PERSONAL ESSAY II:
NARRATIVE
“The Fourth State of Matter”
by Jo Ann Beard
Insights
from Philip
Lopate’s
The Art of
the
Personal
Essay
How the world comes at
another person, the irritations,
jubilations, aches and pains,
humorous flashes--these are
the classic building materials of
the personal essay. We learn
the rhythm by which the
essayist receives, digests, and
spits out the world, and we
learn the shape of his or her
privacy.
Insights
from Philip
Lopate’s
The Art of
the
Personal
Essay
The essayist attempts to surround a
something--a subject, a mood, a
problematic irritation--by coming at it
from all angles, wheeling and diving
like a hawk, each seemingly
digressive spiral actually taking us
closer to the heart of the matter.
There is something heroic in the
essayist's gesture of striking out
toward the unknown, not only without
a map but without certainty that there
is anything worthy to be found. One
would like to think that the personal
essay represents a kind of basic
research on the self, in ways that are
allied with science and philosophy....
MOVING
THROUGH
TIME AND
SPACE
Prepositions—
function words
that place us in
time and space
She totters on her broomstick
legs into the hallway and over
the doorsill into the kitchen,
makes a sharp left at the
refrigerator—careful, almost
went down—then a
straightaway to the door. I
sleep on my feet in the cold of
the doorway, waiting. Here she
comes. Lift her down the two
steps. She pees and then
stands, Lassie in a ratty coat,
gazing out at the yard. (1)
◦ The collie wakes me up about three
times a night, summoning me from a great
distance as I row my boat through a dim,
complicated dream. She’s on the shoreline,
barking. Wake up. She’s staring at me with
her head slightly tipped to the side, long
nose, gazing eyes, toenails clenched to get a
purchase on the wood floor. We used to
call her the face of love (1).
Time/Tense
Shifts
◦ Over the neighbor’s house, Mars
flashes white, then red, then white again.
Jupiter is hidden among the anonymous
blinks and glitterings. It has a moon with
sulfur-spewing volcanoes and a beautiful
name: Io. I learned it at work, from the
group of men who surround me there.
Space physicists, guys who spend days on
end with their heads poked through the
fabric of the sky, listening to the sounds of
the universe. Guys whose own lives are
ticking like alarm clocks getting ready to
go off, although none of us are aware of it
yet (1-2)
Narrative
Time
■
Story Time/Real Time - the chronological order of
events
■
Narrative Time - the order the writer chooses to
present events
■
Anachrony—is the chronological time disrupted? Are
there tense shifts or shifts between points in time?
■
Prolepsis – information about an event that has yet
to occur in the chronological time-line. Whereas we
use “foreshadowing” to refer to how symbols or
images might give hints of future events, prolepsis
signifies a more concrete gesture to futurity.
■
Analepsis—information about an event which
occurred before the current moment in the
chronological story-line. Usually more specific than
flashbacks (which might be provided by on word or
phrase or figurative device) but this is a common
way of describing analepsis and an event from the
past described in the present is often called a
flashback.
______________________________________________________________________
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Real Story Time
______________________________________________________________________
3
6
7
1
2
8
4
Narrative Time Example
5
9
10
Narrative Time vs. Chronological Story Time
◦ The collie wakes me up (1) … My leaping heart settles back into its hole in
my chest. I say “Damn it” out loud, just as Chris strides into the office. (5)
Present
◦ I spend more time with Chris (6) Iterative — Past, present and ongoing
◦ The morning I told him … Chris was drinking coffee (6) Past
◦ During my current turmoils I’ve come to think … Chris lets me work an
eccentric schedule. (6) Iterative — Past, present and ongoing
◦ Currently he is obsessed with the dust in plasma (6) Present
◦ Less than two months from now one of his colleagues (12) Future, then
shift to present
◦ It’s November 1, 1991. . .I can feel Chris watching me (14) Present
Analepsis—page 6
I spend more time with Chris than I ever did with my husband.
