THE CLAIM-MAKING ANIMALThe Use and Misuse of Claims in Fiction

Ben C. Hale

Critical Paper and Program BibliographySubmitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in

Creative Writing, Pacific Lutheran University, August 2011

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The Claim-Making Animal: The Use and Misuse of Claims in Fiction

Serious readers of fiction know (and long for) those subtle, powerful moments

when the tug of meaning is felt, when the plow catches, the rudder drops, the chain runs

tight, and the weight of the work’s ultimate intention is felt. Such moments, successfully

managed, separate serious fiction from trivial. But even in a work with profound

aspirations, if these moments are poorly managed, the plow will scoot across the top of

the ground, the rudder will break, the chain will pop, and the ultimate intentions of the

piece will fail. When the tug of meaning is managed expertly, it is smooth and

powerful—eliciting the timeless sensation of bearing a load and moving forward.

Although it may be obvious, it still needs saying—always needs saying in fresh

ways: a good work of fiction is good precisely in proportion to its ability to summon

meaning, to contain meaning, create meaning, transmit meaning. And the word meaning

here means many things: significance, harmony, resonance, awareness, realization, both

truth and Truth. This ineffable, varying—but nonetheless palpable—quality is the reason

high school students and undergraduates constantly talk about “symbolism.” That simple

X = Y formula may be trite and reductionist, but the instinct behind it is valid: a reader

senses that what she has in her hands means something, that she is holding a little

wireless device that is picking up a strong signal, that there is a message coming through.

Never mind that many experienced readers cringe at that word—“If you want a message,

go to the Western Union”—if there is a problem, it is not that there is a message per se

but rather that the word message seems to imply a neat and tidy statement.

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In fact, it is the sense of real and present—and declarable—meaning emerging

from complex subtlety that sets what we will call literature apart from even the best pulp

fiction (the difference between Marilynne Robinson and Elmore Leonard). And it

separates truly good literature from that which merely mimics it (the difference between

Cloud Atlas and The Bridges of Madison County).

Getting at what it is exactly that generates meaning and how it is done has been

the concern of every literary critic from Aristotle to Derrida, but it seems this question

changes when we move from the realm of literary criticism to that of literary craft. While

the critic-philosopher strives to develop a theory of what fiction is and why it exists, the

novelist frames a different central question: How does one create those moments in

which a work catches and pulls meaning?

First we should, perhaps, look at what such moments are. Although we could

never define them (so infinitely varied are they), we can certainly say, to paraphrase

Justice Potter Stewart’s famous comment on pornography, we know them when we see

them. They are the spots that cause a careful reader to rise from a comfortable couch to

find a pen, just to make a single squiggly underlining. These are the lines that get

transcribed into journals and sometimes memorized. These are the passages that will be

reconsidered and scrutinized and connected to each other when the student’s thesis is

being sharpened and the essay planned. These are the moments, Wayne Booth would say,

where the writer successfully guides the reader to look in the right direction and see the

intention and design of the work. In one way, these places in the text are the stars that

make up a constellation, but they are also the writer’s way of getting you to see a

constellation and not just a random mass of twinkling lights.

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One common element of many such weight-bearing passages is the presence of

the simple claim—the ‘message’, as we discussed above. Saul Bellow says, “No amount

of assertion will make an ounce of art” (56). Certainly he means that assertion alone

cannot create or carry meaning, and perhaps he also means that a work can never have a

consciously crafted ‘thesis.’ I would agree on both counts. If there is a thesis, it must be

the kind that emerges, like a red sunset, naturally and gradually, and that shifts and

dissolves even as it forms. In other words, no proper thesis at all. Every good work can

live and breathe only in that very narrow space between certainty and ambiguity. Both

serious reader and serious writer must possess much of Keats’s “negative capability”

(863). A work that is too definitive loses all complexity and becomes one-dimensional.

Conversely, a work that is too ambiguous can be what my old professor called Norman

Mailer—“cheap deep.”

Bellow’s point taken, we must still admit that assertions are as organic (and

crucial) to fiction as they are to life itself. It is through the simple claim that the speaker

(any speaker) communicates what he or she knows (or assumes) to be true. In a claim, we

can see whether or not a character is sane or insane, wise or foolish, stable or unstable,

rounded or flat. More important, we can see what the character has or has not

learned—the question that lies at the heart of every story and every reading experience.

