Ever since I first read Goon Squad, I have conjured the smell of rotting fish when I sink into a leather chair, I have lingered over pauses in songs, and I have hoped to avoid speaking about an obscure dissertation topic in “breathless tones” that will embarrass me years later.
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I decided to write the above sentence in exactly 280 characters (typing it into my Twitter account to be sure) in order to see and feel the way the confines of a defined space make us rethink and rework the presentation of our ideas. I had to pause, cut, and rewrite to express an idea that, in a first draft, took me 105 additional characters. I point this out because I believe it is formatted pausing and slowing–on the part of both writer and reader—that, at least in part, has made Good Squad stick with me and work its way into my consciousness in the way that I mention.
In this post, I want to focus on pauses and form. It makes sense to begin with a discussion of “Black Box,” since it is the most obvious embodiment of a confined form that we read for this week. Although “Black Box” is not actually part of Goon Squad, I will treat it as an extension of the collection–it can be easily argued that they share the same story world if we think of “Black Box’s” narrator as Lulu from Goon Squad’s last episode/chapter. The morning before Egan began publishing “Black Box”–on the New Yorker Twitter account, 140 characters and a minute at a time–Wired published an article titled Let’s Hope Jennifer Egan’s Twitter Story Heralds the Return of Serial Fiction. In the context of our class, it seems useful to think of “Black Box’s” form in relation to seriality. The author of the Wired article writes that the serial form “enforces quick pacing, dramatic plot twists and economy of language.” I’m not sure I agree with this. In the case of “Black Box,” I think seriality leads to slow reading rather than quick pacing. After each of 606 tweets, readers on publication day would have to pause for a minute between each sentence. Even for me reading the story after the fact, the completeness of each thought–the way each sentence is an entity (and paragraph) of its own–caused me to slow down and comprehend each one before moving to the next.
I think it is fair to say that seriality is a form that relies on pauses and one in which meaning occurs during those pauses. In the opening of Fictional Minds, Palmer describes the phenomenon of returning to a text you’ve thought a lot about and finding that the original text is sparser than you remembered. It is therefore in the pauses between readings that we fill in gaps that go beyond the original text and begin to comprehend the minds of characters. “Black Box” is entirely a look into a fictional mind–literally a string of recorded mental notes–and its presentation of consciousness requires readers to piece together a character from short, didactic thoughts. I’d like to pose a question for discussion before moving into the rest of Goon Squad: How does the serial form influence our interpretation of fictional minds?
Goon Squad is not a serial in the same way as “Black Box” or Fargo, but its form and episodic nature make us slow down and perhaps also focus on character interiority. Goon Squad is more episodic than serial, creating individual episodes that could stand alone but are most effective when presented alongside the other episodes. In class last week we talked about the confusion many of us had trying to understand how the plot and characters related from episode to episode. I realize it is the spaces between chapters/episodes–the pauses, perhaps–in which we construct the story world. When we must figure out the time and connections and construct a cohesive character from, for example, the Sasha who steals, the Sasha whose friend dies in college, and the Sasha who is the mother of Lincoln, we pause to think and make meaning.
Of course the most literal example of pauses in Goon Squad–as well as the most obvious example of experimental form–is the “Great Rock and Roll Pauses” chapter/episode, written in a 75-slide PowerPoint created and narrated by Sasha’s daughter Ally. The PowerPoint form itself is one with built in pauses, as the reader/presenter flips between each slide. Like the tweets and the episodes in the novel, each slide stands alone as an entity. It is also one of space–as Sasha points out to Ally when she critiques her slides, saying “I see a lot of white.” Again, there is space that creates meaning because it is unfilled. Perhaps more importantly, this chapter thematically embodies the point I am trying to make about pauses. Lincoln and Ally explain that musical pauses are spaces of anticipation and thought. They are spaces in which the listener wonders what will come next, if anything at all. In Sasha’s words, “The pauses make you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so you’re relieved. But then the song does actually end, because every song ends, obviously, and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL.” In other words, pauses make us predict and speculate about what will happen next. They also mimic a stop and make us think about endings–like songs, all narratives also come to an end.
I think it’s important that we not just talk about the pauses but experience them. I recommend checking out The Mighty Sword by The Frames, the song Lincoln points out for its one minute and 14 second pause. The pause mimics what would be a full stop in most songs–with a fade out into pure silence. Then the full instrumentation returns triumphantly over a minute later. The song’s opening lyrics, appropriately, are ones that deal with distance and endings:
“I may not hold you/ For as long as forever exists/ I may not know you/ For as long as the heavens permit/ There will be distance/ And we’ll both have to come to expect/ The wild ending of our dark and feathered friends.”
This extra-textual script mimics the feeling of melancholy and perhaps dread that Ally has while walking home from the desert with her father. It also reminds us of endings, as Sasha did earlier in the chapter, and this in turn might remind readers that the novel is also almost coming to a close.
In short, what I am trying to say through these various examples is pretty simple: Pauses contain meaning–meaning about narrative structure and meaning about character interiority. Further, pauses are part of form, and form is essential to both narrative structure and the creation of fictional minds.