Fabulous First Paragraph - Faces in the Water - Janet Frame

Fabulous First Paragraph

Faces in the Water
by Janet Frame
1961

I have added spacings and margins from my own whim to this wonderful and long first paragraph of a novel whose work continues to fascinate me.





They have said that we owe allegiance to Safety,

that he is our Red Cross who will provide us with ointment and bandages for our wounds and remove the foreign ideas the glass beads of fantasy the bent hairpins of unreason embedded in our minds. 

On all the doors which lead to and from the world they have posted warning notices and lists of safety measures to be taken in extreme emergency.  Lightning, isolation in the snows of the Antarctic, snake bite, riots, earthquakes.  Never sleep in the snow.  Hide the scissors.  Beware of strangers.  Lost in a foreign land take your time from the sun and your position from the creeks flowing towards the sea.  Don't struggle if you would be rescued from drowning.  Suck the snake bite from the wound. 

When the earth opens and the chimneys topple, run out underneath the sky. 

But for the final day of destruction when "those that look from the windows shall be darkened" they have provided no slogan.  The streets throng with people who panic, looking to the left and the right, covering the scissors, sucking poison from a wound they cannot find, judging their time from the sun's position in the sky when the sun itself has melted and trickles down the ridges of darkness into the hollows of evaporated seas.

Until that day how can we find our path in sleep and dreams and preserve ourselves from their dangerous reality of lightning snakes traffic germs riot earthquakes blizzard and dirt when lice creep like riddles through our minds? 

Quick, where is the Red Cross God with the ointment and plaster the needle and thread and the clean linen bandages to mummify our festering dreams? 

Safety First.

7/20/15  Now, in spite of myself, I've finished the book.  With books that I enjoy reading so much, I try to go slowly, but this one pulled me in and hasn't let me go.

I hate that I notice typos so often.  But a few typos did not distract me from realizing what a great writer I have been reading.  Really, though?  The main character's first name is spelled two different ways, inexplicably?  I could be a proofreader.  But I don't want to do that!  I want to read text with no errors.

I continue to be impressed with some writers and their ability to flaunt punctuation rules, but I can't get a handle on this for my own writing.  You see, if I like the writer, I like what they do when they flaunt conventions of punctuation, as Janet Frame does when she leaves commas out.  But if I don't like the writer, I think they have taken too many liberties, and that makes me value their art less.  And of course, if I don't understand what they're up to- Janet's lack of commas illustrate to me perfectly the idea of overwhelming options that invade my own thoughts- then I think they've gone too far, which is self-fulfilling, or a circular argument's evidence.  For instance, I sometimes like an attempt to spell phonetically pidgin or slang or ethnic expressions of pronunciation, and sometimes I am distracted by it, but does that mean that the writer's skill is lacking, or that my knowledge of that collection of sounds is incomplete?


Do I prefer fiction that is more baldy autobiographical, as this one is?  A better question is what should I write.  All words come from experience, even if we know that we're coining them at the time, and with only a few text choices on a keyboard, can any of us know that we're inventing any word?

I want to write stories and songs, but I don't want to copy anybody's work unless I know that I'm doing that, in very small doses, in homage or in caricature.