Furthermore, every claim invites us to ponder whether it is a statement the writer himself

(or the work itself) identifies with or whether it is an assertion the writer (or work) is

moving to reject. A successfully executed claim can be so revealing because it is

completely innate to both scene and character, emerging naturally from a character’s way

of thinking in that character’s unique voice, so that it has more the quality of an

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experience than a mere statement. Indeed, voice is crucial here because it affects not

merely the surface of the claim (the idiom, the tone, the rhythm) but also the very nature

of the claim, the logic and intuition and experiences that led to it, the passion with which

it is held, whether it will matter and how. A claim (about anything) is as much about the

persona voicing it as it is about the subject being discussed, whether an act of conscious

self-presentation or unconscious self-revelation. And, of course, there is the

interdependence of form and content, the place where syntax and semiotics merge. Let us

look at some passages.

And why not begin with a work of undisputed artistry and power? In the opening

paragraphs of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, we meet the narrator, Nick

Carraway, through his own eyes:

. . . . Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have

feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some

unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the

horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in

which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred with obvious

expressions. Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a

little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly

suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is

parceled out unequally at birth.

And after boasting this way of my confidence, I came to the

admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or

the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on.

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When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world

to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more

riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only

Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my

reaction. (2)

This is a curious passage because Nick tells us about himself before he begins telling the

story.

He tells us that he is the kind of fellow in whom people confide, the kind who

reserves judgment. These are important qualities for a narrator who would have us trust

him as a witness; indeed, his very cynicism adds to his credibility. He uses himself and

his newly jaundiced point of view to set up the introduction to Gatsby, who is mentioned

only after he has finished declaring his loss of social innocence. And it is more revealing

still that he begins interpreting the story before he begins the story itself, by laying down

a premise he holds about humanity: a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out

unequally at birth.

This claim sits at the center of the passage, literally and figuratively. Although I

do not rest any of my argument on this conjecture, it seems well worth pointing out that

this is the first place the instinctive reader’s pen rises. In other words, this is the very spot

where the plow catches and holds, where the sail pulls. This is the first place where the

reader feels the unmistakable tug of the work’s intention, where we are pulled into the

furrow of meaning. And I would argue that this sense of being pulled—this feeling I

described earlier—is not merely ancillary. It is central to the effect. It is part of what the

writer must craft into the passage.

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Point of view, in its most elementary form, is the first thing that pulls here. The

good reader is always acutely attuned to who is speaking and from what angle, and it is,

of course, crucial that Nick is speaking after having experienced what he will now unfold

in a story. Furthermore, he is carefully framing not just his story and but what he thinks it

means. In rhetorical terms, the passage is an exordium, where the narrator’s ethos is

established, his audience drawn in, his argument begun. So, the good reader is already

attentive before the claim is made, but this in itself is not enough.

There is also the phrasing of the statement itself. It has the quality of aphorism: it

makes a universal claim about the human condition in language sententious and

magisterial, in the elegantly distancing passive voice. The power of an aphoristic style is

that it announces itself and implies that its import is profound. (When the import is

trivial, the effect is comic.) Here the point is indeed profound, whether it is true or not,

with broad implications about the human condition—down to its very premises. It

assumes (or, politely insists that we accept) something called “decency,” which has plural

manifestations, and which is “fundamental,” foundational, essential. It is not irrelevant

that the very phrase “fundamental decencies” is redolent of what Nick and Daisy’s family

might well have called “polite society,” a phrase that harks back to the values once

preserved in the terms “lady” and “gentleman,” meaning those who know how to behave

around those who make such distinctions. Just as the line implies an orderly universe in

which someone or something is “parceling out” natural gifts, it also implies a moral-

social order in which some people behave with more natural generosity and grace than

others. That decency seems to multiply into “decencies” implies a self-refining and self-

elaborating quality, widening the gulf between itself and those who lack it. It rests on a

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kind of social Calvinism: the social elect are also the moral elect, and they must ever

strive to prove this fact.

