Conjuring the Magic of Story
Aspects of Resonance in Fiction
by Stephanie Friedman
I sank into the yellow vinyl of a high-backed chair, my hands around a mug of cooling tea. My grandmother, her sister, and her friends were tucked in closer around the Formica orange slice of a table, leaning over their coffee and pound cake, their voices rising and falling in story. They talked on as if I weren’t there. And I didn’t want them to recollect my presence. I didn’t want them to stop telling to each other and start explaining to me.
They drew each other in: Remember that song? They responded to each other: The Turk waited a thousand years to have his say, my mother always said it. Sometimes the chiming in turned into talking over, especially between my grandmother and her sister, a lifetime of vying for attention and control played out through increasing volume and pitch, until what was being said did not matter so much as who got to do the saying. Sometimes the telling came out of a deep place, the words shot through with timbres of emotion I can hear even now, every cadence: he said, a wife is like a broom, he said, when you don’t need her, you should put her in a corner.
Afternoons like this taught me about voice and dialogue—my earliest attempts at fiction read like transcripts—but only recently did I realize what they revealed about the process and purpose of storytelling. As a kid, I had a biased notion of stories as something printed. What I heard in my grandmother’s kitchen was too familiar and too bound up in family dynamics for me to recognize as kindred to what could be found in books. I then spent years training as a literary historian and critic: a fine pursuit but one which further encouraged me to see a story as a set of symbols to be mapped, a puzzle to be worked out, an illustration of social and cultural problematics, anything but, well, a story.
In my grandmother’s kitchen, a story was a felt experience for both teller and audience, a dynamic swirl of emotions and impulses, some of which were controlled and understood in the telling, and some not. I’ve found myself looking back to those sessions around the kitchen table as I try to write fiction that remains present with the characters and uses language that embodies them. What I have learned to reach for is not meaning, reveal-able and map-able, but resonance—the feeling of being swept up in a flow of connections. Achieve resonance, I tell myself, and meaning will emerge with greater depth and intensity than if I had reached for it on its own.
I like to think that my fellow fiction writers share my deepest ambition: to tell stories that will find readers who need to read them the way I need to write them, stories that will affect readers the way certain texts have come into my life and pried me open or sung through me. What writer would not want the power to do that necessary, impossible thing?
I say necessary because all good writing depends on the ability to create this deep sense of connection. I say impossible because the resonance I’m describing can seem like something beyond a writer’s control, dependent on readers whom the writer will never meet and on properties of language and affect that fall flat if they are forced or too tightly managed. So often a deeply affecting moment of a story is spoken of in terms of “magic,” a property that can be identified but not analyzed. “That’s when the magic happens,” someone will say, or “Well, that’s the magic of literature.” As writers, we owe it to ourselves and to our readers to probe the source of this magic and to understand how we can access it and intensify the effect. In other words, we need to understand resonance.
Re-sounding Sensations and Situations
The primary definition of resonance in the OED is: “the reinforcement or prolongation of sound by reflection, or spec. by synchronous vibration.” It identifies the root of the word as the Latin resonantia, meaning echo, and resonare, to resound. All of the word’s subsequent scientific and colloquial meanings flow from this primary connotation of re-sounding. For our purposes, we can think about the resonance of a story as the reinforcement or prolongation of the perceptions, images, thoughts, and emotions it stirs up. The words that make up the story reflect similar sense-perceptions already experienced by the reader or suggest those that feel real even though the reader does not have actual, associated experiences to draw on. In both cases, through the force of its language, the story sounds through the reader and seems to come from the depths of the reader’s own self. This is the “magic” we feel—as if we’re enacting the story in our own imaginations and in so doing, becoming a part of it.
