Reading Response: Lily King’s Euphoria
Details ground the character in the moment with lots of sounds—branches snapping, monkeys’ greeet greeet greeets, and other onomatopoeias.
I went off to my mat in their study feeling a bit like the family pet who’d been put outside for the night. I lay awake as the animals woke up first, snapping branches and blundering through leaves and hollering out and the greeet greeet greeet of the monkeys, then the humans, coughing, grunting, whining, shouting. Cackles from the women going down to their canoes and their paddling and their songs that carried across the water. Gongs and scoldings and laughter, the thunk of gulls into the water and flying foxes smashing into trees. Finally, I fell asleep. I dreamt I was on an ice floe, squatting like a native, carving a large symbol into the ice. But it was melting, and though I carved deeply—something with two lines across the middle, a glyph representative of whole paragraphs of thought—the ice was turning to slush, and my feet slipped into the sea.
This paragraph from Lily King’s Euphoria transports the reader. It begins with details grounding the character in the moment with lots of sounds—branches snapping, monkeys’ greeet greeet greeets, and other onomatopoeias. Then, when Bankson falls asleep, the sounds are silenced, and the world goes internal. He is “squatting like a native,” adopting the stance of those that he researches, while developing his theory about them, a theory embodied by the mysterious symbol, the interpretation of which eludes him. The slipping of his feet into the sea at the end captures the loss, how he was not able to grasp the idea yet. The alliteration of the sibilant [s]s in “slipped into the sea”, gives a phonetic effect of slipping; “…slipped into the water” isn’t nearly as slick.
By focusing on the sounds in this paragraph, King shows the ecosystem of the community—animals, birds, people—all going about their actions. The reduction of the beings to the sounds they make creates a monolithic group, serving the broader picture that the paragraph paints, with the people and animals cohabiting as fellow community members, thus highlighting Bankson’s feelings of alienation from the couple, Nell and Fen. Later in the paragraph, in the dream, there is blending of Bankson with the native Dobus. He aligns his behavior with theirs, squatting “like a native,” when carried by inspiration. This is the environment where he feels most comfortable, in the throes of his work.
The novel generally does not use a lot of low-frequency words; the less common words here (onomatopoeias “greeet,” “thunk,” the plural noun “scoldings”) highlight his feeling of standing apart, having been sent away like a non-member of the core group. The world is temporarily more foreign, exclusionary.
There is a series of phonetic links in the following sentence that cascades through it: “Gongs and scolding and laughter, the thunk of gulls into the water and flying foxes smashing into trees.” There are common velars ([g]/[k]) from gongs, scoldings, [l] from scoldings, laughter; assonance of the schwa vowels in “thunk of gulls,” alliteration of “flying foxes.” All these pairs have different types of phonetic ties that keep the effect of linking subtle, but artfully interesting to the ear. The string of phonetic grouping ends with the gerund “smashing,” which is apt; the destructive word breaks the spell, in all senses. This is at a time in the story when Bankson himself is hoping to strengthen his link with Nell, even though he knows Fen, with his violent tendencies and his possessiveness, will likely smash those hopes.
The above sentence, as well as the one preceding it, are fragments, right before he slips into a dream state. This intentional break from standard syntax while focusing on the immediate sounds and actions that surround the character serves as a gateway to the dreamland where he has this initial vision that represents the theory his mind is working on. The formality of grammar fades, and the dream world is accessed. Although this paragraph appears in the middle of the novel, the ante-penultimate paragraph of the novel is structurally similar. In that paragraph, Bankson is deeply internal in his thoughts, and then there is a fragment, and then with a literal bang (of hand against glass), he returns to the physical world of the Natural History Museum.
The paragraph excerpted above reflects both Bankson’s desire to be with Nell and the unlikeliness that his desire will be fulfilled. It uses low-frequency words to reinforce the boundaries of exclusion and of the community. And it carries the reader along with the character into a dreamlike state where an important discovery is made. All of this occurs in a paragraph that flows much like—and that presages—another memorable paragraph toward the end of the novel, where the issue of Bankson’s desired relationship is resolved, if still the cause of yearning for him.