On Spareness in Prose: Katie Kitamura
Does anyone know how to describe prose anymore?
We want to nail down this scene today. There’s still something a little indeterminate about it. But can I be honest? I simultaneously nodded and shook my head, I didn’t know if I wanted her to be honest. This scene is different from anything else in the play, it’s different from anything else I’ve written. She frowned. It’s more schematic, or rather it’s only schematic. Everything I write is based in excavating the minutiae of emotion, inhabiting the nooks and crannies of an encounter. But this is more conceptual. It’s arid, cold. She nodded to me. Much like your character.
As she spoke, I was a little taken by surprise, I had not especially thought of the character as cold. She made a little grimace, as if she had a bad or bitter taste in her mouth, she seemed to feel a certain amount of contempt toward the very character she had created and centered her story around, a woman racked by grief, by the extinction of possibility, a shell of a person no longer able to fully access her own emotions. That was how I understood the character, but I saw in the flicker of her eyes that even if I was correct, even if this was the character as she had conceived of it, she not only held her and her grief in some disdain, she was also—and this was perhaps worse—a little bored by her. I felt at once defensive of the character, and also of myself, if she was so bored by her character, then it followed that she was also bored by my performance.
She carried on, oblivious or indifferent to my consternation, which I was unable to hide. (pp. 86–87)
I start with this long quotation from what I consider the pivotal scene of the novel; if the novel contains some directions for how to read it, I believe they are here. But I am less interested in deciphering the meaning of the novel or even in defending its unconventionality than I am interested in honestly reckoning with Kitamura’s prose style.
Audition hasn’t exactly divided critics, at least not into two equal camps—according to its Book Marks page, it has received fifteen “raves,” six “positive” reviews, six “mixed” reviews, and one “pan”—its reception among readers has been more mixed.1 What isn’t mixed or divided, however, is the tendency of reviewers to describe Kitamura’s prose style as cool, quiet, spare, crystalline or glittering, taut, acute, lissome or sinewy, cerebral or arid or intelligent, concise or precise, minimalist, elegant, deliberate, pared-down or pared-back, passionless, but also alluring, beguiling, sinuous, slippery, sly, elliptical, inscrutable, and “joylessly evasive.”
One way to go about prying this bundle of qualifiers apart would be to note how routinely they can be traced back to stereotypes about Asians. “Inscrutable” is a particularly resonant word in the vocabulary of Anglo encounters with “the Orient,” and there have been not only numerous theoretical demolitions of this particular trope, but also several excellent fictional treatments in different mediums, including David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly and Pornsak Pichetshote’s comic series The Good Asian. However, although the narrator makes clear on a handful of occasions in Audition that she is a racial minority and that the character Xavier is of that same race—in fact, this shared background is crucial to the novel’s plots—she does not specify what race she is. I think I should therefore follow Kitamura’s lead and trust the reader to know what racial dynamics are in play without making them (more) explicit.
Instead, let’s think about the way the adjectives I listed above cohere—very well, I would say; they collectively form a unified image of a single prose style—and also how they could be inverted. What would the opposite of such a prose style look and sound like? Garrulous and frivolous we could start with; boisterous, straightforward, exuberant, reckless, redundant, emotional, frank. If the image that critics conjure when describing Kitamura’s prose would seem to be a jewel, the opposite would be, let’s say, a rag, with all its multiple denotations—as tattered cloth used for wiping spills, as a musical genre, as slang for a newspaper of dubious veracity, as slang for a menstrual product, as a verb for scolding or teasing—and compounds—ragtag, ragamuffin, ragpicker.
Even if you are unfamiliar with Kitamura’s work, the excerpt above demonstrates that her prose style is not well described as “ragged.” But is it better described as “spare” or “cool”? Reading it, does a jewel come to mind? Fair is fair, one critic noted that the language of Audition appears to have been “loosened by design” relative to Intimacies, and others picked up on syntactic and grammatical features that I would mark as defining or characteristic. Hamilton Cain mentions the “abundance of commas” while Grace Linden explains that “Kitamura’s syntax evokes this disquiet. She deploys comma splices and eschews quotation marks. Punctuation, under her nimble hand, elongates but does not define. The sentences that make up Audition are loose and unrestrained.”
It is as if we have only two possibilities for thinking about prose: it is taut or it is loose, spare or unrestrained, minimalist or abundant.