As an illustration, Alice Munro’s “Wild Swans” gives us a visceral sense of Rose’s conflicting emotions and sensations, moment to moment, during a simultaneously disgusting and arousing encounter that will shape and haunt her for the rest of her life. When Rose’s stepmother warns her about perverts disguised as ministers who ride the train to Toronto in order to prey on young women, she—and certainly this reader, if not most readers—dismiss the advice as small-minded nonsense. When a minister does sit down next to Rose on the train, however, and proceeds to slowly move his hand up her thigh under the cover of his newspaper, both she and we are in new sensual and emotional territory. Rose discovers, to her titillation and horror, that: “His hand, that she wouldn’t ever have wanted to hold … was able, after all, to get the ferns to rustle and the streams to flow, to waken a sly luxuriance.” We are in her body, sharing her physical revulsion and excitement even as she displaces her thoughts and feelings onto the landscape outside the train window:
Nevertheless, she would rather not. She would still rather not. Please remove this, she said out the window. Stop it, please, she said to the stumps and barns. The hand moved up her leg past the top of her stocking to her bare skin, had moved higher, under her suspender, reached her underpants and the lower part of her belly. Her legs were still crossed, pinched together. While her legs stayed crossed she could lay claim to innocence, she had not admitted anything. She could still believe that she would stop this in a minute. Nothing was going to happen, nothing more. Her legs were never going to open.
But they were. They were. As the train crossed the Niagara Escarpment above Dundas, as they looked down at the preglacial valley, the silver-wooded rubble of little hills, as they came sliding down to the shores of Lake Ontario, she would make this slow, and silent, and definite, declaration, perhaps disappointing as much as satisfying the hand’s owner. He would not lift his eyelids, his face would not alter, his fingers would not hesitate, but would go powerfully and discreetly to work. Invasion, and welcome, and sunlight flashing far and wide on the lake water; miles of bare orchards stirring round Burlington.
Notice the lists—the progress of his hand on her body, the things his body would not and would do, the things her body would not and would do—stringing each bit of sense-perception together like pearls, moving inexorably through each searingly complex sensation until we reach the fragmentary moment of climax and capitulation. Even though “there was something crude and pushy and childish about him,” Rose finds the man from this random encounter “remained on call, so to speak, for years and years, ready to slip into place at a critical moment, without even any regard, later on, for husbands or lovers.” She does not know what “recommends” him, and neither do we. All that she—and we—have are the lingering questions and aftershocks.
Resonance as Relationship
As Munro demonstrates, readers can share a character’s immediate sensations and perceptions through details, diction, and prose rhythm. In this way, resonance depends in part upon the reader, and is not entirely in the writer’s control – what sounds through one reader might not have the same effect on another. This aspect of resonance reveals the story as a process or the site of a relationship between the writer and reader.
The more writers invest their stories with messy, human complexity, the more likely readers will encounter them that way too. Think how often a reader in a workshop reports that a character or incident in a story doesn’t “ring true.” Rather than change the character or the incident so that it squares with the commenter’s expectations of reality, the solution for the writer might be to deepen the representation so that it creates a moment-by-moment synchronous vibration in the reader, and thereby better embodies or enacts story-truth. In other words, the problem might not be one of verisimilitude, but of resonance. If we can show how characters live inside their complexities and contradictions, then they will become real. Readers will not deny what sounds through them, even if it’s outside their personal experience.
In fact, a story may stay with a reader longer if it challenges her preconceptions or confronts her with the unknown. My touchstones for understanding resonance are stories that inhabit their own complicated truths so completely and unshakably that they take me where I could not have gone without them. In a resonant piece of fiction, understanding may be felt as much as thought, allowing for new or deeper questions rather than a burst of insight.
Grace Paley’s “A Conversation with my Father” achieves great comic and philosophical mileage as it shows writer and reader—daughter and father— raising questions born of their love for, and exasperation with, each other. The narrator’s aged and infirm father asks her “to write a simple story…just recognizable people and then write down what happened to them next.” The task is not so simple, however. The narrator realizes that no matter how much she “would like to try to tell such a story,” to please her father, if nothing else, she has problems with the notion of “plot, the absolute line between two points which I’ve always despised. Not for literary reasons, but because it takes all hope away. Everyone, real or invented, deserves the open destiny of life.” To fulfill the assignment, she writes about a woman who lives across the street, becomes a junkie to connect with her junkie son and his friends, but who winds up abandoned by him when he moves on to another fixation and she cannot.
