Dostoyevsky: his grammatical constructs

I've been applying all I've learn, particularly the kind of grammatical schemes detailed here and here, about poetics to extant literature.  I picked up Crime and Punishment the other day.  The book's now crammed with notes in the margins.  It's a slow process, but developing a literary eye and ear seems indispensable to writing.  There are loads of things to analyse, like suspense, tension, his lexicon to analyse--but Dostoyevsky's grammatical constructs first struck me.

One technique he uses is to place one short sentence after, on average, two longer, complex sentences.  You can see this style below, from the first paragraph of Crime and Punishment.

• (1) She occupied the floor beneath him, and her kitchen, with its usually-open door, was entered from the stairase. (2) Thus, whenever the young man went out, he found himself obliged to pass under the enemy's fire, which always produced a morbid terror, humiliating him and making him knit his brows. (3) He owed her some money and felt afraid of enountering her.

The reader is jolted by the difference in pace between sentence (1) and (2), and (3).  This seems useful for two reasons.  The first is that it would become monotonmous to read the same kind of complex sentences again and again, in the same way it is monotomous to hear the same beat again and again without variaration.  See the altered version below, and then compare it to the former.

• (1) She occupied the floor beneath him, and her kitchen, with its usually-open door, was entered from the stairase. (2) Thus, whenever the young man went out, he found himself obliged to pass under the enemy's fire, which always produced a morbid terror, humiliating him and making him knit his brows. (3) He owed her some money, from being unable to pay rent since his retreat into solitude, and felt afraid of enountering her.

The other reason is emphasis.  The change in rhythm, in the former example, focuses the reader on (3).  This is particularly important, as the reader is made to focus on the fact the character is poor and afraid, which is important to the this part of the story and is the focus of the next paragraph.

It surprised me how Dostoyevsky's use of language, and not simply action or description, effected the atmosphere of Crime and Punishment's world.  Later on his uses "polysyndeton" effectively to show an oppressive atmosphere: '...and complaints, and have to make excuses and subterfuges...'.  The use of grammar, eh.  No just knowing what verbs and nouns are...

The use (and non-use) of suspense: analysing Brautigan to learn writing

Suspense is there to keep readers reading.  A gun to the reader's head could do that, but it's usually better to keep them reading by making them want to know something--but to withhold that something.  Brautigan does this in one of his short stories by suggesting that all is not right with a very old woman wanting a pound of meat:  "...but who knows what such an old woman could use a pound of meat for?"  Suddenly the readers interested is piqued.

But the suspense is not simply not telling the reader what he or she wants to know until later--it's building the suspense.  The rest of the story demonstrates her odd behaviour, her insistence, her feelings of victory once she's bought it.  It all serves to make a simple act--buying a large amount of meat--into something more interesting.  And so the reader wants to know more and more about this pound of meat, and is satisfied at the end--particularly so as it serves this story as a whole: the weather in San Francisco (it's a surreal story).

That said, Brautigan also does the opposite to good effect.  In Complicated Banking Problems he starts:  "I have a bank account because I grew tired of burying my money in the back yard and something else happened."  Brautigan could have built up that "something else", talked about its surroundings, alluded to its history and then ended the story revealing an unexpected and interesting "something else".  But instead he says:  "I was burying some money a few years ago when I came across a human skeleton."

But now the suspense has transferred to the human skeleton.  Why is it there?  But he doesn't explain that, or even build up the suspense.  It's just left as an arbitrary skeleton in an arbitrary backyard.  He talks about what was in the skeleton's hand, instead.  And, moreover, right there in the second paragraph he gives the moral of the story.  Without building up any more suspense, except to say there are three women in front of him in the queue, he goes on to write an excellent piece.  And it all works perfectly--all without any more suspense.

After all, suspense is only a good literary device when it's interesting:  few will read on page after to page to find out what I had for breakfast this morning (eggs on toast.)  And if you can make that interesting something without using suspense (Brautigan does it by beautifully describing the women in front of him in the queue) then suspense could become a useless adjunct.