Wrong night, wrong city, wrong movie, wrong ambulances caterwauling past and drowning out wrong dialogue of wrong Norma Desmond, what could be more wrong she’s the same age as me this tilted wreck with deliquescent chin, I turn it off, eat soup and read a novel.
Wrong Norma, by Anne Carson
Repetition creates not only rhythm but also meaning. It’s a signpost for the reader that the repeated word has, for whatever reason, gotten under the protagonist’s skin. The narrator’s mind circles around this word and can’t escape the loop. It’s a way to create not linear but cyclical time. The protagonist is stuck, spinning in a current. At the end of the sentence, the narrator turns it off, with the “it” referring to the endless circling.
Carson uses anaphora, the repetition of word(s) at the beginning of phrases, clauses or sentences, to create a strong current around the word “wrong.” Seven times, the word is repeated. Winston Weathers, in his essay, “The Rhetoric of the Series,” notes that when something becomes four or more, you’ve entered the realm of the irrational and emotional.
Carson also uses punctuation to create a stream of thought. The sentence starts with a sense of order with the commas separating “wrong night, wrong city, wrong movie, wrong ambulances…” But soon the commas drop out as if the protagonist is becoming more frantic, more emotional and with this heightened intensity, there is no possibility of a pause. Carson begins this movement with the long clause, “wrong ambulances caterwauling past and drowning out wrong dialogue of wrong Norma Desmond.”
Carson uses a comma after this clause, creating a comma splice for more speed. Grammaticians warn you against this, but creative writers are, well, creating something other than pure alignment with the rules.
On the other hand, there are pauses or silences in what seems like a streaming sentence. Listen to the audio or read it out loud, and you’ll hear them. I recently took a workshop with Lauren Groff, sponsored by American Short Fiction, who said she pays attention to the silences in a sentence. What’s been said and what’s next to be said fill the silence. An em dash creates silence, so does a period, a comma, semicolon, brackets or parenthesis.
And so does anacoluthon. Anacoluthon is a syntactic interruption or deviation. The sentence heads in one direction syntactically and then abruptly changes directions. It’s also known as a syntactic bend.
There are syntactic bends that create small moments of silence in Carson’s sentence. First, the sentence travels along the road of Norma Desmond and all that is wrong. A traditional sentence structure would put a period after “Norma Desmond” and follow with a question and a question mark. Do you hear the small silences as the sentence bends? After this, there’s another little silence as the sentence bends again and becomes an independent sentence focused on the narrator.
It bends two more times with the description, “this tilted wreck with deliquescent chin”; and the comma splice leading to the final independent clause, “I turn it off, eat soup and read a novel.”
A traditional structure would look like this:
What could be more wrong?
She’s the same age as me, this tilted wreck with deliquescent chin.
I turn it off, eat soup and read a novel.
There’s more to say, but I’ll only add one more thing. “Deliquescent” is a perfect word for this sentence. It does the literal job of describing the narrator’s chin and the sentence itself, with its stream-like feeling.
Your Turn:
What word do you want to repeat seven times? What is your character obsessed about? This is the dominant organizing principle of the sentence. Open with that word using anaphora and repeat it three times in short phrases separated by commas.
The fourth time, you’ll use a long clause that uses the selected word three times.
Add a comma and bend the sentence with a question. Use the repeated word (seventh time).
Bend the sentence again by not using a comma and use an independent clause to introduce the narrator or protagonist, who is the voice behind the sentence's opening.
Add a physical description of the protagonist (don’t use a comma). Can you use an adjective that applies to the structure of the sentence itself?
Add a comma and end with an independent clause without the repeated word.
How did it go?
What else do you see?
Thank you, subscriber, for this sentence. Here’s a brief description of Wrong Norma: As Carson writes: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong.’”
About Me:
I’ve taught “Style in Fiction,” “Word for Word” and “Cultivating Your Prose” at the University of San Francisco and Stanford Continuing Studies since 2007.
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