The morning I told him I was being dumped he was genuinely
perplexed. “He’s leaving you?” he asked.
Chris was drinking coffee, sitting at his table in front of the
blackboard. Behind his head was a chalk drawing of a hip,
professorial man holding a coffee cup. It was a collaborative
effort; I had drawn the man and Chris framed him, using blue
chalk and a straightedge. The two-dimensional man and the
three-dimensional man stared at me intently.
“He’s leaving you?” And for an instant I saw myself from their
vantage point across the room—Jo Ann—and a small bubble of
self-esteem percolated up from my depths. Chris shrugged.
“You’ll do fine,” he said.
analepsis & narrating the iterative once
Currently he is obsessed with the dust in the plasma of
Saturn’s rings. Plasma is the fourth state of matter. You’ve got
your solid, your liquid, your gas, and then your plasma. In outer
space there’s the plasmasphere and the plasmapause. I avoid
the math when I can and put a layperson’s spin on these
things.
“Plasma is blood,” I told him.
“Exactly,” he agreed, removing the comics page and handing it
to me.
This is the kind of conversation we mostly have around the
office.
Prolepsis—page 12
Unimaginable, really, that less than two months from now one
of his colleagues from abroad, a woman with delicate, birdlike
features, will appear at the door to my office and identify
herself as a friend of Bob’s. When she asks, I take her down the
hall to the room with the long table and then to his empty
office. I do this without saying anything, because there’s
nothing to say, and she takes it all in with small, serious nods
until the moment she sees his blackboard covered with
scribbles and arrows and equations. At that point her face
loosens and she starts to cry in long ragged sobs. An hour later
I go back and the office is empty. When I erase the blackboard
finally, I can see where she laid her hands carefully, where the
numbers are ghostly and blurred.
SENTENCE-LEVEL
RHETORICAL
DEVICES
Polysyndeton: The excessive or just
untypical use of conjunctions like “and”,
‘but”, “or”
“She was in Gang Lu’s path and he shot her
and the bullet lodged in the top of her spine
and she will never dance or walk or spend a
day alone”
Asyndeton: the lack of conjunctions where
we expect to find them.
“The Midwest is very brown. The phone
rings. It’s a physicist” (18).
This is also an example of the strategic use
of declarative sentences, as is this:
“His long legs are crossed, his eyes are mild.
He has a wife named Ulrike, a daughter
named Karein, and a son named Göran. A
dog named Mica. A mother named Ursula. A
friend named me (15).
Making
Conjunctions
Work
She speaks to him for a few minutes, he
produces the gun and shoots her in the face.
The receptionist, a young student working as
a temp, is just beginning to stand when he
shoots her. He expels the spent cartridges in
the stairwell, loads new ones. Reaches the
top of the steps, looks around. Is disoriented
suddenly. The ringing and the smoke and the
dissatisfaction of not checking all the names
off the list. A slamming and a running sound,
the shout of police. He walks into an empty
conference room, takes off his coat, folds it
carefully, and puts it over the back of a chair.
Checks his watch: twelve minutes since it
began. Places the barrel against his right
temple. Fires.
The
Sentence
Fragment—
page 22
FRAMING
The collie wakes me up about three times a
night, summoning me from a great
distance as I row my boat through a dim,
complicated dream. She’s on the shoreline,
barking. Wake up. She’s staring at me with
her head slightly tipped to the side, long
nose, gazing eyes, toenails clenched to get a
purchase on the wood floor. We used to call
her the face of love.