But more to the point is the fact that Nick’s statement introduces a central theme

of this novel, which is—on all levels—about defining decency, about where it resides and

where it does not, about the surprise of finding it in the very places where one does not

expect it, about the disappointment and injustice of finding indecency where decency

should dwell. Nick’s story will invite us to question rather than assume the validity of his

claim, and it will ultimately make us question ourselves in terms of whether or not we

assumed (or worse, wished) it to be true. It is a novel that in the end both confirms and

denies the claim: there is indeed something called “decency” that is “fundamental” to

being worthy of love and admiration, but it is not “parceled out” like a land grant from a

king. It is fostered in the heart in love and kindness, which can be real even while being

played at, as we see with the character of Gatsby. One might complain that the reader

cannot know all this yet, and that is true, but we do know from this context that we can

expect just such an answer if we keep reading, and this takes us back to that essential tug

we feel. And one of the ways this pull is created is in the very sentence itself.

Syntax is the most overlooked of strategies. Certainly it is the most subtle. In

thinking of syntax (and how we so often do not notice it until it is, so to speak, too late), I

think of the young narrator in Padget Powell’s Edisto. After a near-death experience he

wanders around seeing everything with what he calls his “good-as-dead outlook,” in

which he tries “to savor the sudden news that [he doesn’t] have to be alive” (7). Seems

one reads for years, saying things like “This is great!” before realizing “the sudden news”

that she is in a trance created by something as taken for granted as simple grammar.

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Caveat lector: Syntax is always at work. And when you do not notice it, it is probably

working its blackest magic.

Let us look at Nick’s syntax as it gives form and edge to this blade of a claim: “I

am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly

suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parceled out

unequally at birth.” It is a lovely example of a neat little periodic sentence, and does

exactly what good periodic sentences do: it unobtrusively sparks curiosity and attunes the

reader to the punch line when it comes. A well executed periodic is a little suspenseful

narrative in itself, and this is no exception: it begins with a self-effacing admission, one

that endears and engenders trust, but before it reveals exactly what it is he must

remember, we get a kind of disclaimer, a confession of his father’s “snobbishness,”

which is also a way of revealing that he himself is able to recognize that snobbishness,

followed by a confession of his own snobbishness. Obviously these dual confessions

further increase our confidence in the humility and honesty of the narrator (introduced in

the first clause). But he is also subtly admitting that he trusts this kind of snobbishness as

the time-tested wisdom of principled, prudent men like his father, who dwell above the

messy social fray and who confidently know that they do (harking back to that social

Calvinism mentioned earlier).

Furthermore, we cannot help but note that there are two kinds of “snobbishness”

here, a generation apart, suggesting that Nick’s is a perfected version of his father’s. His

is the kind that is able to recall and apply his father’s world-view but also able to filter

and refine it, and this refining capacity is also contained in the syntax, since the periodic

is not simply a sentence of suspense. It is also the syntax of clarification and

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qualification, the syntax of the careful and thoughtful, and this is what sets up the all-

important next paragraph, in which he turns on the premise he has so thoughtfully stated.

Without exactly calling its truth into question, he admits that his experiences in the East

have so soured him on human nature that he no longer has the patience—or stomach—to

apply his father’s trusted axiom. It is this vague feeling of disgust that frames this novel,

which will turn the idea of “decency” around in the novel’s green light and question it so

frankly and mournfully.

If we can venture to suggest (without offending Bellow) that artistically

successful novels do in fact make assertions, then we must pay attention to the assertions

buried within them. Part of that essential ‘tug’ comes from the attention we instinctively

give to the linguistic act of setting down a truth—whether we intend to defend or attack

it. To all the varied definitions of human being, I would add this one: A human is the

claim-making animal. Because of this essential fact, any accurate portrait of the human

animal will feature that creature in the act of making—and responding to—claims. And

whenever this happens, the reader will inevitably feel that tug of meaning—even if it is a

meaning that is being worked out rather than declared.

But sometimes the presence of a claim is more subtle. Let us look at a passage

from The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes), the story of a schoolboy who, while lost in

the countryside, stumbles into a strange, wonderful, and mysterious house party where he

is accepted as a guest and where he meets a beautiful girl, who enchants him. Here he is

the morning after he arrives at the estate:

For a moment, in the garden, Meaulnes leant against the rickety wooden

fence around the fish pond: a little ice remained on the edges, thin and

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wrinkled like foam. He saw himself reflected in the water, as if leaning

against the sky, in his romantic student garb. And he thought he saw

another Meaulnes, no longer the schoolboy who had run away in a

peasant’s cart, but a charming, fabled being, from the pages of the sort of

books given as end-of-term prizes . . . . (Alain-Fournier 63)

At first glance the passage seems to make no claims at all, but in fact it makes an

important one.

