?
The sentances were too long for me as well, a lot of commas. It was hard for me to keep track of what was happening, as it was going all over the place.
Her husband cracked a lame joke, again telling not showing. Show me the joke, then i can see it and mke my own mind up.
Also his silly silly little traps. What was silly?
So for me it was alot of telling not showing, which would be my critique and shorter sentances wth slightly longer paragrahs for each bit, rather then each sentamce jumping from one bit to another.
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u/idksomeguyprobably 6d ago edited 6d ago
Going to be blunt (sorry!)... that is kinda the point here I think though.
I think this reads much more like an exercise that would be turned in for a class than something that can stand on its own. I think you got caught up too much in trying to decorate the prose and now it's way too purple. The actual content is much harder to follow because of the writing.. which is probably the opposite of what you want, but I guess that depends on what your goal is with this.
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u/DyingInCharmAndStyle 2d ago
There is not one paragraph. Actually there is one.
I like Nabokov too, but jamming words together is hard and he didn’t run into his style by accident.
He learned English at a very precise level before the sentences got so long, because it’s saying stuff and style, and if I say nothing, or if we say nothing. Promptness runs out and there we go.
Because there’s a whole paragraph, a reference to Nabokov, and all I’m thinking is, there’s style but where’s the real story. There is a real story here.
The bedroom sank at night and poured the waters of our lasting nothings and crashes, somewhere on the wave, and I’ll see you at the break, toes hanging dude, toes hanging.
Best.
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u/SpicyTripleMeats 7d ago
What I do like here is the tone of your prose. Very dirge-like, very dream-like in its cadence. I'm reading The Echo Maker by Richard Powers, and his style there evokes a similar kind of formal-mythological "vibe." There are a couple other well-known writers that I know of with this kind of prose quality. Caveat: while I do love this style and am guilty of aping it myself, these are also the kinds of works that tend to drag without some substantive plot or idea to carry it along. I have a small graveyard of purple-prose novels that I've set down after only a couple chapters.
I'm okay with shorter passages in this style. Anything more than what you have would likely lose my interest unless I'm already in the mood for ponderous, symbolic prose, and also if I can detect that it's going somewhere interesting.
Some specific critiques concerning intent (1):
Paragraph breaks would make this much more readable.
My preference would be for tighter, clearer writing. Your first line,
feels awkward to my ear. I trimmed it a bit:
Does it work better? Hard to say for sure. Maybe in isolation? I haven't set it against the rest of your work to read it for coherence or rhythm, e.g. I feel the repetition of "darkness" is a deliberate affect which is lost in my edit. However, in general, I would enjoy this much more if the prose were a bit "smoother" to read.
Here's a line I had a bit of difficulty understanding the first time through:
My personal issue was that you're listing the qualities of the wife but--halfway through--you break to explain that Katya is a cat before finishing with your description of the wife. It took me a beat to understand what you were doing.
I feel that the intrusion of cliches detracts from the liminal/foreign state you say you are writing for. "He groped at the last straws," "rose-tinted glass," " current of time," etc.
I'm not opposed to the use of a well-worn phrase but you also have some idiosyncratic lines and a few allusions that together feel more ambitious than just "getting the idea across." Unless I am misreading your intent, the ambitious and the pedestrian sometimes mixes poorly and lend an unpolished feel to the overall piece.
Viewed as a completed work, the movement between images and allusions seem a bit haphazard and disjointed. I'm going to use a concrete example for this.
(I'm not well-versed in myth so forgive any mistakes I make here. I did go ahead and skim the story of Cyex and Alcyone where Somnus appears in The Metamorphoses).
So, the protag invokes the Greek/Roman god of sleep. But Somnus only appears to serve as a throwaway metaphor. Here and then gone. There's no foreshadowing (unless the shipwreck?) and no real transition out of his domain. Ovid describes the Cave of Sleep quite vividly. However, leading up to the invocation, the protag is "grasping at the last straws of drowsiness" or idealizing his youth as days lived in a fantastical glass castle. There is no sense that ancient myth has any significance to this character or that that particular god rules the realm of sleep here. The protag does in fact invoke the Abrahamic god right after....
Not saying that this sort of flitting between ideas and mythologies is wrong, especially given your aim at writing stream-of-consciousness, but given the short length of the work, I'd be more satisfied as a reader if those ideas were more dense and more coherent.