A man kissed a girl. The next day he went on a diet.
The above is an example of parataxis. Parataxis is a grammatical technique that places one naked fact next to another. The author doesn't waste words explaining the cause and effect between the two events. (Parataxis means there are no conjunctions like "because" or "therefore"; there's just a gap.) So, the reader sits with silence. She has to figure out what the author means: What logic links the first image to the second?
A reader can usually figure it out. After all, readers have psychological skills. Everyone knows a bit about how motivation works. A guy kisses a girl. (So of course he worries about how attractive he is.) And so, he goes on a diet.
Parataxis is lovely, I think, because it shows that there's trust between people speaking to each other. A speaker lays out facts without an overly directive "why." The listener searches through her life experiences--and she just gets it. One person ships out a sign; another person reads it; and they meet at the same spot without naming it.
I can't overstate my love of In Treatment, the HBO series which just started its second season last night. The show is masterful in terms of silence--of implied ideas, of explanations left out of the text. It's so logical in its silence that it can make anyone feel like an expert psychologist.
The series features a therapist, Paul. Each episode shows us one therapy session he has with a patient. From session to session, we gradually come to understand the motivations powering Paul and the people he treats.
HBO, itself, stages a meaningful dance-move of parataxis insofar as it screens two episodes back-to-back each time it airs the show. In one episode, we see Paul with one patient. Then we get a little HBO music and a short interlude (I love this network which has no commercials and makes the timing between episodes an art). The next episode presents Paul with his next patient.
It goes without saying that one therapy session influences how Paul acts in the one that follows. And there's no explicit explanation for how and why. In other words, to understand the show, we need to be Paul's thoughtful therapist. We have to guess at his motivations--or theorize about how some ego blow or compliment in one session shapes what he says to his next patient.
Last night was a great example of HBO parataxis. The first episode featured Paul in a lawyer's office (that was a break from the norm; usually each episode happens in his own therapy office). It turns out that Paul's being sued by the father of one of his former patients.
His former patient was a fighter pilot who--through a few sessions with Paul--had begun to lower his defenses and name his vulnerabilities. But the pilot, who was only successful in the Navy because of his strength, didn't enjoy feeling vulnerable. So he cut it off with Paul and returned to flying planes. Soon after, he crashed. In last night's episode, the patient's dad insisted that Paul was responsible for the patient's emergent weaknesses. Paul shouldn't have tried to unlace this man's most useful defenses...or at least he shouldn't have let him fly again after a debilitating self-exploration. Paul, as therapist, had no sense of what he destroyed.
Then the episode ends. We hear some music and slip into the next episode. Here, Paul's settling into his chair to greet a new patient. She's in her 20s, a highly independent student at Pratt; and she tells him, in her flip, I-have-conquered-demons tone, that she has cancer. She's been considering taking the route of homeopathic care, she says. Paul listens like a dutifully open-minded shrink, but then moves forward in his seat and insists she's running away from life. You can't treat cancer with acupuncture, he says: She must seek the help of Western medicine.
So, from one episode to the next, we've essentially read a narrative about Paul. In one episode, he was blamed for being irresponsible. In the next episode, he compensates. A shrink usually doesn't give such ardent advice to a patient. But after his confidence has been dealt a blow, he needs to compensate: Don't die, he begs the twentysomething girl from Pratt.
I'm thinking that this is how all great narrative works--someone receives a blow, there's silence, and then there's parataxis. The second move reveals the secrets about how the first blow felt to the character in action.
No one needs to fully, linguistically explain human pain and rebound: We spot it when we see it.
This is the law behind Shakespearean tragedy, too: In Shakespeare's plays, someone has a grand, heroic drive. He runs with it ardently, and that character trait, or drive, propels him to success. And then, as quickly, and with as little explanation, he suffers some awful fate. Without wordy explanation from Shakespeare, we simply spot this paradox as the knot of human life. The same characteristics that drive a guy to greatness bring him down.
Good narrative is a psychologically-minded connect-the-dots--that game we played as kids. No one tells anyone which dot to connect to which, but our sense of life as we've known it so far helps us intuit where a dot directs us. At the end, after making all the connections, we've got a recognizable character in front of us.
Parataxis is the grammar of psychologists: You never get a full explanation, but you can intuit the human motivation at hand.