There are four types of claim: claims of fact, claims of definition, claims of

evaluation, and claims of action. The most common of these are claims of fact, which are

such basic and common speech acts (and so necessary to even the most elementary

conversations) that they do not seem relevant to this discussion. And this passage seems

to be on the surface nothing but a series of simple fact statements, but this is the very

source of its subtlety—its successful navigation of that space between being definitive

and ambiguous. Buried in this narration is the crucial turning point of the novel: “… he

thought he saw another Meaulnes, no longer the schoolboy who had run away in a

peasant’s cart, but a charming, fabled being . . .” and it is indeed a major claim, even

though it does not seem to be. On the linguistic surface, it is simply a declaration of what

he saw in the reflection, but buried in there is a declaration of definition, of interpretation.

Meaulnes is redefined in his own eyes at this moment, and it is this new vision of himself

that will drive him from now on—and, therefore, drive the novel. But the claim is

actually being made by his friend Francois, who is the narrator, and so it is also

Francois’s interpretation of what happened to his friend. The novel is about Meaulnes’s

failed attempt to understand himself, but it is also about Francois’s doomed obsession

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with his friend. Here again the reader feels a powerful tug into the deep furrow of the

work.

First to grab us is the fact that we have here a vision (even if presented as a casual

mirage) and visions, even small ones, draw from the same well as dreams and prophecies.

They are the stuff of myths and legends and scripture, and by portraying this shift in self-

image as a kind of vision, he frames it as also more than a mere shift in self-image.

Furthermore, the transformation he beholds is not merely dramatic but almost epic, as we

see in the central antithesis of the sentence. He is “no longer the schoolboy who had run

away in a peasant’s cart,” rather he is now “a charming, fabled being” from the pages of a

fairy tale. The language is straight from Grimm’s (with quaint words like “schoolboy”

and “cart") and the sentence contains one of the essential fairy-tale fantasies: the simple

“peasant” becomes a “charming” prince of sorts. And so the tug of the passage is

virtually automatic, coming as it does from the common DNA of all stories—from what

Jung called the collective unconscious, which emerges across cultures in all the oldest

stories and tales.

But, as with the Gatsby passage, the claim is also colored and shaped by its

immediate context. It is, of course, not a revelation or a real transformation but a

momentary fantasy. The actual claim is not “he saw” but rather “he thought he saw.” And

the image itself is not solid but rather liquid, creating the illusion that he is “leaning

against the sky,” and it is framed—literally—by melting ice. Nothing is stable in this

vision, and it lasts, of course, only “for a moment.” Furthermore, we should notice that

the glittering image of the transformed schoolboy is no real image in the first place. He

has not become anything concrete but vaguely a “fabled being.” The phrase carries

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powerful romantic connotations and associations, but it is not something we can actually

see. So the vision is no vision at all but rather the confusion of a feeling with a vision,

which prefigures the confusion between childhood fantasy and mature reality that is the

driving conflict of the work. The tug we feel here is nothing less than the pull of the most

profound meaning of the work itself.

There are, of course, works that try too hard to be profound, and it can be

instructive to note how a failed claim can spoil the intended effect of the narrative. At

worst, a reader who senses what in modern parlance is called an “agenda” is likely to be

spooked like a rabbit who smells human scent on a trap. At best, the reader will simply be

disappointed and frustrated by the writer’s manhandling the work. This is, in my opinion,

what happens in parts of Peter Chilson’s much-praised Disturbance-Loving Species. I

think the critics and the prize judges fell in love with the material (which is very rich

indeed) and the noble sentiments and the impressive background research without paying

attention to the actual aesthetic experience of the work itself. On that level, it risks failure

because it struggles too hard to advance, perhaps to impose, what feels like a pre-

existing, fully formed point of view rather than allowing one to form before our eyes out

of the stuff of character and experience. For the sake of fiction, it is not enough that a

position be smart, sensitive, moral, and admirable; it matters only that a declared “truth”

be organic to the story, that it is the inevitable and surprising fruit of the character’s

experience and reflection. Otherwise, nothing is happening but the plot.

