Elaboration 4 (another way of thinking about writing)

Then/now construction

Introduction: What I mean by elaboration

Just to refresh you memories, here is my original “elaborations” post. I place it here to give you the proper context for my discussion of the then/now technique following.

My most recent thoughts about composition have revolved around the idea of elaboration, or, the way you take a basic statement and use various techniques to spin it up into a lengthy, complex, multi-faceted work. In this view, all techniques are techniques of elaboration, ways of creating opportunities (I call it aesthetic space) for inventing new material, perspectives, patterns, and meanings. In other words, technique is not just something one learns for the sake of learning it. Technique is a mode invention (elaboration) in itself. It creates content.

Elaboration is my word for a bundle of techniques and processes for expanding, filling out, detailing, and concretizing a given subject, passage, sentence, clause or phrase (you could also add making the topic entertaining and interesting to the reader). The rhetorical term for this is AMPLIFICATION, which you can look up. You can think of them as techniques for working upon a given subject, manipulating it and adding information by using forms, by formal means.

This, for example, even a simple but-construction can be a technique of elaboration (or amplification).

My cat Luna was grey.

My cat Luna was grey, but ______________________.

My cat Luna was grey, but sometimes in the morning light the sun would catch the tips of her fur and she would glow silvery or in the afternoon golden, liquid and charmed. At night she is black, almost invisible except when she is sleeping on the white counterpane. She is seen best in moonlight when her grey becomes almost translucent...

In this case, the form, the but-construction creates an empty aesthetic space for you, the writer, to fill with addition material (and then once you have an idea, you can keep adding). [Once I invented the idea of how the cat’s color changed in the morning sunlight, it was only natural to add a contrast in the afternoon sunlight. Then I added a series (list) of adjectives. Then, feeling myself on a roll and still in the aestethic space created by the but-construction, I asked myself what the cat would look like at night and that suggested invisibility, which led to the contrast of the cat black against the white counterpane (elaborating by contrast). And night suggested moonlight. And so on. The word “grey” in this instance is elaborated into a complex series of light/color manifestations. I.e. But-construction plus list (series) plus contrasts.]

You can in this way elaborate or amplify any subject by inserting forms: but-constructions, parallels, metaphors, lists (series), rhetorical questions, contrasts, anthitheses, references to relevant external texts or authors, an emotional statement, an aphorism, a piece of reflection (or memory), etc (the list, as I am sure you can appreciate is open-ended).

The key thing that people learning to write don't usually appreciate is that form precedes content, that is, you don't think up content ahead of time. First, you use a form, a device, to create a space, and then you are FORCED to fill it with material that might not have occurred to you before.

Instead of asking yourself What am I going to say about Luna? You say to yourself, e.g., I am going to stick in five rhetorical questions and a list and a but-construction. Then write to that suggestive template. See what happens.

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Then/Now Construction

Like the but-construction, the then/now construction is a simple but powerful technique of elaboration used by all writers but seldom noticed by readers. (Reading for these techniques of elaboration is a bit like butterfly collecting or bird watching. You read with an eye for repeated or similar syntactic structures. Once you have collected from specimens, you define what is similar in each. That’s the technique. Then you can begin to enjoy the varied ways writers deploy the technique, how inventive they are. After a while, you develop a sense that all writing is a collection of techniques of elaboration orchestrated on the page. The topic and content are occasions for elaboration. Think of music. Here is a five-note melody; now let me use structure and technique to build that into a symphony.)

Here is a snippet from my essay on time control in Erotics of Restraint:

Then/Now Construction: This is a lovely and common device (though little noticed as such) for juxtaposing two time periods as a syntactic unit. The juxtaposition itself dramatizes the changes that have taken place over time, tells a story, but in a very short space, eliding all the time in between. Thomas Wyatt’s poem “They Flee From Me” begins with alternating then/now constructions.

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild and do not remember

That sometime they put themself in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Basically, the then/now construction uses the actual words “then” and “now” or cognate words or time stamps, or it is implied in the tenses.

Start with a syntactic germ: Across the highway, there is a Trump hotel and a golf course.

