So says short story writer Gary Lutz, whose address to the students of Columbia University’s writing program, delivered last September, has been reprinted in the January issue of The Believer. Thankfully it is one of the texts reproduced in full online. (Link via The Dizzies.) Here is an excerpt:
I can’t remember reading anything with much comprehension until eighth grade, when, studying for a science test for once, I decided to try making my way quietly through the chapter from start to finish—it was a chapter about magnets—and found myself forced to form the sounds of the words in my head as I read. Many of the words were unfamiliar to me, but the words fizzed and popped and tinkled and bonged. I was reading so slowly that in many a word I heard the scrunch and flump of the consonants and the peal of the vowels. Granted, I wasn’t retaining much of anything, but almost every word now struck me as a provocative hullabaloo. This was my first real lesson about language—this inkling that a word is a solid, something firm and palpable. It was news to me that a word is matter, that it exists in tactual materiality, that it has a cubic bulk. Only on the page is it flat and undensified. In the mouth and in the mind it is three-dimensional, and there are parts that shoot out from it or sink into its syntactic surround.
Hints of Lutz’s unique style (somewhat muffled at this point in the lecture), as well as evidence of what he is discussing, appear in this passage. I would have great difficulty were I try to try imitating Lutz’s granular, volumetric sentences. In fact, I have no desire to try. But every now and again I feel a craving for them, and so I turn to one of his story collections (Stories in the Worst Way and I Looked Alive) or to Christine Schutt’s A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer, which I find rewarding in similar ways—a thought I was grateful to find confirmed by Lutz’s own comments on her work, later in the lecture. (Others, for all I know, might bristle at the comparison.) Lutz continues:
It took me almost another decade after graduate school to figure out what writing really is, or at least what it could be for me; and what prompted this second lesson in language was my discovery of certain remaindered books—mostly of fiction, most notably by Barry Hannah, and all of them, I later learned, edited by Gordon Lish—in which virtually every sentence had the force and feel of a climax, in which almost every sentence was a vivid extremity of language, an abruption, a definitive inquietude. These were books written by writers who recognized the sentence as the one true theater of endeavor, as the place where writing comes to a point and attains its ultimacy. As a reader, I finally knew what I wanted to read, and as someone now yearning to become a writer, I knew exactly what I wanted to try to write: narratives of steep verbal topography, narratives in which the sentence is a complete, portable solitude, a minute immediacy of consummated language—the sort of sentence that, even when liberated from its receiving context, impresses itself upon the eye and the ear as a totality, an omnitude, unto itself.
He then tries “to explain what it is that such sentences all seem to have in common and how in fact they might well have been written,” and the effort is, to me, worth reading in full. He performs a very particular form of close reading that may very well follow you into whatever book or magazine you subsequently read. Also of interest: Three years ago The Believer published an interview with Lutz, which is not online in full but is nonetheless to be found here.
Tags: Christine Schutt, Gary Lutz, literary style, The Believer
