Saturday, May 12, 2012
The
Art of Writing No. 36
When Little Nell died she caused a national
outpouring of grief in Victorian industrial Britain. Readers of the chapter by
chapter novel The Old Curiosity Shop
implored Dickens to find a way out, a resurrection of the character. In its
time it was the epitome of fine writing about a deeply difficult subject. But,
not so long after, in the literary scheme of things, Oscar Wilde said,
“One
must have a heart f stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing.”
Writing about death, to be effective and
keep the reader’s attention and empathy, is a matter of hermeneutics.
Everything about it must ring true to both the context of the story and the time when a person reads it. Of
course we can read about the demise of Nell today, and enjoy it even while we
regard it as mawkish and sentimental. We make allowances for the period and
transport ourselves back to what it must have been like to have a Victorian
sensibility. Most of us will write about death or the dead at some point. In The Strange Attractor I described an
illicit visit to the morgue to watch a post mortem. That was easy in the sense
that the bodies were dead and the act of dying lay outside the narrative. Also
the attitude of the observer, Edward Silver, a private detective, was cool and
detached. But in Azimuth, a major
character is killed. I tried to write about grief and death within the context
of the book, sentimentality not being a dominant trait among my characters.
They seated her body, her head
bowed, on her roan, holding her there from either side and walked slowly to the
nearest high ground, a small, exposed cliff of brittle red stone. They laid her
along its base and the Warrior took powders from saddle bags and mixed them
before working them into a crack in the vertical face just above her prone
form.
Whatever she had been before her death was no longer evident
no matter how much he reached his mind out to her, -May your spirit go where you have always wished it, he said in a
soft, caressing tone, -And may further life spring from your decay.
-Goodbye my Grandmother, whispered his daughter in a
breaking voice, bending to straighten the dead woman’s hair, so that her tears
fell upon the lined face. She and her father looked down upon what seemed too
tiny a form for so powerful a woman, dressed as always in a warrior’s garb,
knife in her belt and sword in her hand.
Looking at it now I remember going over and
over the lines which included:
-Goodbye my Grandmother, whispered his
daughter in a breaking voice, bending to straighten the dead woman’s hair, so
that her tears fell upon the lined face.
Was I being mawkish? I think I certainly was in my
initial descriptions of the burial. I said far too much about the
granddaughter’s emotions. In the end I opted for these short lines of a sorrow
that breaks through her disciplined and wise nature. You must decide.
When writing something like Azimuth (perhaps within
the canon of moral sagas like Lord of the Rings, Beowulf or His
Dark Materials) I was always aware that I had to integrate a modern day
audience’s rejection of cloying emotion with the harsher times of my
characters. It is part of the macro business of persuading readers that this
vast, cyclical drama, though it is ostensibly about the changes in a man who begins
as a warrior and ends as a sage, is relevant to people’s lives today and the
period is immaterial when it comes to being human.
Books by Jack Sanger (aka Eric le Sange)
Azimuth by
Jack Sanger paperback and PDF www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Azimuth,
the ebook, by Jack Sanger in separate volumes Amazon Kindle
The
Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Amazon Kindle
Through a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story by Eric
le Sange , Amazon Kindle
Labels: Writing; death scenes
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