I've been reading The Art of X-Ray Reading, a book by Roy Peter Clark. He includes a passage from A Farewell to Arms, a novel set in Italy during World War I:
------------------------- [excerpt from A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway] ----------------------------
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels.
Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.
------------------------------- [end, excerpt]
Mr. Clark writes,
------------------------------ When an unfinished novel of Hemingway's came out in 1998, Joan Didion wrote about it in The New Yorker magazine. It was a dazzling essay that began with the excerpt from Hemingway quoted above. What follows is her remarkable X-ray reading of the text, not from the perspective of a critic or scholar but that of a fellow writer. She is clearly looking deep beneath the surface of the text, and she does it in a single long paragraph:
---------------------- [excerpt, Didion] --------------- That paragraph, which was published in 1929, bears examination: four deceptively simple sentences, one hundred and twenty-six words, the arrangement of which remains as mysterious and thrilling to me now as it did when I first read them, at twelve or thirteen, and imagined that if I studied them closely enough and practiced hard enough I might one day arrange one hundred and twenty-six such words myself.
Only one of the words has three syllables. Twenty-two have two. The other hundred and three have one. Twenty-four of the words are "the," fifteen are "and." There are four commas.
The liturgical cadence of the paragraph derives in part from the placement of the commas (their presence in the second and fourth sentences, their absence in the first and third), but also from the repetition of "the" and of "and," creating a rhythm so pronounced that the omission of "the" before the word "leaves" in the fourth sentence
("and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling")
casts exactly what it was meant to cast, a chill, a premonition, a foreshadowing of the story to come, the awareness that the author has already shifted his attention from late summer to a darker season.
The power of the paragraph, offering as it does the illusion but not the fact of specificity, derives precisely from this kind of deliberate omission, from the tension of withheld information. In the late summer of what year? what river, what mountains, what troops?
---------------------------- [end, Didion excerpt]
Clark: When something is overdesigned, we often criticize it as being too busy or cluttered. The same is true of the arts. First it was Miles Davis and then Tony Bennett who preached the virtues of knowing which musical notes to leave out. Didion is so tuned in to Hemingway that she can see the small deletions, which can create a big effect.
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Rolling Stones songwriter and guitarist Keith Richards talks about doing something similar with music:
-------------------------- [excerpt, Richards - Life] ------------------ So we sat there in the cold, dissecting tracks for as long as the meter held out. A new Bo Diddley record goes under the surgical knife. Have you got that wah-wah? What were the drums playing, how hard were they playing...what were the maracas doing? You had to take it all apart and put it back together again, from your point of view.
-30-
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