As mentioned in a previous post, I recently took a course at U of T on modern drama.^{*I’ll never reveal my mark, but it was probably a bad sign for one of us that my prof complained on my first paper about there being no letters lower than ‘F’.} Among the gems I left with was this quote from Yeats, on J. M. Synge after Synge’s death at thirty-eight: “In all art like [Synge's], although it does not command—indeed because it does not—may lie the roots of far-branching events. Only that which does not reach, which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.”

I thought this was an excellent evocation not only of what makes a certain kind of drama powerful, but a certain kind of non-fiction as well.

Until I took this class, I was familiar with Synge only from a namecheck in a lovely travel piece we ran a few years back by Mark Anthony Jarman. One of the singular things about the Irish playwright, who published his masterwork, The Playboy of the Western World, in 1907, is the extent to which he reported his dramas before writing them. At Yeats’ suggestion, he made several trips to Ireland’s west coast near the turn of the century—trips that informed the substance and language of his plays. Whether tending toward the tragic—as in Riders to the Sea, about the deaths of all the males in a family on the Aran Islands—or the comic, as in The Playboy—a raucous spin on The Valiant Little Tailor—his work had an irresistibility born of authority, of having been there.

In non-fiction, where the ideas and arguments need to be presented by the writer without manipulation of fact, the trick of irresistibility, as defined by Yeats, is arguably harder.^{*Hard enough that Synge didn’t seem to manage it in his own non-fiction. (Spoiler alert) Witness the last line of Mark’s story for us: “J.M. Synge wrote of these strange beautiful shores, ‘One wonders in these places why anyone is left in Dublin, or London, or Paris, when it would be better, one would think, to live in a tent or hut with this magnificent sea and sky, and to breathe this wonderful air, which is like wine in one’s teeth.’”} How do you present affecting events without hectoring? How do you get across necessary information without lecturing?

Given the difficulty of the task, I was interested to see that the magazine received a letter, published in the Summer Reading issue, suggesting that Jan Dutkiewicz and I had landed somewhere in the vicinity of, if not irresistibility, at least not complete resistibility in a feature we wrote earlier this year. Not to say that I was pleased the letter began, “Jan Dutkiewicz and Jeremy Keehn’s ‘Grounds to Pound’ report on mixed martial arts (May) is one of the most depressing articles I have read in a very long time,”^{*Actually, it is to say that I was pleased. I’m goth that way.} but at least it prompted someone to take the time to articulate an intelligent, reasoned response.

The writer took us to task for not providing serious analysis of why our society condones the brutish violence of mixed martial arts. A fair critique, and indeed when I was initially thinking about writing the article, the plan was to do something that combined a smattering of reporting with more analysis. However, once Jan, who knows the world of the sport better than I do, had gone out and found what we thought was a very compelling narrative, we decided to work with that and try to understand why people do it from the inside, instead of commenting from without. To seek to impart information without crying out, persuading, condescending, or lecturing, as Yeats put it—or, as John Updike did, to aim for “understatement…the mark of authority”^{*As, presumably, when Harry Angstrom authoritatively had understated anal sex with one of his friends’ wives in Rabbit Is Rich.} via narrative.^{*Not that Jan and I could do much better than Updike on that front, given that we were writing about half-naked dudes mashing each other.}

To give an example of how this kind of thing is done by experienced, top-notch narrators, there’s a scene in Chris Tenove’s “Extraordinary Chambers” (June) where, in the course of a column—in which exposition, analysis, and argumentation would be expected to be the norm—Chris captures many of the best arguments against the Khmer Rouge tribunals simply by showing the grilling of a tribunal staffer by a tour group of ordinary Cambodians. When I encountered this in an early draft I read at the behest of the story’s editor, a “!” immediately escaped my pen. A sterling example of craft, and of irresistible narrative.

Next, on the Bironist: I answer your questions, beginning with the oft-asked “Aren’t you always on vacation?”

Tags: Chris Tenove, J. M. Synge, John Updike, Mark Anthony Jarman, narrative non-fiction, New New Journalism, Riders to the Sea, The Aran Islands, The Playboy of the Western World, W. B. Yeats

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Posted on Friday, July 4th, 2008 at 12:33 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.