Paley’s narrator and her father fight about what details should be included and what the events of the story are meant to tell the reader. About the woman who lives across the street, the narrator says, “She’s my knowledge and my invention.” Paley’s narrator goes on to claim that the woman will eventually clean up and get a job as a receptionist. The father just as forcefully insists: “Truth first. She will slide back. A person must have character. She does not…Tragedy! You too. When will you look it in the face?”
This story within the story belongs equally to the daughter as the writer and to her father as the reader because it opens up questions of character, both literally and figuratively. This open quality, not just the content itself, allows the story to become implicated in its own relationship dynamics. “Oh, Pa,” the narrator interjects on more than one occasion, both pleading for her father’s understanding of her, her story, and how she chooses to tell it, and recognizing her father’s cantankerous refusal to understand things in any way but his own. That simple exclamation reveals her connection to him, the man with whom she shares a history of loving combat. The reader understands the stakes of the argument through the feelings and history heard in their voices—as much is communicated in how they say what they do as in what they actually say. The contention between father and daughter, and what it reveals about them and the human condition, are left for the reader to ponder.
Resonance as Thought and Feeling: No Mind-Body Problem Here
Some might say that I’m merely covering the old “show, don’t tell” ground, but actually I’m searching for a more nuanced understanding of how a story works its magic than can be conveyed by that simple dichotomy. Think about the often-cited quote from E.L. Doctorow: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader—not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” In other words, writers must do more than simply show or tell; they must conjure up a tactile and emotional experience, even its interstitial or inchoate aspects. The character who barely notices the chill damp of a November drizzle as he wanders the city streets is rained upon as surely as the character piloting her craft home in a Nor’easter. These nuances of sensory experience, what there is to be felt and how those stimuli affect those doing the feeling, create different registers of tone and meaning.
“Show, don’t tell” also fails to incorporate another important aspect of storytelling—thought. Pondering, analyzing, judging, and other mental processes are a part of life; they should be a part of fiction as well. However, they do need to be accompanied by visceral, sensory details that flesh them out and complicate them. When thought and sensation come together on the page as they do in life, fiction achieves a richer, more complex resonance than it would have if only sensation and emotion were evoked.
My evidence for this claim comes from a seemingly unlikely quarter—that of the writer who kept the word “tactile” pinned above his desk, Andre Dubus. “A Father’s Story” illustrates how a writer can dramatize notions of faith, suffering, and purpose through living, moment-to-moment sensations. In an essay titled “The Habit of Writing,” Dubus explains how his process of “vertical writing” made such a story possible. Dubus formulated this process while writing “Anna,” a story that he dutifully researched and planned, yet could not bring to fruition. As he describes it:
I kept writing, trying for those five pages a day, but each day I felt as though I were watching Anna from a distance, and I could not get inside of her, become her. Then one day or night I decided to try a different approach. I told myself that next day at the desk I would not leave a sentence until I knew precisely what Anna was feeling. I told myself that even if I wrote only fifty words, I would stay with this…
…In that moment I began what I call vertical writing, rather than horizontal…for years I had been writing horizontally, trying to move forward (those five pages); now I would try to move down, as deeply as I could.
In his effort to “move down, as deeply as [he] could,” Dubus “worked on feeling all of her physical sensations.”
I did become her, through her senses. You must know what a glass of beer feels like in her hand, I told myself; you must know everything…Walls fell down and everything was open: I knew nothing of what would happen next, and that was frightening—though simple to solve—but it was wonderful, it was elating, I was both lost and free. There were no more plans…Just follow them home, I told myself, and since then I have believed that you can write a story simply by becoming a character and following that character home.
My point in citing this account is not to prescribe a particular process – a writer’s process is as individual as the writer – but to consider how Dubus does not control the story, but becomes it, embodying the characters on the page and following them home.
