Shock Induction

Wow. Just Wow.

In a recent session of workshop, Ryan lamented. He said how the assigned reading—stories by Amy Hempel, Mark Richard, Thom Jones—had ruined him for reading most other fiction. I told him, “Join the club.”

Since Tom’s workshop in 1990, I’ve no idea why Minimalist fiction landed so hard on me. After a few sessions with Spanbauer, I couldn’t stomach most of the writers—I won’t name names—whom I used to love to read. My old favs were all of the sudden so… writerly, as Gordon Lish would say. Fiction, in particular third-person, omniscient fiction, turned to ashes in my mouth, now that I’d read Hempel’s sentences, for example:

Only a couple of us knew what was taking so long. The children’s dog had been killed the month before. The children felt it would be unfair to get another dog — unfair to their former dog. The children were in pain, and I felt I knew what to say. I said to their father, quoting a lovely poem: “Tell them this: ‘The need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.’”

He said, “That’s what I used to tell myself when I cheated on my ex-wife.”

Minimalist sentences would zig and then zag. Start in one direction and mix metaphors. Gordon Lish, credited with inventing the style of Minimalism, called this roughness “burnt tongue,” and it landed with such freshness. More from Hempel:

Jean looked genuinely pleased. She said, “Larry is the kind of guy who says, Did I tell you about the time I was attacked by a pack of sled dogs in Alaska? No? I was in Fairbanks at the time, he starts out,” Jean said, “and two years later you find out it was one sled dog and it was a puppy.”

From Hempel’s The Rest of God:

Dave dropped the subject, but everyone knew the story as vividly as if we had been the one who hit the deer, then knelt by the side of the road and held the deer’s dying head in our lap, and shielded with one hand the eyes that blinked at each pair of passing headlights, affording the animal that tiny measure of relief until a state trooper showed up with a gun.

As Rick Moody describes Hempel’s work:

It’s all about the sentences. It’s about the way the sentences move in the paragraphs. It’s about the rhythm. It’s about ambiguity. It’s about the way emotion, in difficult circumstances, gets captured in language. It’s about instants of consciousness. It’s about besieged consciousness. It’s about love trouble. It’s about death. It’s about suicide. It’s about the body. It’s about skepticism. It’s against sentimentality. It’s against cheap sentiment. It’s about regret. It’s about survival. It’s about sentences used to enact and defend survival.

How emotion gets captured in language, that’s the best definition I’ve seen for burnt tongue. You can open any of Hempel’s books to a random page and read a sentence to get high. The payoff doesn’t depend on a plot, much less reading eight hundred pages of plot. That’s the gulf between Minimalism and Modernism. Modernism constantly depends on each sentence acting as a little signpost that says, “Keep moving! The show’s still ahead!”

In Minimalism, each sentence is the show. In Hempel, notice how words repeat to bracket the anecdote. From Murder:

The day of the wedding, before a S.W.A.T. team of beauticians arrived to do the bride, the young son from the groom’s first marriage gave his new stepmother a picture he had drawn of a scowling Green Beret with a sword through his flaming head.

The bride fitted the drawing into her vanity mirror. She looked beyond it and made a wedding face.

Notice how the vowels and consonants repeat to create the music. From
The Annex:

The headlights hit the headstone, and I hate it all over again.

Another example:

The lizards made Bell jumpy after dark, made her bark at the stars until one of the guests would yell, “Belle, take the rest of the night off!”

That’s another quality. The prose sounds as though Hempel’s characters are actual people. As though we’re overhearing them, not being told a story. A misstatement or odd phrasing—in ohter words burnt tongue or a a typo—makes the story authentic. Such language gives it heart authority. Another example, but Modernism from the story Bullet in the Brain by Tobias Wolf. Yes, Modernism, but you’ll see my point at the end of the sample:

Then the last two boys arrive, Coyle and a cousin of his from Mississippi. Anders has never met Coyle’s cousin before and will never see him again. He says hi with the rest but takes no further notice of him until they’ve chosen sides and Darsch asks the cousin what position he wants to play.

The bullet is already in the brain; it won’t be outrun forever, or charmed to a halt. In the end, it will do its work and leave the troubled skull behind, dragging its comet’s tail of memory and hope and talent and love into the marble hall of commerce. That can’t be helped. But for now Anders can still make time. Time for the shadows to lengthen on the grass, time for the tethered dog to bark at the flying ball, time for the boy in right field to smack his sweat-blackened mitt and softly chant, They is, they is, they is.