Elaboration 1: In 1924, there was a barn and a cowshed next to a field, now there is a Trump hotel and a golf course.”

They can show change or no change.

They create compression and grammatical action.

They can be given a moral, political, or psychological torque.

Elaboration 2: Then there was a beautiful farm here. A tree-lined lane led to a red-painted barn with precise white trim, a neat little cowshed next to it, pristine green pastures dotted with cattle. Now all that is gone. There is a glitzy hotel and pristine fairways cultured with herbicides. One thing hasn’t changed, the amount of bullshit lying around.

Or: Then there was a beautiful farm here, my grandfather’s pride and joy. A tree-lined lane led to a red-painted barn with precise white trim, a neat little cowshed next to it, pristine green pastures dotted with cattle. Now all that is gone. There is a glitzy hotel and pristine fairways cultured with herbicides. It would have hurt his heart to see it. It hurts mine. It fills my soul with oppression.

It can also be used to construct a symbol. Or it can be used to compress history and deliver incredibly complex orchestrations of time and story tersely and precisely. Here is an excerpt from my essay “The Mind of Alice Munro” in Attack of the Copula Spiders:

In terms of time flow, Munro often uses a lovely little device I call the then/now construction, a grammatical structure that juxtaposes two moments in such a way as to imply change (story) over time. Sometimes authors use the words “then” and “now,” and sometimes the words are only implied. Here is a masterful example of a then/now with intervening moments deftly added (as technique, it’s breathtaking).

[my emphasis] In 1879 [then], Almeda Roth was still living in the house at the corner of Pearl and Dufferin streets, the house her father had built for his family [ca. 1854]. The house is there today [now, ca. 1985]: the manager of the liquor store lives in it. It’s covered with aluminum siding; a closed-in porch has replaced the veranda [then, 1879]. The woodshed, the fence, the gates, the privy, the barn–all these are gone [now, 1985]. A photograph taken in the eighteen-eighties [then, ca. 1885] shows them all in place. The house and fence look a little shabby, in need of paint...No big shade tree is in sight, and, in fact, the tall elms that overshadowed the town until the nineteen-fifties [ca. 1955], as well as the maples that shade it now [now obviously, 1985] are skinny young trees [then, 1885]...

Note especially the final arabesque flurry which swoops the reader from 1885 to 1955 to 1985 and back to 1885 in less than one sentence. As with those bravura point of view shifts, I am not sure the general reader notices this kind of authorial stick-handling, though, again, I suspect it has the same neural effect on the brain as doing loop-de-loops in a biplane without a seatbelt (today, I like the word “fizz”). But Munro’s precise and adamantine control assures the reader that the story’s temporal matrix is as consistent and reliable as a ticking clock.

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Notes from a Lecture on Then/Now Constructions

Unfortunately, I neglected to record this lecture. It consisted of a preamble (the above is much better) and a discussion of examples. The examples were given to the audience as a color-coded handout, which I have preserved. Substack does let me color-code text, so you will understand the examples better if you download the handout.

Here is the nifty color-coded handout with the examples.

Some Typical Variations

1. Simple Then/Now

Represents and narrativizes change over time.

E.g. From Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye. Note the clear delineation of time periods by tense and temporal conjunctions, the word “now” is embedded over half-way through the present-time text.

When he had met Pauline in Kentucky, she was hanging over a fence scratching herself with a broken foot. The neatness, the charm, the joy he awakened in her made him want to nest with her. He had yet to discover what destroyed that desire. But he did not dwell on it. He thought rather of whatever had happened to the curiosity he used to feel. Nothing, nothing, interested him now. Not himself, not other people. Only in drink was there some break, some floodlight, and when that closed, there was oblivion.

Read carefully and separate the past-time events from the present-time events. The past-time is introduced by the conjunction “when” and the pluperfect tense, which modulates into the past tense without losing clarity. The time juxtaposition pivotes on the word “now.” “Nothing, nothing, interested him now.”

E.g. From James Baldwin’s essay about his father, “Notes of a Native Son.” In the example below, he is specifically remembering his father’s sister.

