On a Passage from Christine Schutt’s “Winterreise” in the book A Day, A Night, Another Day, Summer
The Bite of Schutt
Perhaps no other current writer, besides Garielle Lutz, exemplifies the nature of how one sentence leads the writer/reader to the next, via extrusion, as Christine Schutt, who avers, “Each sentence is extruded from the previous sentence; look behind you when writing, not ahead. Your obligation is to know your objects and to steadily, inexorably darken and deepen them.” When reading Schutt, one might not think they are in fiction but in a Robert Lowell or an Elizabeth Bishop poem, but a poem pictured askance in a fictional landscape, say the painting in Bishop’s “Large Bad Picture” laying out in a cobwebbed attic of an old country house in Maine — Schutt’s country, as well. The poem enters fiction — a sharp mind flung into a widening gyre of text. One can start with the first sentence of Winterreise since everything will be following from there in this dusky, harrowing, slate winter story. It begins with a familiar/unfamiliar construction, in medias res by the narrator:
Used to be even in the rain we walked hooded in water-repellent bicolor suits that swished and sounded as if we were fat when we were thin, both of us. Margaret and I, and only walking for the routine and the way it felt, hands free, holding nothing. Children, leashes — my first husband — we left even the dogs sleeping to meet each other at the entrance to the park marked by the great elm, that folktale tree with its house-wide trunk strung green. We meet there still although not as often — and no more in the rain.
From there one is guided to what is the next station in the text: “…we left even the dogs sleeping to meet each other at the entrance to the park marked by the great elm, that folktale tree with its house-wide trunk strung green..” The parade of long e’s in this sentences stuns: “we,” “even,” “sleeping,” “meet,” “each,” “tree,” all to end on “green.” (The next sentence begins “We meet…”) Forget what is said, listen to how it sounds. This isn’t showing off, this is shining forth, so that six pages later, all these stored up soundscapes of the opening paragraph continue to urge and express, a string quartet, when more long e’s and w’s dominate during a mini-monument to Thoreau.
In the title passage, Schutt’s narrator begins a sentence, “Schoolgirl thick, braided, bound, fantastically clipped in enormous clips…” a move more reminiscent of poetry than anything else. This clause is describing “her hair,” which is wonderfully “untouched” by her husband’s “leaving” or her boy’s “expensive confusions, his noisy failures.” “Disappointments” never “disclaimed themselves“ in her friend Margaret’s hair, though the rest of her “contorted,” before the beautiful, “Her brow was a scowl even sleeping” — pentameter with a trochee in the middle and at the end. And after such a starstruck line, a single dollop of a sentence: “I knew,” as if to fend off the electricity of “even sleeping” a little. Again, as in the first paragraph, there is communication by sound before the whole meaning, the full import can be read in. The rhymes, the alliterations are within the body of the text — quartered into the hair and the brow — Schutt is quite the vivisectionist but her scalpels are the words that need to cut in a certain way to the reader, haunting the operation performed on the character, which is really being performed on us, the reader. These poetic images and acoustic landscapes heighten our lives though temporarily lived through this narrator, this character — one closes into the relationship in such a ghostly, but honest manner; watching one sleep, and that scowl in the brow! And we repeat “brow/scowl” because it delights and because it’s true — a child’s repetition. Everything extruded from the last. The method “sounds” easier than it is. It usually takes years of quarrying to find one’s object and learn how to darken and deepen it, through sight of words and sound of words — not just meaning. Sometimes word choices don’t make common sense, but they make sense poetically. Schutt can see and hear her way to the end of a story — or a novel — the most notable being Florida and Prosperous Friends.
In my imprecations that the sound is the story I don’t want to shortchange Schutt’s narrative qualities, but her sound (sentences) is character, it is plot. The rich language offers a feast just as there is a narrator questioning and seeing and a character struggling and dying. All leads to the ending paragraph. Thoreau has been a leitmotif throughout and he returns to haunt the finality of the story — he dies so we don’t have to see the narrator’s friend do so: “Thoreau, on the morning of his death and being read to, is said to have said, “Now comes good sailing.” Quotable to the very end, he is a hard, clean object, a white stone in dark water, woods, greens, needles underfoot. He is a walker; he walks a distance, as we would from here to here.” His death is full of those heightened shards of light and sound and smell: “…he is a hard, clean object, a white stone in dark water, woods, greens, needles underfoot”: “clean” flashing “green” and then a cesura, before “needles” continues the long “e” parade only to en on that tender iambic construction “underfoot.” The bite of Schutt is in the turning of words, the unexpected trochees, the gleam on the fresh spit of life, the fresh paint of her lacquering.
