the moss, the mushrooms, the plants in the undergrowth....
October 23, 2024
Dear Lori & Anthony,
Lori, I want to begin this letter by saying how much I enjoyed your conversation with Chad Post about M3D (my shorthand for Miss Mackintosh, My Darling), Marguerite Young and this project. You provided an excellent and succinct summary of the characters and plot arc, which I found helpful. Hearing that Young provided the structural ballast needed to keep this book afloat was heartening. As a reader, I need to understand an author’s sense of purpose to buy into it. Also, it helps that I feel somewhat vindicated after listening to Chad’s story about how Young wanted Dalkey to print M3D in two volumes. And that she wished she’d had the foresight to release it in multiple installments as she wrote it.
In my last letter, I mentioned wanting to reread Umberto Eco’s essay in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, and so I have. Though all the chapters are insightful, I focused on Chapter Three: Lingering in the Woods. Eco is a genius. He classifies time primarily into two categories – reading and discourse time.
“In written fiction it is certainly difficult to ascertain what the discourse time and the reading time may be; but there is no doubt that at times an abundance of description, a mass of minute particulars in the narration, may serve less as a representational device than as a strategy for slowing down the reading time, until the reader drops into the rhythm that the author believes necessary to the enjoyment of the text.”
Eco gives a few different reasons why a writer might include “an abundance of description” – to slow the readers down and acclimate them to the rhythms of the prose, but also to encourage lingering. According to Eco, lingering allows the reader time to consider what they are reading, make inferences, and imagine. Sticking with his woods metaphor, it will enable us “to watch the beams of sunlight play among the trees and fleck the glades, to examine the moss, the mushrooms, the plants in the undergrowth.” I have a clear picture in my mind of the interior of the sea blackened house, the beach on which it sits, and the passengers we observe on the bus. I think it’s safe to say you both do as well. And I believe our pictures are, if not the same, very similar based on the quality of information Young has given us.
Eco also talks about reading time versus story time – the time it takes to read the actual text versus the passage of time within the story. He mentions a replacement for discourse time, which he calls “hallucinating time,” and that’s precisely what I believe Young is encouraging in these early chapters.
“In the same way we can use a map to imagine trips and extraordinary adventures through unknown lands and seas, but in such a case the map has become merely a stimulus and the reader has become the narrator.”
We have been immersed in the internal dialogue of her heroine, Vera.
There is very little spoken dialogue in chapters one through five of M3D. In fact, there’s almost none until we leave the sea-blackened house behind and take our assigned seats on the bus in chapters six and seven. Eco also makes the point that spoken dialogue is the “perfect congruence between storytime and discourse time” since the time it takes you to read dialogue is equal to the time it takes a character to speak it. (He goes on to give a funny example of how Dumas blatantly padded his dialogue in The Three Musketeers because he was paid by the line. This has no bearing on M3D or my current letter – but it made me grin, so I’m mentioning it). And so it tracks that my time on the bus has a very different, more accelerated rhythm than in the previous chapters. Lest we forget that Young was also a poet.
There’s a lovely essay by Steven Moore on The Poetry Foundation website discussing the correlations between Young’s poetry and M3D. Towards the end, he talks about Young’s “dragnet” sentences (her name for them). I can’t say it better than Moore, so I won’t try. His definition is “a long, paratactic sentence that would cast its net into a sea of facts and fancies, ideas and characters, and drag them into unexpected relationships.” This sent me back to Lori’s letter (9/24/2024) in which she talks about The Collected Poems of Marguerite Young.
All this is to say; I find myself increasingly impressed by Young’s skills as a writer in general and a stylist in particular. I am becoming persuaded that Miss MacIntosh, My Darling is an essential and criminally neglected modernist text.
Yours in the name of the rose,
Tara
P.S. – Lori, I read your last letter but am not ready yet to reckon with death in M3D.
P.S.S. – Do either of you think David Lynch might be a Marguerite Young fan? I’m thinking of Twin Peaks: The Return, which deserves a rewatch.
P.S.S.S. – Steven Moore also mentions that Young admired Tristram Shandy!