To heighten the overheard effect, note how Hempel allows a character other than the narrator to deliver the punch. As does Wolff. Inspiration and enlightenment always come from out there. And note how in the Wolff story, the odd phrasing drives the language to chaos. To become a bird’s song. A chanting repetition, like a mantra. A mistake or by accident? Hardly.

It’s the wrongness that makes Hempel so easy to quote. As it does Denis Johnson. As it does Joy Williams:

She gets to want to have a baby.

But at last I’ve found some insight why. For the past month I’ve been studying with a hypnotist, and finally have a way to grasp how good storytelling works.¹ Like stage hypnosis, fiction requires a “buy-in” from the person to be enchanted. That buy-in comes from merely opening the book, but it also comes from a series of “tests” that overcome the subject’s resistance to entering a trance. Putting the subject into a trance is the “induction,” and each week my teacher and I are focusing on a different method of casting such a spell over a reader.

Bewitching the reader, if you will.

No worries, I’ll revisit all of this in future posts. For now, I want to focus on one method of inducing a trance: Shock induction.

In short, shock induction is a sudden something—a gesture, a sight, a sound—that jars the witness out of their current stream of thought. It’s the sudden enjambment in poetry. It’s the sudden interruption in a song. Think of the break-away in the video (at the 2:40 point) for the song Bizzare Love Triangle. From Wikipedia:

The video has a black and white cut-scene where Jodi Long and E. Max Frye are arguing about reincarnation, in which Long emphatically declares, “I don't believe in reincarnation because I refuse to come back as a bug or as a rabbit!” Frye responds, “You know, you're a real ‘up’ person,” before the song resumes.

In the ’90s, Sinead O’Connor said the point of art was to deliver a “short, sharp shock.” Amen.

Shock induction is The Sultan’s Elephant, which, when I saw it in London, when it walked into view from around a corner, it drove people to screaming fits of laughter, yes, aged stock brokers in pinstriped suits with briefcases, everyone dashed around as dazzled as children. The shock of the novelty bumped us all out of our heads and put us in the present moment. The event was spectacle, but also included music, and smoke and incense—all the elements of a religious ceremony. Maybe that helps to explain its impact. It transcended, well, everything.

Not to belabor the point, but that’s shock induction. And that’s burnt tongue. And that’s Minimalism.

And, no, Hemingway’s work is not Minimalism. Not Raymond Carver Minimalism. As Lish and Spanbauer would tell you, Hemingway is stripped-down Modernism. Hemmingway, classic as he is, writes in the shorthand he learned as a reporter for the Kansas City Star.

Burnt tongue subverts the expectation. It’s clever without getting caught being clever, like a typo or missstatement. It’s sticky. Shock induction is the punchline that leaves you dazed and open for an instant. A tiny bit of tension that relaxes you. For example:

Knock-knock

Who’s there?

Radio

Radio who?

Radio not, I’m going to cum in your mouth.

Orange you glad I didn’t say “banana”? It’s related to the Pattern Interruption method of inducing a trance, but we’ll focus on that method in the future.

Shock induction is at work in pop-up shops… surprise endings… surprise reveals—Rosebud is a sled. Again, they jar us out of what the est training called “the already always listening,” the lens or framework through which we usually see our everyday world.

Shock induction is the punch in Fight Club. It’s the moment in the Catholic ritual of Confirmation when the bishop slaps the child to “wake them up to the reality of being an adult in The Church.” That moment when we all had to fight back tears during the ceremony at the church altar, and our parents braced themselves to see us hurt by the larger world. The loud sound of that smack!! It’s that moment that Sister St. Charles had prepared us 13-year-olds for when she said, “Do not hit him back! He’s the Bishop!”

Lest you jump to conclusions, the Dalai Lama slaps, too. When my friend Rhonda Kennedy was hired to assist him, he slapped her, telling her that the sudden pain was meant to awaken her from the walking dream of human life.

Shock induction is why we love Alien. The chest burster is shock induction, sure, but the real shock comes at the point where Tom Skerritt is killed. In 1978, when the white, male captain of the ship DIED, leaving us with a Black man, two women, and a robot, well, moviegoers had no idea where the story could go from there. We were Wah!!! Our cultural framework was so broken by that event that we were completely entranced. Alien or no alien, Skerritt’s death was the film’s real subversion.

And, yes, the end of Drag Me to Hell does that, but Amy Hempel does it with every sentence. Shock induction returns us to the childhood innocence when anything was possible. That short, sharp shock.

And that, to revisit Ryan’s frustration, is why people exposed to Minimalism aren’t raring to go back.

Read Hempel. Try shock induction for yourself in your writing. But do so at your own peril because there is no going back.

1. One way, of many. More to come.