In the case of “A Father’s Story,” Dubus says that he gave his main character a body, a job, Catholicism, and then a divorce, so that rather than simply pondering truths, “his faith would [have to] be action.” (Among other things, he would have the struggle to remain celibate.) For his own part, Dubus immersed himself in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. And then, when it came time to write, he listened. As he put it:
I kept telling my wife: ‘He won’t stop talking. Nothing is happening, and I can’t make him shut up.’…I should not have worried about Luke talking on and on; for at the desk, I did not worry. I was him, I spoke; I also listened to him. But not from a distance, the kind I had had from Anna till I began to write vertically. No, I listened to him as he listened to himself…Luke’s talking filled me, surprised me, and I was one with it and with him.
In imagining Luke, Dubus both speaks and listens. As Paley’s narrator says of her story’s main character, Luke is Dubus’s knowledge and his invention.
As a “vertical” writer, Dubus recognizes that perception and sensation are bound together. They come together on the “bad nights when [Luke] went from room to room and looked and touched and smelled,” longing for some connection with his ex-wife and the children she took with her. Most of all, they come together in the incident toward which the story builds, when Luke’s now college-age daughter comes to tell him that she has struck a man on the dark rural road with her car, and he goes out into the night looking for the body and wanting “to understand that one moment out of all her heart’s time on earth.” When, as part of his effort to conceal her crime, he smashes her car into a tree outside the church before Mass, he finds the understanding he has sought through imagined, recreated sense-experience:
I shifted to third, left the road, and aiming the right headlight at the tree, accelerated past the white blur of church, into the black trunk growing bigger till it was all I could see, then I rocked in that resonant thump she had heard, had felt, and when I turned off the ignition it was still in my ears, my blood, and I saw the boy flying in the wind.
We, as readers, rock in that resonant thump as well, through the sensual cues, the clear images, the rhythm of the phrasing, and the music of the language striking synchronous vibrations—with the boy forever flying in the wind as the passage ends and Luke’s lifetime of reckoning begins. In short, the moment resonates for the reader as well as for the character.
In both Munro’s and Dubus’s stories, readers, like the main characters, are both inside and outside the action as it happens, simultaneously sharing in, and reflecting on, the sensory experience. The result is that the stories come to resolution and further complication at the same time. They tend toward partial insight, still unfolding even beyond the reach of the narrative, an ever-present revelation that is never complete.
The Guts of a Story: Resonance as Viscera
I’ve heard others say, and have said myself, that for my taste, a story must engage the heart as well as the head, that a story cannot just play clever games with language or structure or generic expectations but must have a beating, emotional heart at its core. I think further that, in order to be fully alive, a story must have guts, or viscera: a deep place of digested and undigested bits, which makes it possible for readers to remain engaged with the story after it has ended, as the questions and sensations that it has raised reverberate in their thoughts.
Jessamyn West’s stories have unfortunately largely faded from view in the twenty-five years since her death, but you can still find her quoted in compendiums of writing advice, particularly her statement that, “Talent is helpful in writing, but guts are absolutely necessary.” I can’t help but read this quote with a bit of spin, so that the guts are those of the story as well as of the writer. In West’s story “A Little Collar for the Monkey,” Mrs. Prosper has spent her long life treating everyone around her as something to be toyed with, as her cat toys with a fly before nonchalantly killing and eating it. When the fishmonger, Olav Duun, comes to the neighborhood on his rounds, Mrs. Prosper usurps the place of her browbeaten spinster daughter and hops into Mr. Duun’s truck to “ride with him for a spell” and needle him with her catty observations. She finds a small, finely wrought, silver-inlaid collar hanging from a nail in the truck. Mr. Duun’s story of how he drowned the “she-devil” monkey that used to wear the collar gives Mrs. Prosper yet another opportunity to triumph, albeit this time by proxy:
Mr. Duun’s recital was calm enough, like that of a law-respecting judge summing up a case, but Mrs. Prosper’s heart was beating faster. She could see it all, very clearly. Mr. Duun, large, young then, handsome; though he was handsome now, for that matter. She could see him take the collar from the monkey’s neck and hand it to a fellow sailor. And she could see the look in the monkey’s eyes as he did that, the foreknowledge, and the thin black hands on the rail, and the little hands torn off, and the unbelief in the eyes as it fell, and the desperate flailing as it tried for a time to regain the ship.
