What Is Lyricism? Part One.
One of the unexpected delights of this spring has been building a bespoke syllabus in the art of the personal essay. Most of my clients come asking for help birthing book ideas, but this project was designed more as an introduction to literary craft, like the nonfiction course I taught for many years at Central College. Even as an experienced memoirist, I am also an apprentice and always will be. I brought that humility to our syllabus: a biweekly calendar with readings from Stephen King’s On Writing, Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, and Phillip Lopate’s The Art of the Personal Essay one week and original writing inspired by these touchstones the next.
The next up from Lopate’s anthology is Richard Selzer’s “The Knife.” I discovered Selzer as a graduate student in Lincoln, Nebraska, and I cannot think of his Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery or The Exact Location of the Soul without recalling the places where I read them: at a local park where I often spread a quilt over the grass, and at a coffee shop in the old Haymarket District. The reason I have such vivid physical memories of those places is because Selzer’s writing conjures strong feeling. It’s not just that he takes me deep into the body, it’s that he makes me feel that surgery is sacred. In his words, the surgeon prays down through the skin, through the fat and fascia — and not in a dreamy sense, but with the intense focus of a true believer. It’s this combination of body and spirit, flesh and feeling, that makes me think of Selzer as a lyrical writer. But lyricism is perennially difficult to define. I’ll do my best here and hope to follow up with Part Two in a few weeks.
The word “lyric” from which “lyrical” and “lyricism” derive comes from the Greek lyrikos, for “lyre.” It’s not common for poets and writers to accompany themselves with stringed instruments these days (maybe poetry readings would be more lively if they did!), but the idea is that lyrical language has music in it. Or, as one of my mentors said of Galileo’s prose, it is writing that sings. Many sacred texts have lyrical qualities. The Qur’an is meant to be recited, not simply read silently, and it is lovely to hear in Arabic. The Psalms are songs meant to aid meditation with their rhythm, internal rhyme, and tonal beauty. Even the words of the prophets have jazzlike qualities — or perhaps it is the other way around, and jazz mimics the spontaneity of the ancient messengers.
It is possible to be a lyrical writer without being conventionally religious, but I’m not sure one can reach beyond the limits of everyday language without a spiritual impulse. It is one of those unaccountable mysteries to the secular thinker: Where does music come from? How can consciousness alone account for poetry or aesthetics? The believer knows that human forms are echoes of the divine, and I think anyone who appreciates lyrical writing has a natural predisposition toward the sublime. Emerson held that the Poet’s vocation was essentially prophetic: to transcend the mundane and carry back revelations to awaken the slumbering masses. But many readers seek out poetry precisely because they’re not asleep — they just lack the facility with words to lift themselves to a higher plane.
When writers debate whether good writing can be taught, they are really arguing about whether a beginner who does not have an ear for language to begin with can be taught to hear the difference between halting efforts and prose that sings.
I was thinking about this while watching “The Bear,” a series about high-end restaurants, where mastery of craft is perpetually at war with budget realities. The loveliest moments in the show are those when the chefs forget all about making a profit and just share new flavors they’ve created. Taste, in those moments, is music that transcends all language barriers, all cultures. Savor is truth. The kitchen staff of “The Bear” begin as employees of “The Beef,” a gritty sandwich shop, but by the end not only have they grown attuned to elegance, they’ve also come to embrace the mindset and process necessary for excellence. No matter where they fall in the kitchen hierarchy — dishwasher, station, sous, or executive — they are all chefs and address each other accordingly.
Similarly, I think it’s possible to teach lyricism to anyone in the right environment, with the right conditions for rigor and mutual respect. It’s not just for gourmands. Even if the lyric impulse begins as a feeling, the written expression of it must be disciplined for the reader to feel its effects.
Take, for example, this paragraph from “The Knife”:
And what of that other, the patient, you, who are brought to the operating room on a stretcher, having been washed and purged and dressed in a white gown? Fluid drips from a bottle into your arm, diluting you, leaching your body of its personal brine. As you wait in the corridor, you hear from behind the closed door the angry clang of steel upon steel, as though a battle were being waged. There is the odor of antiseptic and ether, and masked women hurry up and down the halls, in and out of rooms. There is the watery sound of strange machinery, the tinny beeping that is the transmitted heartbeat of yet another human being. And all the while the dreadful knowledge that soon you will be taken, laid beneath great lamps that will reveal the secret linings of your body. In the very act of lying down, you have made a declaration of surrender. One lies down gladly for sleep or for love. But to give over one’s body and will for surgery, to lie down for it, is a yielding of more than we can bear.
Typically I advise against slipping into the second person “you” in personal writing. The effect is often didactic and forced, like a giant finger pointing out of the page at the reader. I prefer to allow the reader to draw their own conclusions rather than preaching at them directly. But in this case there is a tenderness Selzer’s empathic expression of his patients’ vulnerability, an intimacy gained by the direct appeal.
Note how couplets (“steel upon steel”) and triplets (“washed and purged and dressed”) combine to create rhythm. Maybe a few too many adjectives for my taste (“watery,” “strange,” “tinny”) but also evocative verbs (“leaching,” “clang”). Selzer’s sentences are nearly all compound or compound-complex, which heightens the effect of the one simple statement near the end of the paragraph: “One lies down gladly for sleep or for love.”
One lyrical pattern that I think of as Emersonian but that assuredly goes farther back is the riff, taking two or three passes at an idea before bringing a sentence to a close. Note how Selzer mirrors the structure of two clauses to add resonance to each.
But to give over one’s body and will for surgery, to lie down for it, is a yielding of more than we can bear.
The sentence would not have the same effect if it were written as “But to give over one’s body and will for surgery is a yielding…” or as “But to lie down for surgery is a yielding…” It’s the unique combination of the two attempts to express surrender, coupled with the verb “yielding,” that makes the sentence feel rich and fluid and soulful. This is how the music seeps in.
Lyricism is not to everyone’s taste. It’s not what drives clicks or likes online. Like any ingredient, too much of it can turn an essay saccharine. But there is an innocence in it that has always spoken to me and that still evokes a powerful response to Selzer’s writing. For a surgeon to write with wonder and awe about his craft, for him to bring intimacy into a clinical setting, gives me hope for medicine and for humanity.
If lyricism dies in our hearts, so do we.
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I think the word that dismisses lyricism would be “cringe.” To be lyrical is to be earnest, striving…very not “cool online”
But readers grant different texts more grace based on their ontology. Selzers work has more authority (surgeon, physical text) so he’s allowed words that I, a reply guy, am not.
Well said.