The Darkness In Monkeys

Minot, Susan. Monkeys. A Washington Square Press Publication of POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.: New York. 1986.

Susan Minot is an American novelist, poet and short-story writer. She has published five books, including Folly and Rapture. She has also written a screenplay adaptation for Stealing Beauty as well as the screenplay for her book, Evening. Minot’s first novel, Monkeys, won the Prix Femina award in 1988. She has also won the O. Henry Prize and the Pushcart Prize for her writing. Most of Minot’s writing is considered minimalist, which is where the work is stripped down to its most fundamental features. In an interview, Minot said she was learning how to write short stories when she wrote Monkeys. “…(I was) learning how to polish and be as brief as possible, which is an aesthetic that I prefer,” she said. “If you can say it in a shorter amount of time, that's better.” (Weich, Dave. “Back in Bed with Susan Minot.” Powells.com. 2002)

In order to write minimally in Monkeys, Minot used symbolism to represent aspects of the characters.

“They threw stones into the thorofare and listened to hear them land. Sometimes the darkness would swallow up a stone and they’d wait, but no sound would come.” (Minot 108)

The first sentence is foreshadowing the end of the book when the children and their father throw their mother’s ashes into the thorofare. Obviously, in that action, they couldn’t hear any noise either. Silence, as mentioned in the second sentence as “no sound,” is often equated with death in literary terms. Throughout the book, the children, also known as monkeys, constantly talk and make noise. But they fall quiet when something serious happens. In the section where they discover their mother is dead, Minot writes that they are quiet. In that way, the silence interrupts all the background noise.

Not only is the first sentence foreshadowing their mother’s death, but it also describes their progress through life. The stones are metaphors for the children, who throw themselves into the darkness, entrusting themselves to faith, and wait to see where they will end up. This passivity is noted in their listening to hear the stones land.

The confusion about blindly going through life is a theme in the book. All the children rotate between living alone and returning home. In one scene, Caitlin pressures Sherman to get a job, and he responds that he will, hopefully, find one. Sherman embodies the Vincent children’s progression. Instead of focusing on a goal, he merely goes through life without paying much attention to it. He does not orchestrate his own fate. This numbness is depicted through the nightly intake of marijuana among most of the children, especially Sherman. The idea that the Vincent children are being lead through life, instead of leading themselves, is also evident in the last sentence of the book where Minot writes, “…following at one another’s heels, no one with the slightest idea, when they raised their heads and looked around, of where to go next.” (Minot 159)

In the quote’s second sentence, Minot writes that the darkness swallows the stones because death and depression swallows the family. However, she chooses to say the “darkness swallows” instead of “the stones descend.” There are several fitting definitions for the word “swallow,” which are “to accept without question or suspicion,” “to accept without opposition” and “to suppress.” The Vincent children accept life’s problems without complaint. They also tend to suppress their issues, like their mother, who they saw crying when she thought she was alone.

The Road’s "Weird Little Marks"

McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. 2006.

Cormac McCarthy is an American novelist and playwright. He has written 10 novels in the post-apocalyptic, Southern gothic and Western genres. McCarthy has won numerous awards and accolades for his work, among these are the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Road, a National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses and Blood Meridian was listed in Time Magazine’s 100 best English-language books published between 1923 and 2005. Modern literary reviewers compare McCarthy to another heavyweight author, William Faulkner.

During an interview with Oprah Winfrey, McCarthy declared that he doesn’t like using punctuation in his writing. He occasionally utilizes commas and colons to set off a list but never uses semicolons or quotation marks, saying there is no reason to "block the page up with weird little marks." This aversion to punctuation adds further context to McCarthy’s spare prose in The Road.

“He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure.” (McCarthy 4)

There are two missing pieces of punctuation in the quoted sentence: a comma and an apostrophe. With the two missing parts, this sentence would have read, “He thought the month was October, but he wasn’t sure.” This sole sentence would have been broken up by two marks, creating a visual cadence. Without the punctuation, the sentence reads flat and monotonous. It’s like a visual drone. A relentless background buzz.

Include this in the midst of multiple unpunctuated sentences, and the big blocks of featureless prose blend together.

“He shoved the pistol in his belt and stood looking out over the yard. There was a brick walkway and the twisted and wiry shape of what once had been a row of boxwoods. In the yard was an old iron harrow propped up on piers of stacked brick and someone had wedged between the rails of it a forty gallon castiron cauldron of the kind once used for rendering hogs.” (McCarthy 92)

My computer hates these sentences. It wants to automatically correct all of the red misspellings and green grammar fuck-ups. As well, the reader hopelessly scans the pages of flat black ink, looking for spots of scant markings to break up the tedium. In this way, McCarthy’s distaste for “weird little marks” is effective in mirroring the plights of The Road’s protagonists. The nameless man and boy have been cast into an apocalyptic world where every day and everything is gray and featureless. The monotony and relentless nature of walking through the unvaried landscape day after day is best characterized, not in McCarthy’s beautifully stark descriptions, but in the image of black letters against a white page with nothing but periods, like small finalities, breaking it up. It is as close as The Road gets to being an illustrated novel.