Chilson’s collection opens with the novella Tea with Soldiers, which is told from

the point of view of a young American spending his wanderjahr(s) teaching English in an

unnamed West African country that is erupting in violent revolution. Smart, worldly, and

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cynically idealistic, he is fluent in French and, apparently, can get by in Hausa, but he is

naïve and, despite his swagger and bravado, cowardly. He is way out of his depth in this

complex and dangerous cauldron of cultures, and the story narrates his slow, stubborn

realization of this fact as he tries to locate his African colleague who has been arrested by

the army for no reason. It is a good setup for a story— perhaps too good. You need not

have travelled in West Africa to predict, at least generally, how this will go: The cocksure

young American will learn, after two years “in country,” that he knows nothing

whatsoever about the culture he has inhabited, that he has only superficial and artificial

relationships with the “natives” he presumptuously calls “friends,” that he is a fool

despite his intelligence and education—and without even the consolation of knowing

that, at least, he means well. This setup means that some of the realizations (the claims),

when they come, are more or less expected. It is the wrong kind of inevitability, not the

kind that makes sense afterward when all the forces have been revealed; but rather the

kind that feels engineered. A carefully triggered landslide, not one caused by clash of

tectonic plates. The reader nods an “I told you so” without feeling the least shock or

surprise.

Here is our young American, David Carter, speaking to a woman doctor he meets

at an embassy cocktail party:

"But how do you get anything done?” she said.

Amelia kept looking away from him, at the ground, though still

with a trace of a smile. Carter wanted to sound as if he’d spent serious

time in Africa and knew what he was talking about. “Look,” he said, “the

point is, the system emphasizes human beings over business. For me, it’s

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like this—I feel like I needed to come to Africa just to understand what an

asshole I can be.” (34)

They are having one of those conversations that are easy to imagine (and satirize)

between temporary ex-pats in faraway places with each person establishing his/her on-

the-ground bona fides while revealing just the right measure of soft-heartedness tempered

with sardonic cynicism. His declarations come at the end of a story about what he has

learned from an embarrassing experience with the African colleague who is his de facto

mentor, and they happen to be—more or less—the central revelations of the story. The

African culture, which emphasizes familial and tribal relationships over all other cultural

and official connections, is indeed hopelessly alien to even the smartest and most well-

meaning Westerners, who do come off as “assholes,” especially if they are blinded by

their own intelligence and good intentions.

The problem is that we already know this. Of course, there is nothing wrong with

learning it again. Indeed, the best of fiction simply reveals “that which oft was said but

ne’er so well expressed,” as Alexander Pope phrased it, but the point is that a known truth

becomes a new truth only when it is revealed in a different light or in an unexpected

form. This is, unfortunately, not the case here. The claim Chilson makes about Africa is

rather the opposite of fresh or surprising. The diction is pompous and bureaucratic: nouns

like “system . . . human being . . . business,” with the dull “emphasizes” being the

operative verb. It sounds like a line from an orientation briefing rather than a blunt-force

truth delivered upside this boy’s head when he least expected it. And the claim he makes

about himself, despite (perhaps because of) his shift to frank diction, is too much like a

staged confession. Coming so smoothly on the heels of the other statement, the facile

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declaration lacks all drama and spontaneity. There is no heat, no sting. It is merely glib.

The actual truth of both these claims is lost.

To his credit, Chilson seems to know this. The young doctor laughs at David and

says, "…you’re so well informed,” and they then share a laugh (34). But having the story

call attention to the pat nature of the claims does nothing to redeem the claims, even

when Chilson uses David’s embarrassment to foster another claim. (It could—in a bit of a

stretch— be argued that the author makes the initial claims pat on purpose as a way of

creating the embarrassment, but this would be an even worse strategy, because a narrative

must make claims sparingly, and those that matter must come at the right time and in the

right way.) Anyway, he proceeds to have David admit (to himself) his embarrassment

over his attempt to be impressively profound:

The awkward start to Carter’s meeting with Amelia and the memory of his

I-needed-to-come-to-Africa-to-understand-what-an-asshole-I-can-be

wisdom still stung. How, he wondered, do you explain Africa? He’d

wanted to tell Amelia about the fishing and farming families who once

lived on the hotel land, about Salif, and about how the soldiers affected

life in the city. He wanted to tell her about Hamza Saido but feared she

might say, “You should have recognized malaria….” (36)

So it turns out here that he is embarrassed simply by the “awkwardness” of using such a

melodramatic line with an older, more sophisticated woman; he is not, apparently,

embarrassed by the self-absorbed speciousness of his so-called “wisdom.” Nevertheless,

this embarrassment is expected to work in the narrative to strip him of his pretense and

set him up instead for a genuine epiphany, but what we get is the even more banal

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rhetorical question (“How, he wondered, do you explain Africa?”) followed by the list

that is supposed to be quietly dramatic and reveal this boy as “real” underneath his

youthful cynicism and pomposity. The intended effect is robbed of the power that would

have come with spontaneity.