As with many other things, I blame capitalism. This is jacket-copy description, the kind of appraisal that goes into blurbs—it is about selling the novel in the way a wine bottle informs the shopper of the experience of drinking that particular vintage. And with the frequency of ascriptions like “For readers of Rachel Cusk…” in these blurbs and even in reviews, we are not far off from “Pairs well with veal or prosciutto.”
What should the critic do instead of becoming a sommelier of the sentence? Linden does try to tell us what Kitamura’s stylistic choices do, what her prose style is supposed to build up to. She takes up this passage, made of a single sentence:
He shook his head again, I had the feeling he was deflecting, I could almost see him inventing a plausible body of work in his head, the more I thought about it the more unlikely it seemed that Said had made any real change in the direction of his work, he was excessively talented, but he was also lazy and comfortable and too used to the cocoon of praise and money in which he lived.
Linden responds, “Those commas intensify the narrator’s stress and condemnation and thrust us into her head.” Let’s take the two verbs she (Linden) uses: “intensify” and “thrust.” The idea linking the two is force, although the question really should be where the force is coming from. The sentence is neither propulsive nor digressive, neither emphatic nor equivocal; the narrator seems certain enough of the correctness of her surmises but not enough to be angry or even openly contradictory. She doubts what her husband has just said and also implicitly disagrees with his assessment of their mutual friend Said, disagrees enough for the sentence to swerve slightly onto a different thought-track—it is about her husband, then it is about Said.
Linden correctly labels the syntax here as a series of comma splices, focusing our attention onto Kitamura’s heterodox punctuation as an obviously deliberate choice that must have an intended effect attached to it. Linden links these comma splices to “disquiet,” “elongat[ion],” and “stress.” But is there something about comma splices that makes them intrinsically stressful or disquieting? I would say not. It is not enough to note that Kitamura chooses to punctuate her sentences in a non-standard way; we need to think about the comma’s function and about the kind of clauses that these commas are joining—who is acting in them, who is being acted upon, etc.
Why are comma splices derogated as non-standard in the first place? I would say that it is because—unlike a period or semicolon or even a long dash or a parenthesis—commas do not provide the reader with a clear sense of priority or weight within the sentence, at least not on their own. When we see a list of items separated by commas, we are fairly safe in assuming that the order in which those items are listed is not especially important; additional language (“primary” or “firstly” or “finally”) is needed to grant certain items in the series distinction. Within a compound sentence, clauses are seldom equally weighted. Usually one clause is clearly independent while the others are subordinate, even if they could also stand alone. In a sentence punctuated with comma splices, however, it is much harder to know which clause is primary and independent; it is not necessarily the first one.
I think this uncertainty about the relative importance of clauses is key to the instability that most critics identify is the principal effect of the novel. But let’s take it a step further. Kitamura writes two different kinds of comma spliced sentences. One has a consistent subject—for example, “I simultaneously nodded and shook my head, I didn’t know if I wanted her to be honest.” The other is like the longer sentence we just saw, a much shiftier sentence that rotates different characters into the subject position, with an “I” usually mixed in among second and even third parties in a scene. But the former kind of sentence is, I think, the more destabilizing because—like simultaneously nodding and shaking one’s head—the clauses sutured together by commas may contradict one another or seem to come from different places, even as they ostensibly are about the same person. The comma is like a curtain dropping between two scenes: the same characters may be on the stage when it rises again, but they will not necessarily be in the same positions or even in the same costumes, and the setting may have moved in time or space or both. It may even be a new actor in the same role.
Max was looking at me but when I stared back her face closed down a little, as if she had been confronted, and I knew then that she had no idea what she had written, no idea of how it would work in the play, how it would bridge the two versions of the character, the scene she had written was nothing more than a placeholder. She had grown bored of the character in the midst of writing, I realized, and wanted to write a different character, and so had created this impossible scene to segue between not two versions of the same character, but two different characters altogether. I could see it now, I could see it all over the writing. (pp. 87–88)
There is one other denotation of “rag” that I didn’t mention above; although I never heard it referred to as such, a “rag” may also be a theater curtain.
The novel’s average Goodreads score is 3.39; given the prevailing inflationary tendencies of Goodreads, I think this is a bit below average, and a bit under the score of her last novel, Intimacies, which is right now at 3.64. On the other hand, her novel before that—A Separation—is much further down at 3.04.