The senses, "preferably all of them"
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This week I’ve been reading Butcher’s Crossing, a great Western by John Williams. This novel tells the story of Will Andrews, a young dropout from Harvard College who takes part of his fortune West, where he expects, being a wealthy New Englander and fan of Emerson, to find himself in nature. That’s the big picture.
Last night I came across this paragraph describing a party of snowbound hunters’ long-overdue trip back down from the Rockies with a wagon overloaded with dried buffalo hides:
Before midday they found a level plateau that extended a short way out from the mountain. They took the bits from their horses’ mouths and unyoked the oxen and let them graze on the thick grass that grew among the small rocks that littered the plateau. On a broad flat rock, Charley Hoge cut into equal portions a long strip of smoked venison, and passed the portions among the men. Andrews’s hand received the meat limply, and put it to his mouth; but for several minutes he did not eat. Exhaustion pulled at his stomach muscles, sickening him; tiny points darkened and brightened before his eyes, and he lay back on the cool grass. After a while he was able to tear at the tough leather-like meat. His gums, inflamed by the long diet of game, throbbed at the toughness; he let the meat soften on his tongue before he chewed it. After he had forced most of it down his throat, he stood, despite the tiredness that still pulsed in his legs, and looked about him. The mountainside was a riot of varied shade and hue. The dark green of the pine boughs was lightened to a greenish yellow at the tips, where new growth was starting; scarlet and white buds were beginning to open on the wild-berry bushes; and the pale green of new growth on slender aspens shimmered above the silver-white bark of their trunks. All about the ground the pale new grass reflected the light of the sun into the shadowed recesses beneath the great pines, and the dark trunks glowed in that light, faintly, as if the light came from the hidden centers of the trees themselves. He thought that if he listened he could hear the sound of growth. A light breeze rustled among the boughs, and the pine needles whispered as they were rubbed together; from the grass came a mumble of sound as innumerable insects rustled secretly and performed their invisible tasks; deep in the forest a twig snapped beneath the pad of an unseen animal. Andrews breathed deeply of the fragrant air, spiced with the odor of crushed pine needles and musky from the slow decay that worked upward from the earth in the shadows of the great trees.
This is an extraordinarily rich and beautiful description, and it is impossible to read through it without sensing the place where Andrews and company have come to rest.
About a month ago I wrote in some detail about John Gardner’s concept of the “vivid and continuous fictive dream” as the thing that makes good fiction work. In that post I quoted a passage from The Art of Fiction in which Gardner describes how the writer “gives us images that appeal to our senses—preferably all of them, not just the visual sense—so that we seem to move among the characters, lean with them against the fictional walls, taste the fictional gazpacho, smell the fictional hyacinths.” Emphasis mine. I wrote at some length about the vivid, closely observed, concretely described details that make good fiction absorbing in the way that Gardner describes, but glided over that key phrase: “preferably all of them.” That is, our senses.
Incorporating details that play on all of the senses can be tricky, and most writers fall back on one or two that they are good at conveying. But that paragraph from Butcher’s Crossing is a small masterpiece of exactly what Gardner calls for. Go back and reread it with Gardner’s “preferably all of them” in mind.
Here are a few things I observed:
Sight—Williams presents specific visual details from the beginning (the layout of the plateau where the team stops) to the end (“the shadows of the great trees”). Note especially the many gradations of spring color in the middle of the paragraph, and the play of light through the trees so that it seems to come from everywhere at once. And through Andrews, the novel’s protagonist and viewpoint character, the reader gets the subjective sight of “tiny points darken[ing] and brighten[ing] before his eyes” in his pain and exhaustion.
Touch—Note not only the “cool grass” but “the tiredness that pulsed in his legs” and the entire description of Andrews eating, in which we feel not only the texture of the venison but how Andrews holds (his “hand received the meat limply”), chews, and swallows it. More on this below.
Taste—Again, most obviously the description of eating the venison, through which this category will also overlap with touch above and smell below. But note that this sense does much of its work indirectly; we never get adjectives to describe the precise taste of the venison. Andrews in his exhaustion is beyond that.
Smell—The paragraph concludes with a sentence almost totally devoted to smell, invoking “fragrant air” that is “spiced” and “musky,” a word I also find strongly tactile. (Describe a basement as “musky” and I can feel the air down there.) But anyone with experience of smoked meat and venison in particular will be able to smell Andrews’s meal as well as feeling and tasting it.
Hearing—Williams gets especially creative here. Rustling leaves and whispering pine needles are unsurprising, but the “mumble” of insects in the grass is inventive and just right. And Andrews hears not only small, nearby sounds but the faroff (somewhere, a twig snaps) and the borderline metaphysical (“He thought that if he listened he could hear the sound of growth”). This sense more than anything conveys the space that Andrews and company occupy, high and remote and empty in the mountains.
These are just the most obvious things, but one could examine that paragraph in considerably more detail. I think it might be a good exercise to go through it merely cataloging sensory words. But there are three ways Williams uses the senses, as a matter of technique, that I think give this passage its potency.
First, onomatopoeia. This includes not only auditory effects (the bugs in the grass “rustled secretly”) but control of the rhythm of the sentence to suggest Andrews’s tiredness and the languor of slowly coming to rest in a quiet place (look at how Williams drops the word faintly into his description of the light in the trees). Writers of prose fiction should absolutely read poetry for training in the use of tools like this.
Second, as I’ve already hinted above, Williams overlaps these sensations. One can see this most obviously as Andrews eats his venison, but many other details simultaneously involve multiple senses. Consider this: “the pine needles whispered as they were rubbed together.” That’s not only about sound but touch. In nine words the reader not only hears the pine needles but feels the minute friction beneath the sound.
Third and closely related, Williams creates many of these effects through precisely selected verbs—verbs that carry some suggestion of sensation. I’ve already mentioned the rubbing of the pine needles, but look back at Andrews’s unsatisfying meal again. Andrews has to “tear at” the meat and then let it “soften,” twice suggesting its texture, and does not swallow but “force[s] most of it down.” These three verbs do as much to tell the reader about what eating the venison is like as the adjectives bluntly describing its texture.
The result of all of this detail—so carefully arranged and presented and, per Gardner, appealing to all five senses—is a beautiful but unshowy paragraph of immediately involving and vivid description and action. And Butcher’s Crossing is full of passages like this.
You can read that piece on Gardner and the fictive dream here. For more on the important role vivid sensory verbs play in action and description, see here. And it occurs to me that this is the second time the noble bison has been the thumbnail for a post here; so, speaking of verbs and buffalo, here’s the first time both showed up on this blog.