Mrs. Prosper can see it all moment by moment, just as Luke rocks in the resonant thump that his daughter heard and felt. However, the turn here is not one of connection but disjunction. Mrs. Prosper finds that she is not echoing Mr. Duun’s own perceptions and sensations, but projecting her own presumptions outward:
“Did you think as you watched it drowning,” asked Mrs. Prosper, “your monkey—did you think—monkey, you were born to live in a tree, but I’ve changed all that for you?”
“I did not,” said Mr. Duun, who was now turning into the Prosper driveway.
What she thinks is her moment of synchronous vibration with his tale, resulting in her admission that she wishes she had been there to see it happen, instead occasions his laying bare of her cruel, manipulative nature and his own immunity to it:
Mr. Duun took his hands from the wheel and turned sideways so that he squarely confronted Mrs. Prosper. Sitting thus, he gave Mrs. Prosper the glance she had never before encountered, but which, now that she had received it, she felt she had spent a lifetime looking for. It was a glance of recognition. It took her all in. It missed nothing.
Rather than shrink from this recognition, Mrs. Prosper pursues it; she purposely inspires it again so that she can bask in it, “making up for what she felt to be a lifetime’s lack.”
However, Mr. Duun denies her the “use” of his recognition, leaving her in the truck to go into the Prosper house and invite Mrs. Prosper’s daughter Lilly to go for a ride with him. Before the happy couple drives off together, he tosses the collar at Mrs. Prosper’s feet, with the words, “A gift to the bride’s mother in memory of her that wore it.” We are told that “Mrs. Prosper, who lived on irony, had her cupful then.” Her response to this bitter draught is to laugh and to attempt to pin the shame on her cat by making him wear the collar. The cat is too fast for her, however, and she is left “to enter the house without him, empty-handed except for the monkey collar.” The story’s resolution punishes Mrs. Prosper in the worst way possible: she has at last been seen, but what has been revealed are her limitations.
If West’s story had simply shown Mrs. Prosper’s meanness and followed it up with the scene of her comeuppance, then the story would be a flatter, simpler, less resonant piece of writing. The fact that Mrs. Prosper seeks out Duun’s recognition even as it diminishes her, that she laughs at the irony of which she has been a target, and that despite all this, she still winds up being the one left holding the collar enriches the story and makes for an ending that resounds. In this way, the story resembles Munro’s “Wild Swans,” with Rose’s half-understood, conflicting emotions and sensations. Both stories turn on gutsy complications; they revolve around visceral bits that are understood best as they are experienced rather than explained.
The storytelling around my grandmother’s kitchen table was a shared experience with no beginning or end. It was part of the fabric of the tellers’ lives and their relationships to one another, and resumed whenever they got together. One way to write stories that readers will want to—indeed, feel compelled to—live with is, as we write, to find a way to simultaneously speak as, and listen to, our characters—to feel the glasses in their hands. To be not just a disembodied observer and recorder, but a sounding board for synchronous vibrations. A writer can do that necessary, not-impossible thing: become intimately aware of the people and situations that are both her knowledge and her invention and body them forth on the page so the reader can participate in that process even after the book is closed.
Works Cited
Dubus, Andre. “The Habit of Writing.” In On Writing Short Stories, edited by Tom Bailey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Dubus, Andre. Selected Stories. Boston: D.R. Godine, 1988.
Munro, Alice. The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “resonance,” http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50204166.
Paley, Grace. Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. New York: Dell, 1975.
West, Jessamyn. Love, Death, and the Ladies’ Drill Team. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955.