And then there are the assertions that have a different kind of predictability: the

pronouncements of the Africans are often obscure and cryptic and therefore pass as

profound and wise. We might call this the “Indian Chief syndrome” of classic American

westerns. We see it whenever a character who is “other” (usually darker-skinned and

more “primitive") is the one who sees (and speaks) the truth that the supposedly

enlightened Euro / Anglo (white) character cannot see right before his/her eyes. Often the

“wise other” espouses the wisdom of an exotic and mysterious culture (we could call this

variation the “Kung Fu syndrome”). There is a kind of fetishizing going on here that is

problematic for obvious reasons, but at the very least this is a recipe for triteness and

predictability.

The structure of Tea with Soldiers intertwines present events—the government

crackdown and the arrest of his colleague Salif—with David’s memories of conversations

with Salif, which were almost always over tea. Indeed the tea motif is itself an example

of this triteness.

Salif lectures David on the making of tea as he lectures him on Africa. The

mysterious tea ceremony becomes a metonym for the mystery of the culture at large, and

David’s attempt to master it, a metonym for his attempt to penetrate and inhabit the

culture. No reason on the surface why this shouldn’t work, provided it is subtle, working

by suggestion, but Chilson makes too much of the tea. He uses the scenes as a refrain,

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and so he makes the tea too obviously a device, rather than a naturally recurring part of

the narrative that has significance beyond itself. Furthermore, he is far too flat-footed in

using the tea as occasion for David’s clumsiness and Salif’s aplomb, not to mention as an

occasion for sententious, aphoristic statements:

“You must hold the kettle high. Yes, that’s right. The tea must

travel some distance through the air. Remember you must let it breathe.”

Salif tried to suppress a smile as Carter spilled most of the first

round. “It doesn’t matter. You will make another pot, and another. The

purpose is to make time, to extend time, and to talk. Spilled tea is not a

bad thing.”

Carter tried to brew a second round, watched by a dozen sets of

eyes: Salif, a few teachers and students, and the groundskeeper, Ahmed.

Even the headmaster . . . .

“Do not rush it, Daveed. Take your time, pay attention. You wait,

and we wait, for the tea.” (55)

We are prepared to believe that in Africa, the making of tea means more than it does in

the West, that it is made with greater care and attentiveness than it is in Starbucks, but

Chilson puts too much weight on this. Westerners are not strangers to this idea. (Think,

for example, of English traditions of tea time and the tradition of the London coffee

house as a location of conversation, used to such great effect by Addison and Steele.) In

other words, David’s utter obliviousness to the significance of the tea is no more

believable than his apparent inability to pour water without spilling it. (Why must he be

as physically clumsy as he is socially? That also undermines rather than underscores.)

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Then there is what we might term, after the Peter Sellers character in Being There,

the “Chance the Gardener syndrome”: statements about commonplace things that carry a

cryptic charge of double entendre.

The tea must travel some distance through the air. Remember you must let

it breathe. . . . It doesn’t matter. You will make another pot, and another.

The purpose is to make time, to extend time, and to talk. Spilled tea is not

a bad thing. (55)

We are obviously supposed to read this as we would a New Testament parable or a Zen

koan, but the very fact that we know this means that the moment feels staged, forced.

Hearing one’s own language on the tongue of a non-native speaker can be as enlightening

and delightful as hearing poetry. An ordinary, pedestrian expression can become

unintentionally figurative, can frame common reality in a way that makes it quite

uncommon, but it doesn’t work if it feels rigged. One might be utterly delighted to

discover a snapping turtle laying eggs in the back yard, but the delight would be gone if

the turtle had been caught and placed there. No surprise, no discovery. Such affected

statements simply will not bear the weight that a sturdy allegory will carry. They bulge

with air instead of substance: What does it really mean that the tea must “breathe” or that

one must “wait for the tea”? And we have already gathered—time and again—that the tea

ritual is significant in this culture. When Salif comes out and states—in such a heavy-

handed way—that the purpose is to make time, all the dynamic subtlety is lost. The only

meaning left is that Salif is wise and David is not—again, something we already knew.

