The Syntax of Alienation in Garielle Lutz’s “I was in Kilter with Him, a Little”
A look at the passive voice and other patterns of agency removal.
In a piece on Garielle Lutz in The Paris Review, Brian Evenson calls Lutz "The only untranslatable American writer." Evenson dubbed her thus after a discussion with several French translators and editors in which they agreed that Lutz’s writing is "more exacting than poetry, and infinitely more complex." This is Lutz's gift--working simultaneously with words' sounds and associations and interplay so intimately that the American English context of the writing is necessary and unique.
A theme that she often conjures is alienation, which indeed presses on the story that I gravitated to, "I was in Kilter with Him, a Little." What drew me to this piece in particular was an unusual magnet: the masterful leveraging of syntax to convey a lack of agency. This protagonist who doesn’t see herself as participating in action reminded me broadly of one of my favorite short stories, Amy Hempel’s “Tonight is a favor to Holly” (which I explored in this essay). I am intrigued that both Lutz and Hempel studied with the renowned teacher and editor Gordon Lish. These two stories have some things in common stylistically, and both feature dark humor, but they differ significantly in tone and in characterization. I have many posts exploring Hempel’s work (here, here, here, and here). Lutz’s genius is in her fireworky sentences, whose sparks travel to the brink of meaning.
This story is difficult to summarize. On the surface, a woman succinctly narrates her life through her succession of associations with people: a husband, other partners, an abandoned son, a second husband. For the most part, the narrator lacks agency. Lutz conveys her passivity through various linguistic techniques. I’ll present the three patterns that struck me, although some additional examples evaded these categories.
The withholding of agency in the story is pervasive. Verbs of being (meaning forms of “to be” and other verbs that do not show action but merely indicate a state of being) swim thickly in the pages. Common writing advice suggests avoiding these empty verbs in favor of active verbs when possible. This story, however, flouts this conventional dictum of “good writing.” The resulting verbal stasis contributes to the mood of alienation that constitutes the story: alienation from partners, from a child, from desire, from society, from self.
The primary tool here is passive voice. Lutz leverages the passive voice to eliminate agency and to highlight the narrator’s detachment.
Generally speaking, sentences in passive voice all have certain characteristics. They have a form of “be” (or sometimes “get”) and the past participle of the verb that names the action (e.g. was decided, were investigated, got clobbered, etc.).
In a basic sentence, the subject is the noun phrase that comes before the action indicated by the verb, followed by the object, in Subject-Verb-Object order. Independently, although often aligning with the subject, the doer of the action is known as the “agent.” For example:
Subject Verb Object
The chickenAgent crossed the road
Subject Verb Object
The girlAgent solved the problem.
However, in a passive sentence, if the agent is specified at all, it is not the subject of the sentence. Rather, in such a sentence, if the agent of the verb appears, it is in an optional by-phrase at the end of the sentence. The former object (and “theme” of the action of the verb) takes subject position:
The road was crossed (by the chickenAgent).
The problem was solved (by the girlAgent).
In Lutz’s passive sentences in this story, not one includes a by-phrase designating an agent. This act of omission maximally denies agency. Some examples:
Then it was decided, it was time to fix on just one of them [young women].
Buses passed from one city to the next and were kept conspicuously to their schedules, and I soon took to the buses, was taken with them: I would feel polite and brittle in my seat as a city was approached, neatened itself into streets and squares, then petered out again into bare topography.
I would be summoned from school to school, grade to grade, and I would advance through a class, a subject, a unit, by picking on yet another nobody undergoing youth, and I would peer into her worried homeliness, let a trait or feature advocate itself for half an hour’s discrediting endearment.
I was thus kept milling in her feelings still.
A family? That was how you got crooked out of childhood.
In all of these passive phrases, the agent of the verb is conspicuously absent.
In addition to the passive voice, another way to remove agency is to cast a sentence in what is called an “existential there construction.” In such sentences, there is nonreferential. This structure, with a dummy “there” followed by a form of the verb “to be,” is existential in the sense that there was/there were simply indicates that the person or thing or state that follows exists:
There was relief in how quick we could find the hardness in each other.
There was already wide plight to my tapering life.
There were drops and a dropper on the nightstand, pamphlets of attenuated portent.
There was the hankering hang of his thing.
These existential sentences, like the passives above, altogether lack an agent who performs any action.
So, what does have agency in this story? Time. Some examples:
But the days arched over us and kept us typical to our era.
In my absence, life had scarcely scratched at the man [her husband].
I had been meaning to get something in here of our incensed domestic civility, and the queered quiet of our nights, and the preenings of the weather all the following summer, a summer that never cut either of us in on its havoc and seethe, but the mind’s eye is the least reliable of the sightholes, and I might have been looking all along through only one of those.
Then years had their say.
This last example, Then years had their say, is the final sentence of the story. Time is the over-arching, definitive agent here.
In the final section of the story, however, the narrator does relay some events with an abundance of agency. Before the end of her first marriage, she takes a bus to a nearby town with her girlfriend:
We went in, ordered, raked through each other’s romaine, thinned out the conversation, set off for the restroom together.
This being my history, I snapped out of my marriage, pieced myself back into the population, prodded and faulted, saw red, then wed anew in wee ways.
This section where the narrator describes her actions ripe with agency stands in stark contrast to the rest of the story where the passive voice, existential constructions, and other syntactic patterns work to achieve the sense of the narrator’s remove. And the burst of action here is but a bright flash in the story. The final line, remember, is: Then years had their say. At the end of the story, we circle back to lack of control, a lack of agency.
Just as students are taught to avoid the passive voice, writers are often advised to make sure their protagonists have agency. But what if the point of the story is to convey the protagonist’s sense of alienation? Here, the linguistically agile Lutz performs a wide variety of syntactic gymnastics to make that passivity palpable.