Conscious Streams

“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.” This quote from Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland will get us started today.

There are, my friends, a number of lenses through which one can regard Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo. We’ll do as many as I can think of but today let’s consider style.

“Literary style refers to the distinctive way an author uses language to express their ideas and tell a story. It encompasses elements like word choice, sentence structure, and figurative language, creating a unique "voice" and tone for the writing. Essentially, it's how an author writes, rather than just what they write.” So sayeth our friend, Generative AI.

Of course, we the wise, know that AI is “implying” the role of the implied author, the entity that the reader perceives is creating the text—distinct from, in this case, Ms. Rooney herself. Part of the style of Intermezzo is that it is written in the present tense, and makes use of a close third-person narration, although there is considerable movement towards first-person, in a stream-of-consciousness way.

After the intriguing epigraph concerning grief and chess, mentioned last time, the story begins:

“Didn’t seem fair on the young lad. That suit at the funeral. With the braces on his teeth, the supreme discomfort of the adolescent.” (This beginning links up nicely with the novel’s end, a feature we will return to).

‘Kay. This passage immediately cues the reader that the story is inside the mind of someone who thinks in a jagged and fragmented way—not that we all think in complete sentences.

No?

We learn within a page that the thinker is Peter, and that he is arriving at his girlfriend Naomi’s apartment (or flat, as the Irish say).We get movement from internal thought to third person, present tense here—still on page one: (Peter is thinking of comparisons made between he and his brother, Ivan): “Brains and beauty, an aunt once said. About them both. Or was it Ivan brains and Peter beauty. Thanks, I think. He crosses Watling Street towards an apartment…”

The present tense in fiction has been popular for a number of years, before that, not at all, I think. It creates an immediate paradox. A text is written before the reader reads it, however, it’s written in such a way as to give the sense that it is written and read simultaneously—like speech (I know, there’s a lag there too). In the above example—which may have been written several years ago—we the readers are presented with a story about a man who is walking down a street thinking about his brother and their relationship. There is no shift to simple past tense in that phrase, “He crosses…” The story begins in a present time which is actually the past and moves forward. The implied author—not the characters—knows what will happen even though what will happen will occur in the story’s future. Of course, as if that’s all not enough, we have that intriguing “About them both,” which seems to be a comment by the narrator—not Peter, who would have said, “About us both.”  

Rabbit hole time.

We are pressing our noses against the difficult issue of how an author choose a stable point from which to tell a story. Simple past tense has the advantage of establishing a fixed point. “Peter was walking one evening to Naomi’s flat, thinking about his brother Ivan and how he appeared at their father’s recent funeral. That suit didn’t seem fair on the young lad, he thought. Present tense is harder, more complex. In fact, Ms. Rooney is doing something very creative here. She is shaping a particular narrative style for Peter that is distinct from Ivan and from Margaret, both of whom appear in the next chapter. Peter, a character who is shown as being troubled and abusing alcohol and other drugs, has this jagged, stream-of-consciousness style, consistently to the end when he transforms into a calmer presentation. Please compare how Ivan and Margaret are shown in Chapter Two:

“Ivan is standing on his own in the corner, while the men from the chess club move the chairs and tables around…Alone Ivan is standing, wanting to sit down, but uncertain as to which of the chairs need to be rearranged still and which of them are in their correct places already.”

Here’s Margaret: “By the time Margaret finishes dinner, it’s dark outside the window of the bistro, the glass blue like wet ink. Garret behind the till asks her what they have on tonight and she says the chess clubs are in.”

And here’s the narrator’s voice: “Ivan’s brother Peter, who is thirty-two and has a graduate degree in philosophy, says this school of thought on the relations between body and mind has been refuted.”

I believe last time, I related that I was put off by these different styles between the main characters but now see them as parts of a whole. Peter is anxious and depressed, and his style is ragged. Ivan and Margaret are shown as being calmer and more conventional. They are more clearly sited in time and space and are painted in rather elegant, flowing prose, complete with poetic similes—“like wet ink.”

It should be noted that Ms. Rooney says that she was reading James Joyce while writing Intermezzo and tried to incorporate his usage of stream-of-consciousness narration.

There’s more to say about style in Intermezzo, best beloved. Let’s stop and resume next time.

Till then.

#Intermezzo #SallyRooney #AlanBray