McCarthy’s specific disdain for quotation marks even lends a voice to the protagonists.

“Can I ask you something? he said. Yes. Of course. Are we going to die? Sometime. Not now. And we’re still going south. Yes. So we’ll be warm. Yes. Okay. Okay what? Nothing. Just okay.” (McCarthy 9)

You can almost hear the resignation in these slight exchanges. The man and boy rarely speak and, when they do, the short sentences composed of few words take up an entire line of their own on the page like short lists. It breaks up the big blocks of black paragraphs. Even though their voices are small, the man and boy’s speech is like a puncture in the bleak nothing of the book’s world.

Likewise, McCarthy occasionally punctuates.

“Crate upon crate of canned goods. Tomatoes, peaches, beans, apricots. Canned hams. Corned beef. Hundreds of gallons of water in ten gallon plastic jerry jugs. Paper towels, toiletpaper, paper plates. Plastic trashbags stuffed with blankets. He held his forehead in his hand. Oh my God, he said.” (McCarthy 117)

McCarthy’s use of punctuation to set off lists is especially effective in this passage where the man finds a bomb shelter stocked with food and supplies. Instead of the continuous uninterrupted words marching along the page, this paragraph is strewn with commas. Couple those comma-ridden lists with the occasional single bit of food offset with a period, like canned hams and corned beef, and it reads like an excited babbling. This shows the reader what the man must have felt, his eyes flickering fast from one object to another. Instead of the drudging pace pounding from word to word, the commas provide a visual dip and swoop in the sentences.

The parade of commas works to offset the rest of McCarthy’s prose. The “weird little marks” stand out, almost alien, like the abundance of food in the bomb shelter. In this way, the reader can feel the hope as well as the doom. While the story of The Road tells of a dying world, its naked sentences emphasize the emotion in those words.

The Split Psyche: An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness

Jamison, Kay Redfield. An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. New York: Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc. 1995.

Kay Redfield Jamison is an American writer and professor of psychiatry. She is one of the foremost experts on manic-depressive illness. As detailed in her memoir, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness, Jamison grew fascinated with manic-depressive illness because she is diagnosed with it. Her confusion over her mood swings and suicidal tendencies lead her to tirelessly research the subject and write numerous texts on it. Due to her work, she has been named one of the best doctors in the United States and was chosen by Time Magazine as a Hero of Medicine. In An Unquiet Mind, Jamison describes her elevated and depressed moods. She also writes about the contradictions between being a psychiatrist and a patient, including that she consistently stopped taking lithium, even though professionally she knew that it was saving her life.

The mix between the professional and the personal pepper many sentences throughout the book.

“Perhaps it was not surprising that, as a meteorologist’s daughter, I found myself, in that glorious illusion of high summer days, gliding, flying, now and again lurching through cloud banks and ethers, past stars, and across fields of ice crystals.” (Jamison 90)

Even though the above passage takes up nearly five lines in the book, it is only one sentence. The two sentences in the middle of the paragraph are both run-ons. By making long sentences that pause at punctuation then spring forward, free of complete stops, Jamison patterns these sentences on the elevated mania of manic-depressives. The giddiness of these sentences is felt by the reader as their eye flows freely along the descriptions.

The above-quoted sentence starts in an analytical tone: “Perhaps it was not surprising that, as a meteorologist’s daughter…” The word “perhaps” signifies ambivalence and passivity, so the narrator seems to be non-judgmentally watching herself. This is the psychiatrist side of her examining her emotional self. The wording in this first part of the sentence is banal, like using “was” as the verb and “surprising” as an adjective.

Then Jamison bridges her two selves by coupling the words “glorious” and “illusion.” While the term “illusion” is a practical definition of what she experienced, she prefaces it with “glorious,” which is a very subjective adjective. This lets the reader know that these feelings are exquisite. Throughout the book, the narrator tries to get off lithium because she misses these highs. The word “glorious” shows the reader that her illusion is welcome and not frightening.

After the transition between Jamison’s two selves, the sentence takes off, like the emotional Jamison on her flight through space. The verbs and adjectives become more colorful (ie: “gliding,” “lurching”), so the reader feels the elegancy of gliding and the powerful pull of lurching. In the middle of these two verbs, Jamison throws in “flying,” which tells the reader, in a straightforward way, what is happening in Jamison’s mind. Not only is she flying in her illusion, but her mind is also flying upward in an allusion to the “highs” of manic-depressives.

Likewise, the nouns invoke powerful pictures for the reader. Instead of clouds and ice crystals, Jamison writes about cloud banks and fields of ice crystals. This gives the atmosphere the quality of a landscape, an area that is expansive. She further makes the descriptions expansive by using cloud banks and fields of ice as bookends to ethers and stars, which already entail the vastness of the solar system. This immense space also characterizes the highs that manic-depressives feel. Throughout the book, Jamison writes that, while in an elevated state, manic-depressives feel they can do anything and that the world and their potential is unlimited. They feel like they can, literally and figuratively, touch the skies.