In my childhood — it had not been so long ago — I had thought her beautiful. She had been quick-witted and quick-moving and very generous with all the children and each of her visits had been an event. At one time one of my brothers and myself had thought of running away to live with her. Now she could no longer produce out of her handbag some unexpected and yet familiar delight. She made me feel pity and revulsion and fear. It was awful to realize that she no longer caused me to feel affection.

E.g From Charles Chesnutt’s 1905 Reconstruction novel The Colonel’s Dream (a novel about a wealthy white man returning to the South with his young son after many years away). This is a surprisingly subversive book that portrays what we might now call a well-off liberal who wants to come south with his money and do good. What he discovers is a system that replicates the racial discrimination and brutality of the slave system. That system defeats him (a version of the black trap plot) and sends him back north in despair. One of the ironies made clear in the novel is that post-war Northern commercial imperialism has made life worse for the former slaves and rendered them easy victims for resurgent white supremacists.

Here is an excerpt from a scene involving the auction of prison inmates to farmers and cotton mill managers. The then/now motivates the idea that nothing has changed in the Old South since slavery days.

{Now] The unconscious brutality of the proceeding grated harshly upon the colonel's nerves. Delinquents of some kind these men must be, who were thus dealt with; but [Then signaled in the tense change] he had lived away from the South so long that so sudden an introduction to some of its customs came with something of a shock. He had remembered the pleasant things, and these but vaguely, since his thoughts and his interests had been elsewhere; and in the sifting process of a healthy memory he had forgotten the disagreeable things altogether. He had found the pleasant things still in existence, faded but still fragrant. Fresh from a land of labour unions, and of struggle for wealth and power, of strivings first for equality with those above, and, this attained, for a point of vantage to look down upon former equals, he had found in old Peter, only the day before, a touching loyalty to a family from which he could no longer expect anything in return. Fresh from a land of women's clubs and women's claims, he had reveled last night in the charming domestic, life of the old South, so perfectly preserved in a quiet household. Things Southern, as he had already reflected, lived long and died hard, and these things which he saw now in the clear light of day, were also of the South, and singularly suggestive of other things Southern which he had supposed outlawed and discarded long ago. "Now, Mr. Haines, bring in the next lot," said the Squire.

The constable led out an old coloured man, clad in a quaint assortment of tattered garments, whom the colonel did not for a moment recognise, not having, from where he stood, a full view of the prisoner's face.

2. Extended (complex) Then/Now

E.g. From James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues,” a slightly more complex then/now with a back and forth action and varied past-time referents.

I saw this boy standing in the shadow of a doorway, looking just like Sonny. I almost called his name. Then I saw that it wasn't Sonny, but somebody we used to know, a boy from around our block. He'd been Sonny's friend. He'd never been mine, having been too young for me, and, anyway, I'd never liked him. And now, even though he was a grown-up man, he still hung around that block, still spent hours on the street corners, was always high and raggy. I used to run into him from time to time and he'd often work around to asking me for a quarter or fifty cents. He always had some real good excuse, too, and I always gave it to him. I don't know why.

But now, abruptly, I hated him. I couldn't stand the way he looked at me, partly like a dog, partly like a cunning child. I wanted to ask him what the hell he was doing in the school courtyard.

E.g. From Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream. Description of an abandoned mill. Chesnutt has a special ability to wrap up his passages with a sting in the tail as it were. Here the black slave “mill operatives” are replaced by poor whites living off the dole. That word “poormaster” is accurate and ironic.

Whenever the colonel visited the cemetery, or took a walk in that pleasant quarter of the town, he had to cross the bridge from which was visible the site of the old Eureka cotton mill of his boyhood, and it was not difficult to recall that it had been, before the War, a busy hive of industry. On a narrow and obscure street, little more than an alley, behind the cemetery, there were still several crumbling tenements, built for the mill operatives, but now occupied by a handful of abjectly poor whites, who kept body and soul together through the doubtful mercy of God and a small weekly dole from the poormaster.

E.g Also from The Colonel’s Dream. This is a double simple then/now construction (using “once” instead of “then”), combining anaphora and parallel construction. There is a special irony in the fact that the white man’s address is written by his former slave housekeeper Viney, the inversion of their relationship paralleling the then/now constructions earlier. This is a gorgeously elegant sentence packed with implication and history.