I do not wish to be unfair to Chilson. He is obviously very talented, and his book

well worth attention. He manages some powerful and memorable scenes and evokes the

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combination of danger, joy, tragedy, and romance that is Africa and looks seriously at the

unutterably sad and messy legacy of colonialism. Yet there are too many places in these

stories where his claims bear no weight or where his story does not bear the claims, and

this seriously mars this otherwise promising collection. It illustrates how claims function

as pegs that hold the larger pieces together. Pegs are few and small, but when the pegs do

not hold, the piece wobbles and collapses. When pegs are made of the same wood and fit

tightly and sit flush with the surface, they are barely noticeable—and strongest. And so it

is with claims in fiction.

Rarely do you run into a tighter work than Padgett Powell’s Edisto, and that

tightness is in large part due to his deft use of claims. This delightful novel chronicles a

few months in the life of a teenage boy who lives with his divorced mother on the still-

undeveloped coast of South Carolina. I did not read this novel for years because I simply

could not stand the thought of reading yet another “Southern coming-of-age story.” But I

was a fool. The jacket description fits, but the novel upends the expectations the phrase

sets up. It is expected that this boy’s world will open up, that his innocence will begin to

disappear, that a youthful wisdom will accrue, but the paths and forms and expressions of

these changes are unexpected and startling.

One of the most powerful engines of the novel is the evolving consciousness

(heard in the cracking voice) of Simons Manigault, this observant, precocious, ever-

thinking kid, and the claims are his discoveries—whether those he formulates or those he

quotes from others. One of the characters important to him is Theenie, his mother’s black

housekeeper and his de facto nanny. Early in the novel, he remembers one of their more

important—and also typical—exchanges. Theenie has just left because she believes a

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young man who has turned up is her long-lost grandson and that his appearance may be a

bad omen for her family:

…and from what Taurus told me about her (Theenie) bolting out of the

shack with jets of terror into the palms waving around like big testifying

arms at a revival, from this I knew something was up, particularly for

Theenie, old Theenie, who says to me, “Sim, you ain’t got to do but two

things. One is die, and thuther is live till you die.” I turn my head like a

beagle at the novelty of this suggestion coming from her. “Ain’t I right?”

she says. “I guess you are,” I say. “You believe it then.” (28)

Just like Chilson, Powell is weaving in an old saying from the culture, but here it works

for two reasons. First, he captures Theenie’s voice. Dialect is easily overdone and ruined,

but Powell manages it through what Martin Luther King once called “ungrammatical

profundity” and music in the syntax (“One is die, and thuther is live…”). Those who see

regional speech (whether in South Alabama or South Bronx) as a result of mere

ignorance miss the point. The speakers may not know a split infinitive from a split pea,

but their language is governed by an instinct for efficiency and an ear for the sound—and

soundness—of expression. “One is die,” for example, is completely clear and straight to

the point. Indeed the economy and the unusualness of it combine to give it far more

punch than a flat standard construction would ever have. But the sentence also has a ring,

with the two central clauses as almost perfect isocolons that echo each other and

emphasize the gritty antithesis (live—die). Not only does this capture what we imagine to

be Theenie’s voice, but it also captures her voice in exactly the way Simons Manigault

would hear it and write it down, hence the coinage of “thuther,” which is equally true to

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Theenie’s voice and to Simons’s ear—and to his meticulousness about writing down

exactly what he heard to the syllable. And given that the claim is native to both the scene

and the characters, it can then resonate within the larger narrative.

Simons is trying to figure life out, trying to figure out what he owes society and

what it owes him, which rules to follow and which ones to break, and Theenie’s line

unfolds for him throughout the work. But the resonance gets its force from the subtlety.

Powell does not make Chilson’s mistake in calling attention to and explicating the

importance of the line. All he does to flag it is have Simons’s head “turn like a beagle” as

he catches its significance like a dog catches a smell; this is all it takes to make the

reader’s head turn as well, and that is just what is wanted. We notice Simons’s noticing,

notice what he notices and why—and how he notices—but noticing is different from

being grabbed and turned. A good narrative manages to call a reader’s attention to a

claim without calling his attention to the fact that his attention has been called.

