The Instrument (part two)

Part four of How to Sit Down

Flaubert recumbent on his daybed, his silk dressing gown bunched up around him, his eyes bugging out, the tips of his mustaches alit in the firelight, his ashtray crowded with cigar butts, empty bottles everywhere, groaning and shifting around and occasionally flinging an arm out as if beginning a declamation, frustrated in his nineteenth day of trying to locate a word—not just a word but the exact word, the only one that can fit into the hole he has carved for it. In the waxworks display of literature (coming soon to the Steel Pier) our Flaubert reclines between Stendhal scratching out The Charterhouse of Parma in 52 days and Kerouac typing On the Road into being on a 120-foot scroll. Writing is so rarely thought of as a physical activity that any such anecdote sounds heroic. The source for our image of Flaubert is of course Flaubert, bitching on and on in his letters to Louise Colet and George Sand. He suffered for his art.

But is it really that hard? I was first introduced to the concept of le mot juste, the right word, by my father, who quit school at 14 to go to work and may not have ever read Flaubert, but was a reader nevertheless. (He most appreciated war memoirs, mountaineering memoirs, minutiae on the French Revolution, and a variety of minor regional novelists.) He absorbed the concept secondhand from his reading. Le mot juste has become one of those axioms, amounting to commands, that every French reader is taught early. The French may uniquely attach the proposition to a heroic image, but writers in other languages have not failed to make the point. “Use the right word, not its second cousin,” advised Mark Twain in his evisceration of James Fenimore Cooper, who in his Leatherstocking novels trespassed against this and seventeen other commandments. It’s not a hard concept to master.

You don’t need an extensive vocabulary. All you really need is to know what you are trying to say. Sometimes you really have to think about it. There are few or no true synonyms; words are highly individuated. "Hate" and "scorn" and "despise" and "execrate" all mean roughly the same thing, but not exactly; only one of them will work in any specific context. If you hang around words long enough, you will develop a sense of their personalities, and instinctively refer to their particular taste and odor and emotional charge when making a choice. “Hate” applies to the white supremacist, “scorn” to the self-appointed aristocrat, “despise” to the affronted gourmet, and “execrate” to the Pope, issuing a bull. But sometimes the problem is intractable. You find that you’ve somehow employed the word “set” twice in a sentence, and need to change one. There are 64 meanings of “set” in the Oxford English Dictionary (only seventeen of them obsolete). Which one do you mean? The pileup of definitions makes you dizzy. You wish you had a system, maybe a little machine. Luckily there is one.

Roget’s International Thesaurus is a grand philosophical enterprise. If you use other thesauri, or the machine-generated lists that pass for thesauri online, you may not be familiar with Roget’s concept. Peter Mark Roget (1779-1869) was one of those nineteenth-century polymaths. He graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a medical degree at nineteen, worked as a physician, lectured widely on many subjects, received a government commission to study London's water supply, tinkered with the invention of a calculating machine, devised chess problems, wrote a series of popular science manuals for the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge, which he founded, and in 1852 published the first edition of his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition.

His thesaurus was no mere dictionary of synonyms, but something very much like a philosophical system. Look at the eight classes that compose the overall organization of the volume: abstract relations, space, physics, matter, sensation, intellect, volition, affections. Among them every word in the language can be found. The classes and their sub-units are organized with patient and intuitive logic, one thing leading to the next. "Superficial Form" is comprised of Convexity, Concavity, Sharpness, Bluntness, Smoothness, Roughness, Notch, Furrow, Fold, Opening, and Closure. And any word you look up unfolds its many shades. Look up "pith," for example. Which of its attributes do you seek? Is it gist, substance, center, meaning, pluck, main point, or courage? Simply thinking about which of those is the right one can lead you to the word you seek, or it can suggest another train of thought altogether. Every dip into its pages is a voyage to the roots of language, an experience that mingles pleasure and rigor.

The thesaurus is often scorned as a trinket case filled with useless fancy words. Why be stuck with ordinary workaday "speed" when you can impress with the gossamer sheen of "celerity"? I once knew a writer who claimed that using one was a stain upon the craft, since the words should come burbling out of your inner source and nowhere else. Which is all fine and mystical, except that sometimes you do need a substitute for that one word that keeps insistently recurring in your text, and sometimes you seek a shade of meaning that just refuses to appear on your mental palette, and sometimes you have to retrieve that term, on the tip of your tongue, that keeps eluding you, maybe for deeply embarrassing psychological reasons. The dictionary is a great place to see language laid out in neat alphabetical rows, like an army at a ceremonial drill. You sense its massive breadth and might, note the rare words flitting by in their exquisite plumage, admire the deep versatility of a plebeian word like "set." The thesaurus, on the other hand, is an immense illustrated bird guide, with row upon row, page after page of related specimens that initially look identical, until you notice this tuft of gray feathers, that extra band around the eye. No two are exactly alike, just as no two words ever mean exactly the same thing. W. H. Auden said that a poet should "hang around words and overhear them talking to one another." Roget's Thesaurus is a convenient place to find them, gathered in their affinity groups.

The thesaurus helps in laying your options out on a platter, narrowing down your intentions. That is fine and dandy for everyday household use, but what about when the problem lies deeper, when you have tried every single possible word and still none of them fit? In that case you have to open the hood and look at the sentence. Maybe there’s something wrong with its logic, maybe simply with its word order. Maybe it needs to become two sentences, and your meaning redistributed so that you no longer need that word. And then there are times when you will just have to blindfold yourself, spin around three times, and blurt out the first word that comes into your head. A Ouija board works fine, too, if you can get in touch with any spirit but Victor Hugo, who will give you 250 words. In any case each of us already has a little oracle built into the back of our heads, which is cranky and often asleep, but in a pinch can deliver the word. When that happens, it will likely be a word completely outside the realm where you had been looking. You had been tunneling through mud, and your unconscious broke you out of the pattern. Your unconscious is your friend—but more about that later.

With the next installment I will start charging admission, because this is actual work. I had been considering making a book about writing, but didn’t know (still don’t) if I have enough to say to fill up an entire book. This is forcing me to find out.