He produced an envelope, once white, now yellow with time, on which was endorsed in ink once black but faded to a pale brown, and hardly legible, the name of "Malcolm Dudley, Esq., Mink Run," and in the lower left-hand corner, "By hand of Viney."

3. Implied Then/Now

E.g. From Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son.” “Now” is used once, but the contrast is carried mostly via tense changes, complex because there is a back and forth action; note that this is one of those then/now constructions that show continuity — the surface changes but the underlying social structure does not; note also the use of a final, crisp sentence of commentary to give the whole text a social and political torque.

So we drove along, between the green of the park and the stony, lifeless elegance of hotels and apartment buildings, toward the vivid, killing streets of our childhood. These streets hadn't changed, though housing projects jutted up out of them now like rocks in the middle of a boiling sea. Most of the houses in which we had grown up had vanished, as had the stores from which we had stolen, the basements in which we had first tried sex, the rooftops from which we had hurled tin cans and bricks. But houses exactly like the houses of our past yet dominated the landscape, boys exactly like the boys we once had been found themselves smothering in these houses, came down into the streets for light and air and found themselves encircled by disaster. Some escaped the trap, most didn't.

4. Montage

E.g. From Baldwin’s essay “Notes of a Native Son.” This is a passage describing his father’s funeral service. The montage structure is motivated by the words “a rash of disconnected impressions” after which the text moves back and forth juxtaposing various past events with moments in the present scene. Note also the impressions rhythmically introduced by the insistent anaphora “I remembered.” The passage climaxes with a rendered scene including dialogue, the only time Baldwin and his father ever really talked. The passage actually opens with a different then/now construction parenthetically inserted between two em dashes as part of the present narrative.

While the preacher talked and I watched the children — years of changing their diapers, scrubbing them, slapping them, taking them to school, and scolding them had had the perhaps inevitable result of making me love them, though I am not sure I knew this then — my mind was busily breaking out with a rash of disconnected impressions. Snatches of popular songs, indecent jokes, bits of books I had read, movie sequences, faces, voices, political issues — I thought I was going mad; all these impressions suspended, as it were, in the solution of the faint nausea produced in me by the heat and liquor. For a moment I had the impression that my alcoholic breath, inefficiently disguised with chewing gum, filled the entire chapel. Then someone began singing one of my father’s favorite songs and, abruptly, I was with him, sitting on his knee, in the hot, enormous, crowded church which was the first church we attended. It was the Abyssinian Baptist Church on 138th Street. We had not gone there long. With this image, a host of others came. I had forgotten, in the rage of my growing up, how proud my father had been of me when I was little. Apparently, I had had a voice and my father had liked to show me off before the members of the church. I had forgotten what he had looked like when he was pleased but now I remembered that he had always been grinning with pleasure when my solos ended. I even remembered certain expressions on his face when he teased my mother — had he loved her? I would never know. And when had it all begun to change? For now it seemed that he had not always been cruel. I remembered being taken for a haircut and scraping my knee on the footrest of the barber’s chair and I remembered my father’s face as he soothed my crying and applied the stinging iodine. Then I remembered our fights, fights which had been of the worst possible kind because my technique had been silence.

I remembered the one time in all our life together when we had really spoken to each other.

It was on a Sunday and it must have been shortly before I left home. We were walking, just the two of us, in our usual silence, to or from church. I was in high school and had been doing a lot of writing and I was, at about this time, the editor of the high school magazine. But I had also been a Young Minister and had been preaching from the pulpit.

Lately, I had been taking fewer engagements and preached as rarely as possible. It was said in the church, quite truthfully, that I was “cooling off.”

My father asked me abruptly, “You'd rather write than preach, wouldn’t you?”

I was astonished at his questionc— because it was a real question. I answered, “Yes.”

That was all we said. It was awful to remember that that was all we had ever said.

The casket now was opened and the mourners were being led up the aisle to look for the last time...

