“This or That: Simultaneity in John O’Hara’s BUTTERFIELD 8,” by Ian Randall Wilson (Poetry ’02) (Fiction ’16)
2002 poetry graduate Ian Randall Wilson recently had a craft essay featured in Craft Literary. Read an excerpt below:
This or That: Simultaneity in John O’Hara’s BUTTERFIELD 8
When I wrote in third person, it was in third-person close. The concerns of simultaneity didn’t occupy much of my attention. There may be a flaw in my thinking here, but my reasoning was that because the world was seen by a focalizing character, other characters were subservient to the primary consciousness. We understand through inference that other characters are perceiving at the same time, other things are happening, but we are only privy to the perceptions of the one. Those other consciousnesses could only be suggested through the direct discourse of dialogue or through an action (or reaction). I didn’t think I had to evoke simultaneity, it sort of happened. That was until I began to move away from third-person close and used narrators that were more omniscient.
When the omniscience changes, becomes more editorial, the need to deal with the mechanics of stage-managing more than one character suddenly leaps out as a concern. Reading Butterfield 8, I started thinking about simultaneity and how language, by definition sequential, somehow evokes things happening at the same time. How is the effect managed? The novel showed me several kinds of simultaneity and/or the sequential which are worth looking at.
John O’Hara’s novel opens this way: “On this Sunday morning in May, this girl who later was to be the cause of a sensation in New York, awoke much too early for her night before.” The opening establishes a time marker and we meet one of the principals, Gloria. We follow her as she rounds up what’s left of her clothing, steals a mink coat then takes a cab where the section finishes a few pages later: “At the corner of Madison the driver almost struck a man and girl, and the man yelled and the driver yelled back. ‘Go on, spit in their eye,’ called Gloria.” Then after a space break, we get: “in the same neighborhood another girl was sitting at one end of a rather long refectory table.” I first thought that one incident had occurred and concluded, and another was beginning—pure sequence. But only a few pages later we have:
At Madison Avenue they were almost struck by a huge Paramount taxi, and when Jimmy swore at the driver, the driver said, “Go on, I’ll spit in your eye.” And both Isabel and Jimmy distinctly heard the lone passenger, a girl in a fur coat, call to the driver: “Go on, spit in their eye.” The cab beat the light and sped south in Madison.
This is the same near-collision from another angle of refraction. What I thought was sequence turns out to be (also) simultaneity. It’s like two trajectories whose paths cross in an X. The moment with the girl at the refectory table turns out not to be happening afterward but happening at the same time. O’Hara makes us figure this out rather than signal with some transitional device like “meanwhile” or “at the same time.” The effect is to disrupt our sense of conventional time.
Read the full essay here: https://www.craftliterary.com/2020/07/07/simultaneity-butterfield8-ian-randall-wilson/