This does not mean that Powell does not explicate the claims that emerge. Indeed,

he does this to great effect. Consider this passage, which comes after Simons has just

been learning about girls from Taurus, the man his mother has hired to be his “mentor”:

He said yes and smiled, and I don’t think knew whether I was joking or

not, but didn’t need to know. That’s the thing I learned from him during

those days: you can wait to know something like waiting for a dream to

surface in the morning, which if you jump up and wonder hard you will

never remember, but if you just lie there and listen to the suck-pump chop

the surf and the peppering and the palm thrashing and feel the rising glare

of the Atlantic heat, you can remember all things of the night. But if you

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go around beating the world with questions like a reporter or federal or

oral history junior sociologist number-two pencil electronic keyout

asshole, all the answers will go back to mystery like fiddlers into pluff

mud. You just sit down in the marsh and watch mystery peek out and

begin to nibble the air and saw and sing and run from hole to hole with

itself. Lie down and the fiddlers will come as close to you as trained

squirrels in a park. And how did he teach me that? I don’t know, but you

don’t need a package of peanuts or anything. (84)

The main claim (“…you can wait to know something like waiting for a dream to surface

in the morning…”) emerges in the beginning of the paragraph, and it is significant

because the central concern of the entire work is Simons’s struggle to “know” about life,

but this particular discovery is the most important because it is the beginning of his

wisdom: he is fascinated not by what he has just learned about girls but rather about what

he has learned about learning itself. This is knowledge about knowledge, and so it is also

self-knowledge. He is suddenly aware of the nature of his own peculiar awareness, and

this is the place where the reader feels a whole new tug in the work. This is the place

where the novel plows into something far more interesting than a teenager learning about

sex and adults. And the claim emerges as a spontaneous, unexpected discovery because

he learned it while setting out to learn something else entirely.

And, not yet completely fallen from innocence, he is being metaphorical and

analogical without being completely aware of it, and so his language is as fresh and

immediate as his discovery while he describes exactly what he hears every morning from

his bed and exactly what he has learned about fiddler crabs while actually describing the

24

nature of wisdom. And the unbroken, stream-of-consciousness syntax captures the

excited rush of these thoughts as they come to him and as he breathlessly shares them.

The discovery he claims here is not simply imbedded in the narrative; it is rather a part of

the narrative, and it is in Simons’s unmistakable voice. Even more important, the

expounding he does is also part of the narrative. He makes the claim up front, but then he

proceeds to, as the deconstructionists would say, “unpack” it in his own inimitable way.

But the unpacking is not a device of authorial intrusion (à la Chilson) but rather Simons’s

attempt to get this clear in his mind, to explain it to himself, to lay claim to his claim. It is

an extension of the claim itself, and in the extension, Simons’s character is expanded and

refined.

In this way, a claim forms character just as much as character forms a claim. A

claim is authentic when it emerges naturally and believably from an authentic

personality, and the claim in turn confirms and establishes the authenticity of that

personality. The tree bears the fruit and the fruit bears the tree. The natural-born claim is

a microcosm of the larger sui generis quality of all strong fiction, which seems to have

appeared fully formed, at once made of and making endlessly complex, self-generating

mutual dependencies. Narrative makes claims, and claims, in turn, make narratives. The

forming of narratives and the making of claims are not merely coincidental but

concomitant, the same thing at the same time, two manifestations of the meaning that is

produced by—and that produces—the work.

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WORKS CITED

Alain-Fournier. The Lost Estate (Le Grand Meaulnes). Trans. Robin Buss. London:

Penguin, 2007. Print.

Bellow, Saul. “Among Writers.” The New Yorker, Vol. 86, No. 10 (26 Apr. 2010):

52-61. Print.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983. Print.

Chilson, Peter. Disturbance-Loving Species. Boston, New York: Houghton, Mifflin,

2007. Print.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.

Keats, John. Letter to George and Thomas Keats. 21 Dec. 1817. The Norton Anthology

of English Literature. Ed. M.H. Abrams. Vol. 2. 5th ed. New York: Norton,

1987. 862-863. Print.

King, Martin Luther. “Address at the Conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery March.”

25 Apr. 1965. The Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute.

Web. 5 Feb. 2011.

Mitchell, David. Cloud Atlas. New York: Random House, 2004. Print.

Powell, Padgett. Edisto. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983. Print.

Robinson, Marilynne. Home. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Print.

Waller, Robert James. The Bridges of Madison County. New York: Grand Central, 1995.

Print.