In the porch light the trees shiver, the
I wake her up three times between
midnight and dawn. She doesn’t usually
sleep this soundly, but all the chaos and
company in the house tonight have made
her more tired than usual. The Lab wakes
and drowsily begins licking her lower
region. She stops and stares at me, trying
to make out my face in the dark, then
gives up and sleeps. The brown dog is flat
on her back with her paws limp, wedged
squirrels turn over in their sleep. The Milky
Way is a long smear on the sky, like
something erased on a blackboard. Over
the neighbor’s house, Mars flashes white,
between me and the back of the couch.
then red, then white again. Jupiter is
hidden among the anonymous blinks and
glitterings. It has a moon with sulfurspewing volcanoes and a beautiful name:
branches of a maple is the Dog Star,
Sirius, my personal favorite. The dusty
rings of Saturn. Io, Jupiter’s moon. . . .
Io. (1)
I’ve propped myself so I’ll be able to see
when dawn starts to arrive. For now there
are still planets and stars. Above the black
(22)
Plasma is the fourth state of matter.
…
“Plasma is blood,” I told him.
“Exactly,” he agreed, removing the
comics page and handing it to me.
....
“You have control over this,” he
explains in his professor voice. “You
can decide how long she suffers.”
This makes my heart pound.
Absolutely not, I cannot do it. And
then I weaken and say what I really
want: for her to go to sleep and not
wake up, just slip out of her skin and
into the other world.
“Exactly,” he says. (7)
When I think I can’t bear it for one
more minute I reach down and nudge
her gently with my dog arm. She rises
slowly, faltering, and stands over me in
the darkness. My peer, my colleague.
In a few hours the world will resume
itself, but for now we’re in a pocket of
silence. We’re in the plasmapause, a
place of equilibrium, where the forces
of the earth meet the forces of the sun.
I imagine it as a place of stillness,
where the particles of dust stop
spinning and hang motionless in deep
space.
Around my neck is the stone he
brought me from Poland. I hold it out.
Like this? I ask. Shards of fly wings,
suspended in amber.
Exactly, he says.
(22)
MOTIF AND
LEVELS OF
MEANING
Motif
Motif: a pattern; something that
appears repeatedly (an image,
object, word or words, etc.) that,
through repetition, become
meaningful—they connect to the
theme or meaning of the text.
Follow a repeating image –
The image becomes motif –
The motif reveals and connects to
meaning
◦ The Milky Way is a long smear on
the sky, like something erased on a
blackboard. (1)
◦ They’re speaking in physics, so I’m
left out of the conversation. Chris
apologetically erases one of the
pictures I’ve drawn on the blackboard
and replaces it with a curving blue
arrow surrounded by radiating chalk
waves of green. (11)
Image
becomes …
Motif
◦ They spend at least half of each day standing in front of
blackboards, writing equations and arguing about outer
space. Then they write theoretical papers about what they
come up with. They’re actually quite a big deal in the spacephysics community, but around here they’re just two guys
who keep erasing my pictures. (12)
◦ Chris erases what he put on the blackboard and tries
unsuccessfully to redraw my pecking parakeet. “I don’t know
how it goes,” he says to me. (13)
◦ It’s November 1, 1991, the last day of the first part of my life.
Before I leave I pick up the eraser and stand in front of the
collie’s picture on the blackboard, thinking. I can feel Chris
watching me, drinking his coffee. His long legs are crossed,
his eyes are mild. He has a wife named Ulrike, a daughter
named Karein, and a son named Göran. A dog named Mica. A
mother named Ursula. A friend named me. I erase the “X”s.
(14)
Motif
Unimaginable, really, that less than two months
from now one of his colleagues from abroad, a
woman with delicate, birdlike features, will
appear at the door to my office and identify
herself as a friend of Bob’s. When she asks, I
take her down the hall to the room with the long
table and then to his empty office. I do this
without saying anything, because there’s nothing
to say, and she takes it all in with small, serious
nods until the moment she sees his blackboard
covered with scribbles and arrows and equations.
At that point her face loosens and she starts to
cry in long ragged sobs. An hour later I go back
and the office is empty. When I erase the
blackboard finally, I can see where she laid her
hands carefully, where the numbers are ghostly
and blurred. (12)
SIGNIFIERS &
MOTIFS
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