5. Then/Now setting up a symbol

The concept of the implicit symbolic structure of the then/now device is something writers are conscious of as exemplified by the opening lines of Charles Johnson’s novel Oxherding Tale:

Long ago my father and I were servants at Cripplegate, a cotton plantation in South Carolina. That distant place, the world of my childhood, is ruin now, mere parable, but what history I have begins there…

The change undergone by the plantation itself is a parable, a symbol.

E.g. From Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, a section called “Spring” opens with this passage stunningly intricate and compressed passage. Contrast is initially delineated by tenses (present/past). The horror is intensified by the further contrast between spring and winter beatings (winter beatings were better), between the beauty of nature and the cruelty of humans. In the passage, the words “spring” and “forsythia” repeat twice; they become a symbolic aggregate, especially forsythia, which now is structured as something in nature, something beautiful and a sign of spring and renewal, but also something used to inflect especially cruel and repetitive suffering on a victim.

The first twigs are thin, green, and supple. They bend into a complete circle, but will not break. Their delicate, showy hopefulness shooting from forsythia and lilac bushes meant only a change in whipping style. They beat us differently in the spring. Instead of the dull pain of a winter strap, there were these new green switches that lost their sting long after the whipping was over. There was a nervous meanness in these long twigs that made us long for the steady stroke of a strap or the firm but honest slap of a hairbrush. Even now spring for me is shot through with the remembered ache of switchings, and forsythia holds no cheer.

E.g. From Chesnutt’s The Colonel’s Dream. The sword is carefully constructed, using a then/now construction, as a symbol of the Colonel’s psychic development. Once a symbol of honor and the old South, now it is hidden away, repressed.

"You are a fine, strong man now, but I can see you as you were, the day you went away to the war, in your new gray uniform, on your fine gray horse, at the head of your company. You were going to take Peter with you, but he had got his feet poisoned with poison ivy, and couldn't walk, and your father gave you another boy, and Peter cried like a baby at being left behind. I can remember how proud you were, and how proud your father was, when he gave you his sword—your grandfather's sword, and told you never to draw it or sheath it, except in honour; and how, when you were gone, the old gentleman shut himself up for two whole days and would speak to no one. He was glad and sorry — glad to send you to fight for your country, and sorry to see you go — for you were his only boy."

The colonel thrilled with love and regret. His father had loved him, he knew very well, and he had not visited his tomb for twenty-five years. How far away it seemed too, the time when he had thought of the Confederacy as his country! And the sword, his grandfather's sword, had been for years stored away in a dark closet. His father had kept it displayed upon the drawing-room wall, over the table on which the family Bible had rested. Mrs. Treadwell was silent for a moment.

6. Toni Morrison’s proleptic variation

This is a fascinating and inventive variation of then/now. Then/now morphs into now/future. Note that in the first passage quoted from her novel above, she also inserts a future reference. “He had yet to discover what destroyed that desire.” Thus she brilliantly compresses the past, present, and future of her character in a single syntactic element.

E.g. From The Bluest Eye.

We reached Lake Shore Park, a city park laid out with rosebuds, fountains, bowling greens, picnic tables. It was empty now, but sweetly expectant of clean, white, well-behaved children and parents who would play there above the lake in summer before half-running, half-stumbling down the slope to the welcoming water. Black people were not allowed in the park, and so it filled our dreams.

E.g. From The Bluest Eye.

Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless. His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess — that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke. He was, in time, to discover that hatred of white men — but not now. Not in impotence but later, when the hatred could find sweet expression. For now, he hated the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence. The one whom he had not been able to protect, to spare, to cover from the round moon glow of the flashlight. The hee-hee-hee’s. He recalled Darlene’s dripping hair ribbon, flapping against her face as they walked back in silence in the rain. The loathing that galloped through him made him tremble.

As always, I suggest you look for this technique in your reading. You’ll be surprised at how often it shows up. And as I have said before, this is a technique of elaboration (of amplification). It’s a technique that generates content. And when you begin to use it and play with it, the technique sucks in other techniques. See above: parallel construction, anaphora, but-constructions. This makes for intricate, complex writing that is also powerful and clear. It creates action at the level of syntax (whatever the content).