The Sky Is Blue
Dear Hugo,
This isn't going to be a letter so much as an extended excerpt of a book I'm reading, but I think that's allowed since we are on our semi-vacation.
Retyping passages from another author is a writing exercise in itself, teachers have said to me, a way to try on another voice and feeling it coming from your own fingertips. I haven't done this exercise often, because slipping into another writer's voice has never been that hard for me. In fact I've always been uncomfortable with how easy it is, the same way I pick up spoken slang and intonation without even meaning to (the latest example I've noted in my own lexicon is saying "I APPRECIATE YOU!" to someone as an intensifier to the perfunctory thank you. Definitely picked this up on our block. I like it and I'm keeping it.)
It's not just the voice I am loving so much in Milkman, though. It's the grammar itself. Burns structures her sentences in unruly ways that both capture spoken rhythms and create a constant tension between the collective and the individual. Her grammar is political, in the same way the passive voice (or exonerative voice) of newspaper headlines is political.
The book never says so explicitly (in fact no places, characters, or religions are ever identified with proper nouns) but its implied setting is Belfast in the late 1970s. Not the beachiest of beach reads, but that's where I read the beginning of chapter three:
"Third time of the milkman was when he appeared not long after my adult evening French class. This class was downtown and it had surprising things. Often these things would not be French things. Often too, there would be more of them than would be the French things. At this latest lesson, which took place on Wednesday evening, teacher was reading from a book. This was a French book, a proper French book -- one that native speakers could read without considering it beneath them -- and teacher said she was reading from it to get us used to what authentic French sounded like when strung together in full-on passages -- in this case, a literary passage. Thing was though, the sky in this passage she was reading from wasn't blue. Eventually she got interrupted because someone in the class -- spokesperson for the rest of us -- couldn't stand it. Something was wrong and he had a need, for the sake of all things generic, to point it out.
'I'm confused,' he said. 'Is that passage about the sky? If it is about the sky then why doesn't the writer just say so? Why is he complicating things with fancy footwork when all he need say is that the sky is blue?'
'Hear! Hear!' cried us or, if some of us, like me, didn't cry it, certainly we agreed in sentiment. 'Le ciel est bleu! Le ciel est bleu!' shouted many of the others. 'That would have cleared matters. Why didn't he just put that?'
We were disturbed, and not a little, but teacher, she laughed which was something she did a lot. She did this because she had an unnerving amount of humour -- another thing which ruffled us as well. Whenever she laughed, we weren't sure whether to laugh along with her, to be curious and engaged and to ask why she was laughing, or to be sulky and offended and seriously up in arms. This time, as usual, we opted for up in arms.
'What a waste of time and a confusion of subjects,' complained a woman. 'That writer ought not to be featuring in a French lesson even if he is French if he's not doing anything about teaching it. This is "learning a foreign language class" not a class on burdening us with taking things apart which are in the same language to find out if they're a poem or something. If we wanted figures of speech and rhetorical flourishes, with one thing representing another thing when the represented thing could easily have been itself in the first place, then we'd have gone to English Literature with those weirdos down the hall.' 'Yeah!' cried us and also we cried, 'A spade's a spade!', also the popular 'Le ciel est bleu!' and 'What's the point? There's no point!' continued to come out of us. Everyone was nodding and slapping desks and murmuring and acclaiming. And now it was time, we thought, to give our spokespeople and ourselves a jolly good round of applause.
'So, class,' said teacher after this applause had died down, 'is it that you think the sky can only be blue?'
'The sky is blue,' came us. 'What colour else can it be?'
Of course we knew really that the sky could be more than blue, two more, but why should any of us admit to that? I myself have never admitted it. Not even the week before when I experienced my first sunset with maybe-boyfriend did I admit it. Even then, even though there were more colours than the acceptable three in the sky -- blue (the day sky), black (the night sky) and white (clouds) -- that evening still I kept my mouth shut. And now the others in this class -- all older than me, some as old as thirty -- also weren't admitting it. It was the convention not to admit it, not to accept detail for this type of detail would mean choice and choice would mean responsibility and what if we failed in our responsibility? Failed too, in the interrogation of the consequence of seeing more than we could cope with? Worse, what if it was nice, whatever it was, and we liked it, got used to it, were cheered up by it, came to rely upon it, only for it to go away, or be wrenched away, never to come back again? Better not to have had it in the first place was the prevailing feeling, and that was why blue was the color for our sky to be. Teacher though, wasn't leaving it at that."
Teacher makes them look out the window at the sunset
"'My poor deprived class!' cried teacher and again she was bluffing, pretending sorrow about our lack of colour, our hampered horizons, our mental landscapes, when it was obvious she was a person too defined within herself to be long perturbed by anything at all. And how come she was this? How come she was doing this antagonising, this presenting of an anti-culture to our culture when she herself was of our culture, where the same rules of consciouness regarding the likes of colour -- regardless, too, of church affiliation -- as applied to us ought equally to have applied to her? But she was laughing again. 'There is no blue in the whole of the window,' she said. 'Look again please. Try again please -- and, class,' here she paused and, for a moment, did become serious -- 'although there's no lack of colour out there really -- there's nothing out there really. But for temporal purposes please note -- the sky that seems to be out there can be any colour that there is.'
'Testicles!' cried some ladies and gentlemen and a frisson -- the only French of the evening apart from 'le ciel est bleu' and that literary guff the guy in the book had been posturing -- went through us. It seemed to our minds that no, what she was saying could not ever be true. If what she was saying was true, that the sky -- out there -- not out there -- whatever -- could be any colour, that anything could be anything, that anything could happen, at any time, in any place, in the whole of the world, and to anybody -- probably had too, only we just hadn't noticed. So no. After generation upon generation, fathers upon forefathers, mothers upon foremothers, cenutries and millenia of being one colour officially and three colours unofficially, a colourful sky, just like that, could not be allowed to be."
Then through the window the narrator sees the van belonging to the milkman, her enigmatic (so far) pursuer. Her consciousness splits off from the group, individualized again in a flash, fixing on a threat only she can see.
I love this passage and I can think of so many things it reminds me of - including the last page of The Savage Detectives, one of my favorite novel endings of all time. What's outside the window?
What does it remind you of?
Love,
M.